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REVISED EDITION 



I 



I 



I 



Author of THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN 



$35.00 

Now available in a revised and updated edi- 
tion, the continuing national bestseller (nearly 
200,000 copies sold) about the events, ideas, 
and personalities of the seven decades since the 
end of World War I. Originally published in 
1983 and named one of the Best Books of the 
Year by the New York Times, this edition con- 
tains a new final chapter, and the text has been 
revised and updated. 

Modern times, says the author, began on 
May 29, 1919, when photographs of a solar 
eclipse confirmed the truth of a new theory of 
the universe — Einstein's Theory of Relativity. 
Paul Johnson then describes the full impact of 
Freudianism, the establishment of the first 
Marxist state, the chaos of "Old Europe," the 
Arcadian twenties and the new forces in China 
and Japan. Here are Keynes, Coolidge, Franco, 
the '29 Crash, the Great Depression and Roo- 
sevelt's New Deal. And there are the wars that 
followed — the Sino-Japanese, the Abyssinian 
and Albanian conflicts and the Spanish Civil 
War, a prelude to the massive conflict of World 
War II. The incredible repression and violence 
of the totalitarian regimes brought a new 
dimension to the solution of social and political 
problems, and in Germany, Russia and China 
we see this frightening aspect of the new 
"social engineering." 

Churchill, Roosevelt, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, 
Hirohito, Mussolini and Gandhi are the titans 
of this period. There are wartime tactics, strate- 
gy and diplomacy; the development of nuclear 
power and its use at Hiroshima and Nagasaki; 
the end of World War II and the harsh political 
realities of the uneasy peace that followed. The 
rise of the superpowers — Russia and the United 
States; the emergence of the Third World; the 
Marshall Plan and the Cold War; Tito, Nehru, 
de Gaulle, Eisenhower, Sukarno, Eden, Ade- 
nauer, Nasser, Ben Gurion and Castro are 
described. The book covers the economic 

(continued on back flap) 

1191N 



(continued from front flap) 

resurgence of Europe and Japan; existentialism; 
Suez; Algeria; Israel; the New Africa of Kenya t- 
ta, Idi Amin and apartheid; the radicalizing of 
Latin America; the Kennedy years, Johnson 
and Vietnam, Nixon and Watergate, the Rea- 
gan years; Gorbachev and peresfcroika; Saddam 
Hussein and the Gulf War, And there are the 
Space Age, the expansion of scientific knowl- 
edge, the population explosion, religion in our 
times, world economic cycles, structuralism, 
generic engineering and sociobiology. 

Incisive, stimulating and frequently con- 
troversiai, Modern Times combines fact, anec- 
dote, incident and portrait in a major full-scale 
analysis of how the modern age came into 
being and where it is heading. 




PAUL JOHNSON was educated at Stonyhurst 
College, Lancashire, and Magdalen College, 
Oxford. He was assistant editor of Realties and 
was then on the staff of the New Statesman from 
1955 to 1970, the last six years as editor. In 1980 
and 1981 he was visiting professor of commu- 
nications at the American Enterprise Institute 
in Washington, D.C. He has received the Fran- 
cis Boyer Public Policy Award and the Krug 
Award for Excellence in Literature. Among his 
other books are A History of the Jews, A History 
of the English People, Intellectuals, and The Birth of 
tiie Modern: World Society 1815- JS30. 

jacket dcsigti © by One Plus One Studio 
Author photograph © by Mark Cersott 

H&rperCo\lm$Pub!i$hers 



'Truly a distinguished work of history . . . Modern Times unites historical and critical 
consciousness. It is far from being a simple chronicle, though a vast wealth of events 
and personages and historical changes fill it. . . .We can take a great deal of intellectual 
pleasure in this book." — Robert Nisbet, New York Times Book Review 

"A brilliant, densely textured, intellectually challenging book. Frequently surprises, 
even startles, us with new views of past events and fresh looks at the characters of the 
chief world movers and shakers, in politics, the military, economics, science, religion 
and philosophy for six decades." — Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal 

"Wide-ranging and quirky, this history of our times (since World War I) hits all the 
highlights and hot spots: the Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler, World War II and 
on to the 1980s. ... A latter-day Mencken, Johnson is witty, gritty and compulsively 
readable." — Foreign Affairs 



"Johnson's insights are often brilliant and of value in their startling freshness." 

— Peter Loewenberg, Los Angeles Times 



"A marvelously incisive and synthesizing account. 



— David Gress, Commentary 



"A remarkable book. ... It is a powerful, lively, compelling and provocative political 
history of the world since 1917." — Hugh Thomas, Times Literary Supplement 



"A sweeping interpretation of world history since the failure of peacemaking at Ver- 
sailles in 1919. His central themes are the bankruptcy of moral relativism, social engi- 
neering, and totalitarian regimes, all linked in his analysis, and the superiority of open 
societies and free market capitalism. The book is bound to be controversial Never- 
theless, it is a fascinating book. Johnson's range is vast, his citations are impressive, 
and he has a knack for the apposite quotation. He sees the century as an age of 
slaughter, but also one of human improvement." — Library Journal 



"Paul Johnson's Modern Times is an extraordinary book: a comprehensive narrative 
history of the contemporary world, and at the same time a sustained and passionate 
meditation on the meaning of history in general, and of modernity in particular." 

— American Spectator 



MODERN TIES 



MODERN 
IMS 

The Ml from 
the Mies 
to the Nineties 



RwfcafMm 



Paul Johnson 



HarperCollmsPublishers 



This work is published in England under the title A History of the Modern World: From 1917 to 
the 1980s. 



MODERN TIMES! THE WORLD FROM THE TWENTIES TO THE NINETIES. Copyright © 1983 by Paul 

Johnson. Revised edition copyright © 1991 by Paul Johnson. All rights reserved. Printed in the 
United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner 
whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical 
articles and reviews. For information address HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New 
York, NY 10022. 

library of congress catalog card number 91-55161 

isbn 0-06-433427-9 

91 92 93 94 95 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 



This book is dedicated 

to the memory of my father, W. A. Johnson, 

artist, educator and enthusiast 



Contents 



Acknowledgements ix 

1 A Relativistic World 1 

2 The First Despotic Utopias 49 

3 Waiting for Hitler 104 

4 Legitimacy in Decadence 138 

5 An Infernal Theocracy, a Celestial Chaos 1 76 

6 The Last Arcadia 203 

7 Degringolade 230 

8 The Devils 261 

9 The High Noon of Aggression 309 

10 The End of Old Europe 341 

11 The Watershed Year 372 

12 Superpower and Genocide 398 

13 Peace by Terror 432 

14 The Bandung Generation 466 

15 Caliban's Kingdoms 506 

16 Experimenting with Half Mankind 544 

17 The European Lazarus 575 

18 America's Suicide Attempt 613 

19 The Collectivist Seventies 659 

20 The Recovery of Freedom 697 

Source Notes 785 
Index 841 



Vll 



Acknowledgements 



Among the many institutions and individuals to whom I am 
beholden I would especially like to thank the American Enterprise 
Institute for Public Policy Research in Washington, which gave me 
hospitality as a Resident Scholar; Dr Norman Stone, who read the 
manuscript and corrected many errors; my editor at Weidenfeld, 
Linda Osband; the copy-editor, Sally Mapstone; and my eldest son, 
Daniel Johnson, who also worked on the manuscript. 



IX 



Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron; 
thou shalt dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. 
Be wise now therefore, O ye kings: 
be instructed, ye judges of the earth' 

Psalms, 2: 9-10 



ONE 

A Relativistic World 



The modern world began on 29 May 1919 when photographs of a 
solar eclipse, taken on the island of Principe off West Africa and at 
Sobral in Brazil, confirmed the truth of a new theory of the universe. 
It had been apparent for half a century that the Newtonian cos- 
mology, based upon the straight lines of Euclidean geometry and 
Galileo's notions of absolute time, was in need of serious modifica- 
tion. It had stood for more than two hundred years. It was the 
framework within which the European Enlightenment, the Industrial 
Revolution, and the vast expansion of human knowledge, freedom 
and prosperity which characterized the nineteenth century, had 
taken place. But increasingly powerful telescopes were revealing 
anomalies. In particular, the motions of the planet Mercury deviated 
by forty-three seconds of arc a century from its predictable behaviour 
under Newtonian laws of physics. Why? 

In 1905, a twenty-six-year-old German Jew, Albert Einstein, then 
working in the Swiss patent office in Berne, had published a paper, 
'On the electrodynamics of moving bodies', which became known as 
the Special Theory of Relativity. 1 Einstein's observations on the way 
in which, in certain circumstances, lengths appeared to contract and 
clocks to slow down, are analogous to the effects of perspective in 
painting. In fact the discovery that space and time are relative rather 
than absolute terms of measurement is comparable, in its effect on 
our perception of the world, to the first use of perspective in art, 
which occurred in Greece in the two decades c. 500-480 bc. 2 

The originality of Einstein, amounting to a form of genius, and the 
curious elegance of his lines of argument, which colleagues compared 
to a kind of art, aroused growing, world-wide interest. In 1907 he 
published a demonstration that all mass has energy, encapsulated in 
the equation E = mc 2 , which a later age saw as the starting point in 
the race for the A-bomb. 3 Not even the onset of the European war 
prevented scientists from following his quest for an all-embracing 



2 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

General Theory of Relativity which would cover gravitational fields 
and provide a comprehensive revision of Newtonian physics. In 1915 
news reached London that he had done it. The following spring, as 
the British were preparing their vast and catastrophic offensive on 
the Somme, the key paper was. smuggled through the Netherlands 
and reached Cambridge, where it was received by Arthur Eddington, 
Professor of Astronomy and Secretary of the Royal Astronomical 
Society. 

Eddington publicized Einstein's achievement in a 1918 paper for 
the Physical Society called 'Gravitation and the Principle of Relativ- 
ity'. But it was of the essence of Einstein's methodology that he 
insisted his equations must be verified by empirical observation and 
he himself devised three specific tests for this purpose. The key one 
was that a ray of light just grazing the surface of the sun must be bent 
by 1.745 seconds of arc — twice the amount of gravitational 
deflection provided for by classical Newtonian theory. The exper- 
iment involved photographing a solar eclipse. The next was due on 
29 May 1919. Before the end of the war, the Astronomer Royal, Sir 
Frank Dyson, had secured from a harassed government the promise 
of £1,000 to finance an expedition to take observations from 
Principe and Sobral. 

Early in March 1919, the evening before the expedition sailed, the 
astronomers talked late into the night in Dyson's study at the Royal 
Observatory, Greenwich, designed by Wren in 1675-6, while 
Newton was still working on his general theory of gravitation. E.T. 
Cottingham, Eddington's assistant, who was to accompany him, 
asked the awful question: what would happen if measurement of the 
eclipse photographs showed not Newton's, nor Einstein's, but twice 
Einstein's deflection? Dyson said, 'Then Eddington will go mad and 
you will have to come home alone.' Eddington's notebook records 
that on the morning of 29 May there was a tremendous thunder- 
storm in Principe. The clouds cleared just in time for the eclipse at 
1.30 pm. Eddington had only eight minutes in which to operate. 'I 
did not see the eclipse, being too busy changing plates . . . We took 
sixteen photographs.' Thereafter, for six nights he developed the 
plates at the rate of two a night. On the evening of 3 June, having 
spent the whole day measuring the developed prints, he turned to his 
colleague, 'Cottingham, you won't have to go home alone.' Einstein 
had been right. 4 

The expedition satisfied two of Einstein's tests, which were 
reconfirmed by W.W. Campbell during the September 1922 eclipse. 
It was a measure of Einstein's scientific rigour that he refused to 
accept that his own theory was valid until the third test (the 'red 
shift') was met. Tf it were proved that this effect does not exist in 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 3 

nature', he wrote to Eddington on 15 December 1919, 'then the 
whole theory would have to be abandoned'. In fact the 'red shift' was 
confirmed by the Mount Wilson observatory in 1923, and thereafter 
empirical proof of relativity theory accumulated steadily, one of the 
most striking instances being the gravitational lensing system of 
quasars, identified in 1979— 80. 5 At the time, Einstein's professional 
heroism did not go unappreciated. To the young philosopher Karl 
Popper and his friends at Vienna University, 'it was a great exper- 
ience for us, and one which had a lasting influence on my intellectual 
development'. 'What impressed me most', Popper wrote later, 'was 
Einstein's own clear statement that he would regard his theory as 
untenable if it should fail in certain tests .... Here was an attitude 
utterly different from the dogmatism of Marx, Freud, Adler and even 
more so that of their followers. Einstein was looking for crucial 
experiments whose agreement with his predictions would by no 
means establish his theory; while a disagreement, as he was the first 
to stress, would show his theory to be untenable. This, I felt, was the 
true scientific attitude.' 6 

Einstein's theory, and Eddington's much publicized expedition to 
test it, aroused enormous interest throughout the world in 1919. No 
exercise in scientific verification, before or since, has ever attracted 
so many headlines or become a topic of universal conversation. The 
tension mounted steadily between June and the actual announcement 
at a packed meeting of the Royal Society in London in September 
that the theory had been confirmed. To A.N. Whitehead, who was 
present, it was like a Greek drama: 

We were the chorus commenting on the decree of destiny as disclosed in the 
development of a supreme incident. There was dramatic quality in the very 
staging: the traditional ceremonial, and in the background the picture of 
Newton to remind us that the greatest of scientific generalizations was now, 
after more than two centuries, to receive its first modification ... a great 
adventure in thought had at last come home to shore. 7 

From that point onward, Einstein was a global hero, in demand at 
every great university in the world, mobbed wherever he went, his 
wistful features familiar to hundreds of millions, the archetype of the 
abstracted natural philosopher. The impact of his theory was im- 
mediate, and cumulatively immeasurable. But it was to illustrate 
what Karl Popper was later to term 'the law of unintended conse- 
quence'. Innumerable books sought to explain clearly how the 
General Theory had altered the Newtonian concepts which, for 
ordinary men and women, formed their understanding of the world 
about them, and how it worked. Einstein himself summed it up thus: 
'The "Principle of Relativity" in its widest sense is contained in the 



4 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

statement: The totality of physical phenomena is of such a character 
that it gives no basis for the introduction of the concept of "absolute 
motion"; or, shorter but less precise: There is no absolute motion.' 8 
Years later, R. Buckminster Fuller was to send a famous cable to the 
Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi explaining Einstein's key equation in 
exactly 249 words, a masterpiece of compression. 

But for most people, to whom Newtonian physics, with their 
straight lines and right angles, were perfectly comprehensible, rela- 
tivity never became more than a vague source of unease. It was 
grasped that absolute time and absolute length had been dethroned; 
that motion was curvilinear. All at once, nothing seemed certain in 
the movements of the spheres. The world is out of joint', as Hamlet 
sadly observed. It was as though the spinning globe had been taken 
off its axis and cast adrift in a universe which no longer conformed to 
accustomed standards of measurement. At the beginning of the 
1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular 
level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of 
good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but 
perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism. 

No one was more distressed than Einstein by this public misap- 
prehension. He was bewildered by the relentless publicity and error 
which his work seemed to promote. He wrote to his colleague Max 
Born on 9 September 1920: 'Like the man in the fairy-tale who turned 
everything he touched into gold, so with me everything turns into a 
fuss in the newspapers.' 9 Einstein was not a practising Jew, but he 
acknowledged a God. He believed passionately in absolute standards 
of right and wrong. His professional life was devoted to the quest not 
only for truth but for certitude. He insisted the world could be divided 
into subjective and objective spheres, and that one must be able to 
make precise statements about the objective portion. In the scientific 
(not the philosophical) sense he was a determinist. In the 1920s he 
found the indeterminacy principle of quantum mechanics not only 
unacceptable but abhorrent. For the rest of his life until his death in 
1955 he sought to refute it by trying to anchor physics in a unified field 
theory. He wrote to Born: 'You believe in a God who plays dice, and I 
in complete law and order in a world which objectively exists and 
which I, in a wildly speculative way, am trying to capture. I firmly 
believe, but I hope that someone will discover a more realistic way or 
rather a more tangible basis than it has been my lot to find.' 10 But 
Einstein failed to produce a unified theory, either in the 1920s or 
thereafter. He lived to see moral relativism, to him a disease, become a 
social pandemic, just as he lived to see his fatal equation bring into 
existence nuclear warfare. There were times, he said at the end of his 
life, when he wished he had been a simple watchmaker. 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 5 

The emergence of Einstein as a world figure in 1919 is a striking 
illustration of the dual impact of great scientific innovators on 
mankind. They change our perception of the physical world and 
increase our mastery of it. But they also change our ideas. The second 
effect is often more radical than the first. The scientific genius 
impinges on humanity, for good or ill, far more than any statesman 
or warlord. Galileo's empiricism created the ferment of natural 
philosophy in the seventeenth century which adumbrated the scienti- 
fic and industrial revolutions. Newtonian physics formed the frame- 
work of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and so helped to 
bring modern nationalism and revolutionary politics to birth. 
Darwin's notion of the survival of the fittest was a key element both 
in the Marxist concept of class warfare and of the racial philosophies 
which shaped Hitlerism. Indeed the political and social consequences 
of Darwinian ideas have yet to work themselves out, as we shall see 
throughout this book. So, too, the public response to relativity was 
one of the principal formative influences on the course of 
twentieth-century history. It formed a knife, inadvertently wielded 
by its author, to help cut society adrift from its traditional moorings 
in the faith and morals of Judeo-Christian culture. 

The impact of relativity was especially powerful because it vir- 
tually coincided with the public reception of Freudianism. By the 
time Eddington verified Einstein's General Theory, Sigmund Freud 
was already in his mid-fifties. Most of his really original work had 
been done by the turn of the century. The Interpretation of Dreams 
had been published as long ago as 1900. He was a well-known and 
controversial figure in specialized medical and psychiatric circles, 
had already founded his own school and enacted a spectacular 
theological dispute with his leading disciple, Carl Jung, before the 
Great War broke out. But it was only at the end of the war that his 
ideas began to circulate as common currency. 

The reason for this was the attention the prolonged trench-fighting 
focused on cases of mental disturbance caused by stress: 'shell-shock' 
was the popular term. Well-born scions of military families, who had 
volunteered for service, fought with conspicuous gallantry and been 
repeatedly decorated, suddenly broke. They could not be cowards, 
they were not madmen. Freud had long offered, in psychoanalysis, 
what seemed to be a sophisticated alternative to the 'heroic' methods 
of curing mental illness, such as drugs, bullying, or electric-shock 
treatment. Such methods had been abundantly used, in ever-growing 
doses, as the war dragged on, and as 'cures' became progressively 
short-lived. When the electric current was increased, men died under 
treatment, or committed suicide rather than face more, like victims 
of the Inquisition. The post-war fury of relatives at the cruelties 



6 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

inflicted in military hospitals, especially the psychiatric division of 
the Vienna General Hospital, led the Austrian government in 1920 to 
set up a commission of inquiry, which called in Freud. 11 The 
resulting controversy, though inconclusive, gave Freud the world- 
wide publicity he needed. Professionally, 1920 was the year of 
breakthrough for him, when the first psychiatric polyclinic was 
opened in Berlin, and his pupil and future biographer, Ernest Jones, 
launched the International Journal of Psycho- Analysis, 

But even more spectacular, and in the long run far more impor- 
tant, was the sudden discovery of Freud's works and ideas by 
intellectuals and artists. As Havelock Ellis said at the time, to the 
Master's indignation, Freud was not a scientist but a great artist. 12 
After eighty years' experience, his methods of therapy have proved, 
on the whole, costly failures, more suited to cosset the unhappy than 
cure the sick. 13 We now know that many of the central ideas of 
psychoanalysis have no basis in biology. They were, indeed, formu- 
lated by Freud before the discovery of Mendel's Laws, the chromoso- 
mal theory of inheritance, the recognition of inborn metabolic errors, 
the existence of hormones and the mechanism of the nervous 
impulse, which collectively invalidate them. As Sir Peter Medawar 
has put it, psychoanalysis is akin to Mesmerism and phrenology: it 
contains isolated nuggets of truth, but the general theory is false. 14 
Moreover, as the young Karl Popper correctly noted at the time, 
Freud's attitude to scientific proof was very different to Einstein's 
and more akin to Marx's. Far from formulating his theories with a 
high degree of specific content which invited empirical testing and 
refutation, Freud made them all-embracing and difficult to test at all. 
And, like Marx's followers, when evidence did turn up which 
appeared to refute them, he modified the theories to accommodate it. 
Thus the Freudian corpus of belief was subject to continual expan- 
sion and osmosis, like a religious system in its formative period. As 
one would expect, internal critics, like Jung, were treated as heretics; 
external ones, like Havelock Ellis, as infidels. Freud betrayed signs, 
in fact, of the twentieth-century messianic ideologue at his worst - 
namely, a persistent tendency to regard those who diverged from him 
as themselves unstable and in need of treatment. Thus Ellis's 
disparagement of his scientific status was dismissed as 'a highly 
sublimated form of resistance'. 15 'My inclination', he wrote to Jung 
just before their break, 'is to treat those colleagues who offer 
resistance exactly as we treat patients in the same situation'. 16 Two 
decades later, the notion of regarding dissent as a form of mental 
sickness, suitable for compulsory hospitalization, was to blossom in 
the Soviet Union into a new form of political repression. 

But if Freud's work had little true scientific content, it had literary 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 7 

and imaginative qualities of a high order. His style in German was 
magnetic and won him the nation's highest literary award, the 
Goethe Prize of the City of Frankfurt. He translated well. The 
anglicization of the existing Freudian texts became an industry in the 
Twenties. But the new literary output expanded too, as Freud 
allowed his ideas to embrace an ever-widening field of human 
activity and experience. Freud was a gnostic. He believed in the 
existence of a hidden structure of knowledge which, by using the 
techniques he was devising, could be discerned beneath the surface of 
things. The dream was his starting-point. It was not, he wrote, 
'differently constructed from the neurotic symptom. Like the latter, it 
may seem strange and senseless, but when it is examined by means of 
a technique which differs slightly from the free association method 
used in psychoanalysis, one gets from its manifest content to its 
hidden meaning, or to its latent thoughts.' 17 

Gnosticism has always appealed to intellectuals. Freud offered a 
particularly succulent variety. He had a brilliant gift for classical 
allusion and imagery at a time when all educated people prided 
themselves on their knowledge of Greek and Latin. He was quick to 
seize on the importance attached to myth by the new generation of 
social anthropologists such as Sir James Frazer, whose The Golden 
Bough began to appear in 1890. The meaning of dreams, the 
function of myth - into this potent brew Freud stirred an all- 
pervading potion of sex, which he found at the root of almost all 
forms of human behaviour. The war had loosened tongues over sex; 
the immediate post-war period saw the habit of sexual discussion 
carried into print. Freud's time had come. He had, in addition to his 
literary gifts, some of the skills of a sensational journalist. He was an 
adept neologian. He could mint a striking slogan. Almost as often as 
his younger contemporary Rudyard Kipling, he added words and 
phrases to the language: 'the unconscious', 'infantile sexuality', the 
'Oedipus complex', 'inferiority complex', 'guilt complex', the ego, 
the id and the super-ego, 'sublimation', 'depth-psychology'. Some of 
his salient ideas, such as the sexual interpretation of dreams or what 
became known as the 'Freudian slip', had the appeal of new intellec- 
tual parlour-games. Freud knew the value of topicality. In 1920, in 
the aftermath of the suicide of Europe, he published Beyond the 
Pleasure Principle, which introduced the idea of the 'death instinct', 
soon vulgarized into the 'death-wish'. For much of the Twenties, 
which saw a further abrupt decline in religious belief, especially 
among the educated, Freud was preoccupied with anatomizing 
religion, which he saw as a purely human construct. In The Future of 
an Illusion (1927) he dealt with man's unconscious attempts to 
mitigate unhappiness. 'The attempt to procure', he wrote, 'a protec- 



8 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

tion against suffering through a delusional remoulding of reality is 
made by a considerable number of people in common. The religions of 
mankind must be classed among the mass-delusions of this kind. No 
one, needless to say, who shares a delusion ever recognizes it as such.' 18 

This seemed the voice of the new age. Not for the first time, a prophet 
in his fifties, long in the wilderness, had suddenly found a rapt audience 
of gilded youth. What was so remarkable about Freudianism was its 
protean quality and its ubiquity. It seemed to have a new and exciting 
explanation for everything. And, by virtue of Freud's skill in 
encapsulating emergent trends over a wide range of academic 
disciplines, it appeared to be presenting, with brilliant panache arid 
masterful confidence, ideas which had already been half-formulated in 
the minds of the elite. That is what I have always thought!' noted an 
admiring Andre Gide in his diary. In the early 1 920s, many intellectuals 
discovered that they had been Freudians for years without knowing it. 
The appeal was especially strong among novelists, ranging from the 
young Aldous Huxley, whose dazzling Crome Yellow was written in 
1 92 1 , to the sombrely conservative Thomas Mann, to whom Freud was 
'an oracle'. 

The impact of Einstein and Freud upon intellectuals and creative 
artists was all the greater in that the coming of peace had made them 
aware that a fundamental revolution had been and was still taking place 
in the whole world of culture, of which the concepts of relativity and 
Freudianism seemed both portents and echoes. This revolution had 
deep pre-war roots. It had already begun in 1905, when it was 
trumpeted in a public speech, made appropriately enough by the 
impresario Sergei Diaghilev of the Ballets Russes: 

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name 
of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also 
sweep us away. That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the 
ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a 
new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is 
that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that 
the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection. 19 

As Diaghilev spoke, the first exhibition of the Fauves was to be seen in 
Paris. In 1913 he staged there Stravinsky's Sacredu Printemps; by then 
Schoenberg had published the atonal Drei Klavierstucke and Alban 
Berg his String Quartet (Opus 3); and Matisse had invented the term 
'Cubism'. It was in 1909 that the Futurists published their manifesto 
and Kurt Hiller founded his Neue Club in Berlin, the nest of the artistic 
movement which, in 1911, was first termed Expressionism. 20 Nearly 
all the major creative figures of the 1920s had already been published, 
exhibited or performed before 1914, and in that sense the Modern 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 9 

Movement was a pre-war phenomenon. But it needed the desperate 
convulsions of the great struggle, and the crashing of regimes it 
precipitated, to give modernism the radical political dimension it had 
hitherto lacked, and the sense of a ruined world on which it would 
construct a new one. The elegiac, even apprehensive, note Diaghilev 
struck in 1905 was thus remarkably perceptive. The cultural and 
political strands of change could not be separated, any more than 
during the turbulence of revolution and romanticism of 1790-1830. 
It has been noted that James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Lenin were all 
resident-exiles in Zurich in 1916, waiting for their time to come. 21 
With the end of the war, modernism sprang onto what seemed an 
empty stage in a blaze of publicity. On the evening of 9 November 
1918 an Expressionist Council of Intellectuals met in the Reichstag 
building in Berlin, demanding the nationalization of the theatres, the 
state subsidization of the artistic professions and the demolition of 
all academies. Surrealism, which might have been designed to give 
visual expression to Freudian ideas — though its origins were quite 
independent — had its own programme of action, as did Futurism and 
Dada. But this was surface froth. Deeper down, it was the disorienta- 
tion in space and time induced by relativity, and the sexual gnostic- 
ism of Freud, which seemed to be characterized in the new creative 
models. On 23 June 1919 Marcel Proust published A V Ombre des 
jeunes filles, the beginning of a vast experiment in disjointed time 
and subterranean sexual emotions which epitomized the new pre- 
occupations. Six months later, on 10 December, he was awarded the 
Prix Goncourt, and the centre of gravity of French letters had made a 
decisive shift away from the great survivors of the nineteenth 
century. 22 Of course as yet such works circulated only among the 
influential few. Proust had to publish his first volume at his own 
expense and sell it at one-third the cost of production (even as late as 
1956, the complete A la Recherche du temps perdu was still selling 
less than 10,000 sets a year). 23 James Joyce, also working in Paris, 
could not be published at all in the British Isles. His Ulysses, 
completed in 1922, had to be issued by a private press and smuggled 
across frontiers. But its significance was not missed. No novel 
illustrated more clearly the extent to which Freud's concepts had 
passed into the language of literature. That same year, 1922, the poet 
T.S.Eliot, himself a newly identified prophet of the age, wrote that it 
had 'destroyed the whole of the nineteenth century'. 24 Proust and 
Joyce, the two great harbingers and centre-of-gravity-shifters, had no 
place for each other in the Weltanschauung they inadvertently 
shared. They met in Paris on 18 May 1922, after the first night of 
Stravinsky's Renard, at a party for Diaghilev and the cast, attended 
by the composer and his designer, Pablo Picasso. Proust, who had 



10 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

already insulted Stravinsky, unwisely gave Joyce a lift home in his 
taxi. The drunken Irishman assured him he had not read one 
syllable of his works and Proust, incensed, reciprocated the com- 
pliment, before driving on to the Ritz where he had an arrangement 
to be fed at any hour of the night. 25 Six months later he was dead, 
but not before he had been acclaimed as the literary interpreter of 
Einstein in an essay by the celebrated mathematician Camille Vet- 
tard. 26 Joyce dismissed him, in Finnegans Wake, with a pun: 'Prost 
bitte\ 

The notion of writers like Proust and Joyce 'destroying' the 
nineteenth century, as surely as Einstein and Freud were doing with 
their ideas, is not so fanciful as it might seem. The nineteenth 
century saw the climax of the philosophy of personal responsibility 
— the notion that each of us is individually accountable for our 
actions — which was the joint heritage of Judeo-Christianity and the 
classical world. As Lionel Trilling, analysing Eliot's verdict on 
Ulysses, was to point out, during the nineteenth century it was 
possible for a leading aesthete like Walter Pater, in The Renaiss- 
ance, to categorize the ability 'to burn with a hard, gem-like flame' 
as 'success in life'. 'In the nineteenth century', Trilling wrote, even 
'a mind as exquisite and detached as Pater's could take it for 
granted that upon the life of an individual person a judgment of 
success or failure might be passed.' 27 The nineteenth-century novel 
had been essentially concerned with the moral or spiritual success 
of the individual. A la Recherche and Ulysses marked not merely 
the entrance of the anti-hero but the destruction of individual hero- 
ism as a central element in imaginative creation, and a contemptu- 
ous lack of concern for moral balance-striking and verdicts. The 
exercise of individual free will ceased to be the supremely interesting 
feature of human behaviour. 

That was in full accordance with the new forces shaping the 
times. Marxism, now for the first time easing itself into the seat of 
power, was another form of gnosticism claiming to peer through 
the empirically-perceived veneer of things to the hidden truth 
beneath. In words which strikingly foreshadow the passage from 
Freud I have just quoted, Marx had pronounced: 'The final pattern 
of economic relationships as seen on the surface ... is very different 
from, and indeed quite the reverse of, their inner but concealed 
essential pattern.' 29. On the surface, men appeared to be exercising 
their free will, taking decisions, determining events. In reality, to 
those familiar with the methods of dialectical materialism, such 
individuals, however powerful, were seen to be mere flotsam, 
hurled hither and thither by the irresistible surges of economic 
forces. The ostensible behaviour of individuals merely concealed 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 11 

class patterns of which they were almost wholly unaware but 
powerless to defy. 

Equally, in the Freudian analysis, the personal conscience, which 
stood at the very heart of the Judeo-Christian ethic, and was the 
principal engine of individualistic achievement, was dismissed as a 
mere safety-device, collectively created, to protect civilized order 
from the fearful aggressiveness of human beings. Freudianism was 
many things, but if it had an essence it was the description of guilt. 
'The tension between the harsh super-ego and the ego that is 
subjected to it', Freud wrote in 1920, 'is called by us the sense of 
guilt .... Civilization obtains mastery over the individual's danger- 
ous desire for aggression by weakening and disarming it and by 
setting up an agency within him to watch over it, like a garrison in a 
conquered city.' Feelings of guilt were thus a sign not of vice, but of 
virtue. The super-ego or conscience was the drastic price the individ- 
ual paid for preserving civilization, and its cost in misery would 
increase inexorably as civilization advanced: 'A threatened external 
unhappiness . . . has been exchanged for a permanent internal 
unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.' Freud said he 
intended to show that guilt-feelings, unjustified by any human 
frailty, were 'the most important problem in the development of 
civilization'. 29 It might be, as sociologists were already suggesting, 
that society could be collectively guilty, in creating conditions which 
made crime and vice inevitable. But personal guilt-feelings were an 
illusion to be dispelled. None of us was individually guilty; we were 
all guilty. 

Marx, Freud, Einstein all conveyed the same message to the 1920s: 
the world was not what it seemed. The senses, whose empirical 
perceptions shaped our ideas of time and distance, right and wrong, 
law and justice, and the nature of man's behaviour in society, were 
not to be trusted. Moreover, Marxist and Freudian analysis com- 
bined to undermine, in their different ways, the highly developed 
sense of personal responsibility, and of duty towards a settled and 
objectively true moral code, which was at the centre of nineteenth- 
century European civilization. The impression people derived from 
Einstein,, of a universe in which all measurements of value were 
relative, served to confirm this vision - which both dismayed and 
exhilarated - of moral anarchy. 

And had not 'mere anarchy', as W.B. Yeats put it in 1916, been 
'loosed upon the world'? To many, the war had seemed the greatest 
calamity since the fall of Rome. Germany, from fear and ambition, 
and Austria, from resignation and despair, had willed the war in a 
way the other belligerents had not. It marked the culmination of the 
wave of pessimism in German philosophy which was its salient 



12 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

characteristic in the pre-war period. Germanic pessimism, which 
contrasted sharply with the optimism based upon political change 
and reform to be found in the United States, Britain, France and even 
Russia in the decade before 1914, was not the property of the 
intelligentsia but was to be found at every level of German society, 
particularly at the top. In the weeks before the outbreak of 
Armageddon, Bethmann Hollweg's secretary and confident Kurt 
Riezler made notes of the gloomy relish with which his master 
steered Germany and Europe into the abyss. July 7 1914: The 
Chancellor expects that a war, whatever its outcome, will result in 
the uprooting of everything that exists. The existing world very 
antiquated, without ideas.' July 27: 'Doom greater than human 
power hanging over Europe and our own people.' 30 Bethmann 
Hollweg had been born in the same year as Freud, and it was as 
though he personified the 'death instinct' the latter coined as the 
fearful decade ended. Like most educated Germans, he had read Max 
Nordau's Degeneration, published in 1895, and was familiar with 
the degenerative theories of the Italian criminologist Cesare Lom- 
broso. War or no war, man was in inevitable decline; civilization was 
heading for destruction. Such ideas were commonplace in central 
Europe, preparing the way for the gasp of approbation which greeted 
Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West, fortuitously timed for 
publication in 1918 when the predicted suicide had been accom- 
plished. 

Further West, in Britain, Joseph Conrad (himself an Easterner) had 
been the only major writer to reflect this pessimism, working it into a 
whole series of striking novels: Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent 
(1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), Victory (1915). These despair- 
ing political sermons, in the guise of fiction, preached the message 
Thomas Mann was to deliver to central Europe in 1924 with The 
Magic Mountain, as Mann himself acknowledged in the preface he 
wrote to the German translation of The Secret Agent two years later. 
For Conrad the war merely confirmed the irremediable nature of 
man's predicament. From the perspective of sixty years later it must 
be said that Conrad is the only substantial writer of the time whose 
vision remains clear and true in every particular. He dismissed 
Marxism as malevolent nonsense, certain to generate monstrous 
tyranny; Freud's ideas were nothing more than 'a kind of magic 
show'. The war had demonstrated human frailty but otherwise 
would resolve nothing, generate nothing. Giant plans of reform, 
panaceas, all 'solutions', were illusory. Writing to Bertrand Russell 
on 23 October 1922 (Russell was currently offering 'solutions' to 
The Problem of China, his latest book), Conrad insisted: 'I have 
never been able to find in any man's book or any man's talk anything 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 13 

convincing enough to stand up for a moment against my deep-seated 
sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world .... The only 
remedy for Chinamen and for the rest of us is the change of hearts. 
But looking at the history of the last 2,000 years there is not much 
reason to expect that thing, even if man has taken to flying .... Man 
doesn't fly like an eagle, he flies like a beetle.' 31 

At the onset of the war, Conrad's scepticism had been rare in the 
Anglo-Saxon world. The war itself was seen by some as a form of 
progress, H.G.Wells marking its declaration with a catchy volume 
entitled The War That Will End War. But by the time the armistice 
came, progress in the sense the Victorians had understood it, as 
something continuous and almost inexorable, was dead. In 1920, the 
great classical scholar J. B. Bury published a volume, The Idea of 
Progress, proclaiming its demise. 'A new idea will usurp its place as 
the directing idea of humanity .... Does not Progress itself suggest 
that its value as a doctrine is only relative, corresponding to a certain 
not very advanced stage of civilization?' 32 

What killed the idea of orderly, as opposed to anarchic, progress, 
was the sheer enormity of the acts perpetrated by civilized Europe 
over the past four years. That there had been an unimaginable, 
unprecedented moral degeneration, no one who looked at the facts 
could doubt. Sometime while he was Secretary of State for War 
(1919-21), Winston Churchill jotted down on a sheet of War Office 
paper the following passage: 

All the horrors of all the ages were brought together, and not only armies 
but whole populations were thrust into the midst of them. The mighty 
educated States involved conceived - not without reason - that their very 
existence was at stake. Neither peoples nor rulers drew the line at any deed 
which they thought could help them to win. Germany, having let Hell loose, 
kept well in the van of terror; but she was followed step by step by the 
desperate and ultimately avenging nations she had assailed. Every outrage 
against humanity or international law was repaid by reprisals - often of a 
greater scale and of longer duration. No truce or parley mitigated the strife 
of the armies. The wounded died between the lines: the dead mouldered 
into the soil. Merchant ships and neutral ships and hospital ships were sunk 
on the seas and all on board left to their fate, or killed as they swam. Every 
effort was made to starve whole nations into submission without regard to 
age or sex. Cities and monuments were smashed by artillery. Bombs from 
the air were cast down indiscriminately. Poison gas in many forms stifled or 
seared the soldiers. Liquid fire was projected upon their bodies. Men fell 
from the air in flames, or were smothered often slowly in the dark recesses 
of the sea. The fighting strength of armies was limited only by the manhood 
of their countries. Europe and large parts of Asia and Africa became one 



14 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

vast battlefield on which after years of struggle not armies but nations broke 
and ran. When all was over, Torture and Cannibalism were the only two 
expedients that the civilized, scientific, Christian States had been able to 
deny themselves: and they were of doubtful utility. 33 

As Churchill correctly noted, the horrors he listed were perpe- 
trated by the 'mighty educated States'. Indeed, they were quite 
beyond the power of individuals, however evil. It is a commonplace 
that men are excessively ruthless and cruel not as a rule out of 
avowed malice but from outraged righteousness. How much more is 
this true of legally constituted states, invested with all the seeming 
moral authority of parliaments and congresses and courts of justice! 
The destructive capacity of the individual, however vicious, is small; 
of the state, however well-intentioned, almost limitless. Expand the 
state and that destructive capacity necessarily expands too, pari 
passu. As the American pacifist Randolph Bourne snarled, on the eve 
of intervention in 1917, 'War is the health of the state.' 34 Moreover, 
history painfully demonstrates that collective righteousness is far 
more ungovernable than any individual pursuit of revenge. That was 
a point well understood by Woodrow Wilson, who had been 
re-elected on a peace platform in 1916 and who warned: 'Once lead 
this people into war and they'll forget there ever was such a thing as 
tolerance .... The spirit of ruthless brutality will enter into every 
fibre of our national life.' 35 

The effect of the Great War was enormously to increase the size, 
and therefore the destructive capacity and propensity to oppress, of 
the state. Before 1914, all state sectors were small, though most were 
growing, some of them fast. The area of actual state activity averaged 
between 5 and 10 per cent of the Gross National Product. 36 In 1913, 
the state's total income (including local government) as a percentage 
of gnp, was as low as 9 per cent in America. In Germany, which 
from the time of Bismarck had begun to construct a formidable 
apparatus of welfare provisions, it was twice as much, 18 per cent; 
and in Britain, which had followed in Germany's wake since 1906, it 
was 13 per cent. 37 In France the state had always absorbed a 
comparatively large slice of the gnp. But it was in Japan and, above 
all, in Imperial Russia that the state was assuming an entirely new 
role in the life of the nation by penetrating all sectors of the industrial 
economy. 

In both countries, for purposes of military imperialism, the state 
was forcing the pace of industrialization to 'catch up' with the more 
advanced economies. But in Russia the predominance of the state in 
every area of economic life was becoming the central fact of society. 
The state owned oilfields, gold and coal mines, two-thirds of the 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 15 

railway system, thousands of factories. There were 'state peasants' in 
the New Territories of the east. 38 Russian industry, even when not 
publicly owned, had an exceptionally high dependence on tariff 
barriers, state subsidies, grants and loans, or was interdependent 
with the public sector. The links between the Ministry of Finance and 
the big banks were close, with civil servants appointed to their 
boards. 39 In addition, the State Bank, a department of the Finance 
Ministry, controlled savings banks and credit associations, managed 
the finances of the railways, financed adventures in foreign policy, 
acted as a regulator of the whole economy and was constantly 
searching for ways to increase its power and expand its activities. 40 
The Ministry of Trade supervised private trading syndicates, regu- 
lated prices, profits, the use of raw materials and freight-charges, and 
placed its agents on the boards of all joint-stock companies. 41 Imper- 
ial Russia, in its final phase of peace, constituted a large-scale 
experiment in state collective capitalism, and apparently a highly 
successful one. It impressed and alarmed the Germans: indeed, fear 
of the rapid growth in Russia's economic (and therefore military) 
capacity was the biggest single factor in deciding Germany for war in 
1914. As Bethmann Hollweg put it to Riezler, 'The future belongs to 
Russia.' 42 

With the onset of the war, each belligerent eagerly scanned its 
competitors and allies for aspects of state management and interven- 
tion in the war economy which could be imitated. The capitalist 
sectors, appeased by enormous profits and inspired no doubt also by 
patriotism, raised no objections. The result was a qualitative and 
quantitative expansion of the role of the state which has never been 
fully reversed — for though wartime arrangements were sometimes 
abandoned with peace, in virtually every case they were eventually 
adopted again, usually permanently. Germany set the pace, speedily 
adopting most of the Russian state procedures which had so scared 
her in peace, and operating them with such improved efficiency that 
when Lenin inherited the Russian state-capitalist machine in 
1917—18, it was to German wartime economic controls that he, in 
turn, looked for guidance. 43 As the war prolonged itself, and the 
losses and desperation increased, the warring states became steadily 
more totalitarian, especially after the winter of 1916—17. In 
Germany the end of civilian rule came on 9 January 1917 when 
Bethmann Hollweg was forced to bow to the demand for unres- 
tricted submarine warfare. He fell from power completely in July, 
leaving General Ludendorff and the admirals in possession of the 
monster-state. The episode marked the real end of the constitutional 
monarchy, since the Kaiser forewent his prerogative to appoint and 
dismiss the chancellor, under pressure from the military. Even while 



16 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

still chancellor, Bethmann Hollweg discovered that his phone was 
tapped, and according to Riezler, when he heard the click would 
shout into it 'What Schweinhund is listening in?' 44 But phone- 
tapping was legal under the 'state of siege' legislation, which 
empowered area military commands to censor or suppress news- 
papers. Ludendorff was likewise authorized to herd 400,000 Belgian 
workers into Germany, thus foreshadowing Soviet and Nazi slave- 
labour methods. 45 In the last eighteen months of hostilities the 
German elite fervently practised what was openly termed 'War 
Socialism' in a despairing attempt to mobilize every ounce of 
productive effort for victory. 

In the West, too, the state greedily swallowed up the independence 
of the private sector. The corporatist spirit, always present in France, 
took over industry, and there was a resurgence of Jacobin patriotic 
intolerance. In opposition, Georges Clemenceau fought successfully 
for some freedom of the press, and after he came to supreme power 
in the agony of November 1917 he permitted some criticism of 
himself. But politicians like Malvy and Caillaux were arrested and 
long lists of subversives were compiled (the notorious 'Carnet B'), 
for subsequent hounding, arrest and even execution. The liberal 
Anglo-Saxon democracies were by no means immune to these 
pressures. After Lloyd George came to power in the crisis of 
December 1916, the full rigours of conscription and the oppressive 
Defence of the Realm Act were enforced, and manufacturing, 
transport and supply mobilized under corporatist war boards. 

Even more dramatic was the eagerness, five months later, with 
which the Wilson administration launched the United States into war 
corporatism. The pointers had, indeed, been there before. In 1909 
Herbert Croly in The Promise of American Life had predicted it 
could only be fulfilled by the state deliberately intervening to 
promote 'a more highly socialized democracy'. Three years later 
Charles Van Hise's Concentration and Control: a Solution of the 
Trust Problem in the United States presented the case for corporat- 
ism. These ideas were behind Theodore Roosevelt's 'New National- 
ism', which Wilson appropriated and enlarged to win the war. 46 
There was a Fuel Administration, which enforced 'gasless Sundays', 
a War Labor Policies Board, intervening in industrial disputes, a 
Food Administration under Herbert Hoover, fixing prices for com- 
modities, and a Shipping Board which launched 100 new vessels on 4 
July 1918 (it had already taken over 9 million tons into its operating 
control). 47 The central organ was the War Industries Board, whose 
first achievement was the scrapping of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, a 
sure index of corporatism, and whose members (Bernard Baruch, 
Hugh Johnson, Gerard Swope and others) ran a kindergarten for 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 17 

1920s interventionism and the New Deal, which in turn inspired the 
New Frontier and the Great Society. The war corporatism of 1917 
began one of the great continuities of modern American history, 
sometimes underground, sometimes on the surface, which culmi- 
nated in the vast welfare state which Lyndon Johnson brought into 
being in the late 1960s. John Dewey noted at the time that the war 
had undermined the hitherto irresistible claims of private property: 
'No matter how many among the special agencies for public control 
decay with the disappearance of war stress, the movement will never 
go backward.' 48 This proved an accurate prediction. At the same 
time, restrictive new laws, such as the Espionage Act (1917) and the 
Sedition Act (1918), were often savagely enforced: the socialist 
Eugene Debs got ten years for an anti-war speech, and one man who 
obstructed the draft received a forty-year sentence. 49 In all the 
belligerents, and not just in Russia, the climacteric year 1917 
demonstrated that private liberty and private property tended to 
stand or fall together. 

Thus the war demonstrated both the impressive speed with which 
the modern state could expand itself and the inexhaustible appetite 
which it thereupon developed both for the destruction of its enemies 
and for the exercise of despotic power over its own citizens. As the 
war ended, there were plenty of sensible men who understood the 
gravity of these developments. But could the clock be turned back to 
where it had stood in July 1914? Indeed, did anyone wish to turn it 
back? Europe had twice before experienced general settlements after 
long and terrible wars. In 1648 the treaties known as the Peace of 
Westphalia had avoided the impossible task of restoring the status 
quo ante and had in large part simply accepted the political and 
religious frontiers which a war of exhaustion had created. The 
settlement did not last, though religion ceased to be a casus belli. The 
settlement imposed in 1814-15 by the Congress of Vienna after the 
Napoleonic Wars had been more ambitious and on the whole more 
successful. Its object had been to restore, as far as possible, the 
system of major and minor divine-right monarchies which had 
existed before the French Revolution, as the only framework within 
which men would accept European frontiers as legitimate and 
durable. 50 The device worked in the sense that it was ninety-nine 
years before another general European war broke out, and it can be 
argued that the nineteenth century was the most settled and produc- 
tive in the whole history of mankind. But the peacemakers of 
1814-15 were an unusual group: a congress of reactionaries among 
whom Lord Castlereagh appeared a revolutionary firebrand and the 
Duke of Wellington an egregious progressive. Their working ass- 
umptions rested on the brutal denial of all the innovatory political 



18 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

notions of the previous quarter-century. In particular, they shared 
avowed beliefs, almost untinged by cynicism, in power-balances and 
agreed spheres of interest, dynastic marriages, private understand- 
ings between sovereigns and gentlemen subject to a common code 
(except in extremis), and in the private ownership of territory by 
legitimate descent. A king or emperor deprived of possessions in one 
part of Europe could be 'compensated', as the term went, elsewhere, 
irrespective of the nationality, language or culture of the inhabitants. 
They termed this a 'transference of souls', following the Russian 
expression used of the sale of an estate with its serfs, glebae 
ad$cripti. si 

Such options were not available to the peacemakers of 1919. A 
peace of exhaustion, such as Westphalia, based on the military lines, 
was unthinkable: both sides were exhausted enough but one, by 
virtue of the armistice, had gained an overwhelming military 
advantage. The French had occupied all the Rhine bridgeheads by 6 
December 1918. The British operated an inshore blockade, for the 
Germans had surrendered their fleet and their minefields by 21 
November. A peace by diktat was thus available. 

However, that did not mean that the Allies could restore the old 
world, even had they so wished. The old world was decomposing 
even before war broke out. In France, the anti-clericals had been in 
power for a decade, and the last election before the war showed a 
further swing to the Left. In Germany, the 1912 election, for the first 
time, made the Socialists the biggest single party. In Italy, the Giolitti 
government was the most radical in its history as a united country. In 
Britain the Conservative leader A.J. Balfour described his catastro- 
phic defeat in 1906 as 'a faint echo of the same movement which has 
produced massacres in St Petersburg, riots in Vienna and Socialist 
processions in Berlin'. Even the Russian autocracy was trying to 
liberalize itself. The Habsburgs anxiously sought new constitutional 
planks to shore themselves up. Europe on the eve of war was run by 
worried would-be progressives, earnestly seeking to satisfy rising 
expectations, eager above all to cultivate and appease youth. 

It is a myth that European youth was ruthlessly sacrificed in 1914 
by selfish and cynical age. The speeches of pre-war politicians were 
crammed with appeals to youth. Youth movements were a European 
phenomenon, especially in Germany where 25,000 members of the 
Wandervogel clubs hiked, strummed guitars, protested about pollu- 
tion and the growth of cities, and damned the old. Opinion-formers 
like Max Weber and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck demanded that 
youth be brought to the helm. The nation, wrote Bruck, 'needs a 
change of blood, an insurrection of the sons against the fathers, a 
substitution of the old by the young'. 52 All over Europe, sociologists 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 19 

were assiduously studying youth to find out what it thought and 
wanted. 

And of course what youth wanted was war. The first pampered 
'youth generation' went enthusiastically to a war which their elders, 
almost without exception, accepted with horror or fatalistic despair. 
Among articulate middle-class youth it was, at the outset at least, the 
most popular war in history. They dropped their guitars and seized 
their rifles. Charles Peguy wrote that he went 'eagerly' to the front 
(and death). Henri de Montherlant reported that he 'loved life at the 
front, the bath in the elemental, the annihilation of the intelligence 
and the heart'. Pierre Drieu la Rochelle called the war 'a marvellous 
surprise'. Young German writers like Walter Flex, Ernst Wurche and 
Ernst Jiinger celebrated what Jiinger called 'the holy moment' of 
August 1914. The novelist Fritz von Unger described the war as a 
'purgative', the beginning of 'a new zest for life'. Rupert Brooke 
found it 'the only life ... a fine thrill, like nothing else in the world'. 
For Robert Nichols it was 'a privilege'. 'He is dead who will not 
fight', wrote Julian Grenfell ('Into Battle'), 'and who dies fighting has 
increase.' Young Italians who got into the war later were if anything 
even more lyrical. 'This is the hour of the triumph of the finest 
values,' one Italian poet wrote, 'this is the Hour of Youth.' Another 
echoed: 'Only the small men and the old men of twenty' would 'want 
to miss it.' 53 

By the winter of 1916-17, the war-lust was spent. As the fighting 
prolonged itself endlessly, bloodied and disillusioned youth turned 
on its elders with disgust and rising anger. On all sides there was talk 
in the trenches of a reckoning with 'guilty politicians', the 'old gang'. 
In 1917 and still more in 1918, all the belligerent regimes (the United 
States alone excepted) felt themselves tested almost to destruction, 
which helps to explain the growing desperation and savagery with 
which they waged war. Victory became identified with political 
survival. The Italian and Belgian monarchies and perhaps even the 
British would not have outlasted defeat, any more than the Third 
Republic in France. Of course, as soon as victory came, they all 
looked safe enough. But then who had once seemed more secure than 
the Hohenzollerns in Berlin? The Kaiser Wilhelm II was bundled out 
without hesitation on 9 November 1918, immediately it was realized 
that a German republic might obtain better peace terms. The last 
Habsburg Emperor, Charles, abdicated three days later, ending a 
millennium of judicious marriages and inspired juggling. The Roma- 
novs had been murdered on 16 July and buried in a nameless grave. 
Thus the three imperial monarchies of east and central Europe, the 
tripod of legitimacy on which the ancien regime, such as it was, had 
rested, all vanished within a year. By the end of 1918 there was little 



20 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

chance of restoring any one of them, still less all three. The Turkish 
Sultan, for what he was worth, was finished too (though a Turkish 
republic was not proclaimed until 1 November 1922). 

At a stroke, the dissolution of these dynastic and proprietory 
empires opened up packages of heterogeneous peoples which had 
been lovingly assembled and carefully tied together over centuries. 
The last imperial census of the Habsburg empire showed that it 
consisted of a dozen nations: 12 million Germans, 10 million 
Magyars, 8.5 million Czechs, 1.3 million Slovaks, 5 million Poles, 4 
million Ruthenians, 3.3 million Romanians, 5.7 million Serbs and 
Croats, and 800,000 Ladines and Italians. 54 According to the 1897 
Russian imperial census, the Great Russians formed only 43 per cent 
of the total population; 55 the remaining 57 per cent were subject 
peoples, ranging from Swedish and German Lutherans through 
Orthodox Latvians, White Russians and Ukrainians, Catholic Poles, 
Ukrainian Uniates, Shia, Sunni and Kurdish Muslims of a dozen 
nationalities, and innumerable varieties of Buddhists, Taoists and 
animists. Apart from the British Empire, no other imperial conglom- 
erate had so many distinct races. Even at the time of the 1926 census, 
when many of the western groups had been prised away, there were 
still approximately two hundred peoples and languages. 56 By compa- 
rison, the Hohenzollern dominions were homogeneous and mono- 
glot, but they too contained huge minorities of Poles, Danes, 
Alsatians and French. 

The truth is that, during the process of settlement in eastern and 
central Europe, from the fourth to the fifteenth centuries, and during 
the intensive phase of urbanization which took place from the early 
eighteenth century onwards, about one-quarter of the area had been 
occupied by mixed races (including over ten million Jews) whose 
allegiance had hitherto been religious and dynastic rather than 
national. The monarchies were the only unifying principle of these 
multi-racial societies, the sole guarantee (albeit often a slender one) 
that all would be equal before the law. Once that principle was 
removed, what could be substituted for it? The only one available 
was nationalism, and its fashionable by-product irredentism, a term 
derived from the Italian Risorgimento and signifying the union of an 
entire ethnic group under one state. To this was now being added a 
new cant phrase, 'self-determination', by which was understood the 
adjustment of frontiers by plebiscite according to ethnic preferences. 

The two principal western Allies, Britain and France, had origin- 
ally no desire or design to promote a peace based on nationality. 
Quite the contrary. Both ran multiracial, polyglot overseas empires. 
Britain in addition had an irredentist problem of her own in Ireland. 
In 1918 both were led by former progressives, Lloyd George and 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 21 

Clemenceau, who under the agony of war had learned Realpolitik 
and a grudging respect for the old notions of 'balance', 'compensa- 
tion' and so forth. When, during the peace talks, the young British 
diplomat Harold Nicolson urged that it was logical for Britain to 
grant self-determination to the Greeks in Cyprus, he was rebuked 
by Sir Eyre Crowe, head of the Foreign Office: 'Nonsense, my dear 
Nicolson. . . . Would you apply self-determination to India, Egypt, 
Malta and Gibraltar? If you are not prepared to go as far as this, 
then you have not [sic] right to claim that you are logical. If you are 
prepared to go as far as this, then you had better return at once to 
London.' 57 (He might have added that Cyprus had a large Turkish 
minority; and for that reason it has still not achieved self- 
determination in the 1980s.) Lloyd George would have been happy 
to strive to keep the Austro-Hungarian empire together as late as 
1917 or even the beginning of 1918, in return for a separate peace. 
As for Clemenceau, his primary object was French security, and for 
this he wanted back not merely Alsace-Lorraine (most of whose 
people spoke German) but the Saar too, with the Rhineland hacked 
out of Germany as a French-oriented puppet state. 

Moreover, during the war Britain, France and Russia had signed 
a series of secret treaties among themselves and to induce other 
powers to join them which ran directly contrary to nationalist 
principles. The French secured Russian approval for their idea of a 
French-dominated Rhineland, in return for giving Russia a free 
hand to oppress Poland, in a treaty signed on 1 1 March 1917. 58 By the 
Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, Britain and France agreed to strip 
Turkey of its Arab provinces and divide them between themselves. 
Italy sold itself to the highest bidder: by the Secret Treaty of 
London of 26 April 1915 she was to receive sovereignty over 
millions of German-speaking Tyroleans, and of Serbs and Croats in 
Dalmatia. A treaty with Romania signed on 17 August 1916 gave her 
the whole of Transylvania and most of the Banat of Temesvar and 
the Bukovina, most of whose inhabitants did not speak Romanian. 
Another secret treaty signed on 16 February 1917 awarded Japan 
the Chinese province of Shantung, hitherto in Germany's commer- 
cial sphere. 59 

However, with the collapse of the Tsarist regime and the refusal 
of the Habsburgs to make a separate peace, Britain and France 
began to encourage nationalism and make self-determination a 'war 
aim'. On 4 June 1917 Kerensky's provisional government in Russia 
recognized an independent Poland; France began to raise an army 
of Poles and on 3 June 1918 proclaimed the creation of a powerful 
Polish state a primary objective. 60 Meanwhile in Britain, the Slavo- 
phile lobby headed by R.W.Seton- Watson and his journal, The 



22 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

New Europe, was successfully urging the break-up of Austria- 
Hungary and the creation of new ethnic states. 61 Undertakings and 
promises were given to many Slav and Balkan politicians-in-exile in 
return for resistance to 'Germanic imperialism'. In the Middle East, 
the Arabophile Colonel T.E.Lawrence was authorized to promise 
independent kingdoms to the Emirs Feisal and Hussein as rewards 
for fighting the Turks. In 1917 the so-called 'Balfour Declaration' 
promised the Jews a national home in Palestine to encourage them to 
desert the Central Powers. Many of these promises were mutually 
incompatible, besides contradicting the secret treaties still in force. In 
effect, during the last two desperate years of fighting, the British and 
French recklessly issued deeds of property which in sum amounted to 
more than the territory they had to dispose of, and all of which could 
not conceivably be honoured at the peace, even assuming it was a 
harsh one. Some of these post-dated cheques bounced noisily. 

To complicate matters, Lenin and his Bolsheviks seized control of 
Russia on 25 October 1917 and at once possessed themselves of the 
Tsarist diplomatic archives. They turned copies of the secret treaties 
over to western correspondents, and on 12 December the Manches- 
ter Guardian began publishing them. This was accompanied by 
vigorous Bolshevik propaganda designed to encourage Communist 
revolutions throughout Europe by promising self-determination to 
all peoples. 

Lenin's moves had in turn a profound effect on the American 
President. Woodrow Wilson has been held up to ridicule for more 
than half a century on the grounds that his ignorant pursuit of 
impossible ideals made a sensible peace impossible. This is no more 
than a half-truth. Wilson was a don, a political scientist, an 
ex-President of Princeton University. He knew he was ignorant of 
foreign affairs. Just before his inauguration in 1913 he told friends, 
'It would be an irony of fate if my administration had to deal chiefly 
with foreign affairs.' 62 The Democrats had been out of office for 
fifty-three years and Wilson regarded us diplomats as Republicans. 
When the war broke out he insisted Americans be 'neutral in fact as 
well as name'. He got himself re-elected in 1916 on the slogan 'He 
kept us out of war'. He did not want to break up the old Europe 
system either: he advocated 'peace without victory'. 

By early 1917 he had come to the conclusion that America would 
have a bigger influence on the settlement as a belligerent than as a 
neutral, and he did draw a narrow legal and moral distinction 
between Britain and Germany: the use of U-boats by Germany 
violated 'human rights', whereas British blockade-controls violated 
only 'property rights', a lesser offence. 63 Once in the war he waged it 
vigorously but he did not regard America as an ordinary combatant. 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 23 

It had entered the war, he said in his April 1917 message to 
Congress, 'to vindicate the principles of peace and justice' and to set 
up 'a concert of peace and action as will henceforth ensure the 
observance of these principles'. Anxious to be well-prepared for the 
peacemaking in September 1917 he created, under his aide Colonel 
Edward House and Dr S.E.Mezes, an organization of 150 academic 
experts which was known as 'the Inquiry' and housed in the 
American Geographical Society building in New York. 64 As a result, 
the American delegation was throughout the peace process by far the 
best-informed and documented, indeed on many points often the sole 
source of accurate information. 'Had the Treaty of Peace been 
drafted solely by the American experts,' Harold Nicolson wrote, 'it 
would have been one of the wisest as well as the most scientific 
documents ever devised.' 65 

However, the Inquiry was based on the assumption that the peace 
would be a negotiated compromise, and that the best way to make it 
durable would be to ensure that it conformed to natural justice and 
so was acceptable to the peoples involved. The approach was 
empirical, not ideological. In particular, Wilson at this stage was not 
keen on the League of Nations, a British idea first put forward on 20 
March 1917. He thought it would raise difficulties with Congress. 
But the Bolshevik publication of the secret treaties, which placed 
America's allies in the worst possible light as old-fashioned preda- 
tors, threw Wilson into consternation. Lenin's call for general 
self-determination also helped to force Wilson's hand, for he felt that 
America, as the custodian of democratic freedom, could not be 
outbid by a revolutionary regime which had seized power illegally. 
Hence he hurriedly composed and on 8 January 1918 publicly 
delivered the famous 'Fourteen Points'. The first repudiated secret 
treaties. The last provided for a League. Most of the rest were 
specific guarantees that, while conquests must be surrendered, the 
vanquished would not be punished by losing populations, nationality 
to be the determining factor. On 11 February Wilson added his 'Four 
Principles', which rammed the last point home, and on 27 September 
he provided the coping-stone of the 'Five Particulars', the first of 
which promised justice to friends and enemies alike. 66 The corpus of 
twenty-three assertions was produced by Wilson independently of 
Britain and France. 

We come now to the heart of the misunderstanding which 
destroyed any real chance of the peace settlement succeeding, and so 
prepared a second global conflict. By September 1918 it was evident 
that Germany, having won the war in the East, was in the process of 
losing it in the West. But the German army, nine million strong, was 
still intact and conducting an orderly retreat from its French and 



24 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

Belgian conquests. Two days after Wilson issued his 'Five Particu- 
lars', the all-powerful General Ludendorff astounded members of his 
government by telling them 'the condition of the army demands an 
immediate armistice in order to avoid a catastrophe'. A popular 
government should be formed to get in touch with Wilson. 67 Luden- 
dorff's motive was obviously to thrust upon the democratic parties 
the odium of surrendering Germany's territorial gains. But he also 
clearly considered Wilson's twenty-three pronouncements collec- 
tively as a guarantee that Germany would not be dismembered or 
punished but would retain its integrity and power substantially 
intact. In the circumstances this was as much as she could reasonably 
have hoped for; indeed more, for the second of the 14 Points, on 
freedom of the seas, implied the lifting of the British blockade. The 
civil authorities took the same view, and on 4 October the 
Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden, opened negotiations for an 
armistice with Wilson on the basis of his statements. The Austrians, 
on an even more optimistic assumption, followed three days later. 68 
Wilson, who now had an army of four million and who was 
universally believed to be all-powerful, with Britain and France 
firmly in his financial and economic grip, responded favourably. 
Following exchanges of notes, on 5 November he offered the 
Germans an armistice on the basis of the 14 Points, subject only to 
two Allied qualifications: the freedom of the seas (where Britain 
reserved her rights of interpretation) and compensation for war 
damage. It was on this understanding that the Germans agreed to lay 
down their arms. 

What the Germans and the Austrians did not know was that, on 
29 October, Colonel House, Wilson's special envoy and US repre- 
sentative on the Allied Supreme War Council, had held a long secret 
meeting with Clemenceau and Lloyd George. The French and British 
leaders voiced all their doubts and reservations about the Wilsonian 
pronouncements, and had them accepted by House who drew them 
up in the form of a 'Commentary', subsequently cabled to Wilson in 
Washington. The 'Commentary', which was never communicated to 
the Germans and Austrians, effectively removed all the advantages of 
Wilson's points, so far as the Central Powers were concerned. Indeed 
it adumbrated all the features of the subsequent Versailles Treaty to 
which they took the strongest objection, including the dismember- 
ment of Austria-Hungary, the loss of Germany's colonies, the 
break-up of Prussia by a Polish corridor, and reparations. 69 What is 
still more notable, it not only based itself upon the premise of 
German 'war guilt' (which was, arguably, implicit in Wilson's 
twenty-three points), but revolved around the principle of 'rewards' 
for the victors and 'punishments' for the vanquished, which Wilson 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 25 

had specifically repudiated. It is true that during the October 
negotiations Wilson, who had never actually had to deal with the 
Germans before, was becoming more hostile to them in consequence. 
He was, in particular, incensed by the torpedoing of the Irish civilian 
ferry Leinster, with the loss of 450 lives, including many women and 
children, on 12 October, more than a week after the Germans had 
asked him for an armistice. All the same, it is strange that he accepted 
the Commentary, and quite astounding that he gave no hint of it to 
the Germans. They, for their part, were incompetent in not asking 
for clarification of some of the points, for Wilson's style, as the 
British Foreign Secretary, A.J.Balfour, told the cabinet 'is very 
inaccurate. He is a first-rate rhetorician and a very bad draftsman.' 70 
But the prime responsibility for this fatal failure in communication 
was Wilson's. And it was not an error on the side of idealism. 

The second blunder, which compounded the first and turned it 
into a catastrophe, was one of organization. The peace conference 
was not given a deliberate structure. It just happened, acquiring a 
shape and momentum of its own, and developing an increasingly 
anti-German pattern in the process, both in substance and, equally 
important, in form. At the beginning, everyone had vaguely assumed 
that preliminary terms would be drawn up by the Allies among 
themselves, after which the Germans and their partners would 
appear and the actual peace-treaty be negotiated. That is what had 
happened at the Congress of Vienna. A conference programme on 
these lines was actually drawn up by the logical French, and handed 
to Wilson by the French ambassador in Washington as early as 29 
November 1918. This document had the further merit of stipulating 
the immediate cancellation of all the secret treaties. But its wording 
irritated Wilson and nothing more was heard of it. So the conference 
met without an agreed programme of procedure and never acquired 
one. 71 The modus operandi was made still more ragged by Wilson's 
own determination to cross the Atlantic and participate in it. This 
meant that the supposedly 'most powerful man in the world' could 
no longer be held in reserve, as a deus ex machina, to pronounce 
from on high whenever the Allies were deadlocked. By coming to 
Paris he became just a prime minister like the rest, and in fact lost as 
many arguments as he won. But this was partly because, as the 
negotiations got under way, Wilson's interest shifted decisively from 
his own twenty-three points, and the actual terms of the treaty, to 
concentrate almost exclusively on the League and its Covenant. To 
him the proposed new world organization, about which he had 
hitherto been sceptical, became the whole object of the conference. 
Its operations would redeem any failings in the treaty itself. This had 
two dire consequences. First, the French were able to get agreed 



26 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

much harsher terms, including a 'big' Poland which cut Prussia in 
two and stripped Germany of its Silesian industrial belt, a fifteen- 
year Allied occupation of the Rhineland, and enormous indemnities. 
Second, the idea of a preliminary set of terms was dropped. Wilson 
was determined to insert the League Covenant into the preliminary 
document. His Secretary of State, Robert Lansing, advised him that 
even such a putative agreement legally constituted a treaty and 
therefore required Congressional ratification. Fearing trouble in the 
Senate, Wilson then decided to go straight for a final treaty. 72 Of 
course there were other factors. Marshal Foch, the French genera- 
lissimo, feared that the announcement of agreed preliminary terms 
would accelerate the demobilization of France's allies, and so 
strengthen Germany's hand in the final stage. And agreement even 
between the Allies was proving so difficult on so many points that all 
dreaded the introduction of new and hostile negotiating parties, 
whose activities would unravel anything so far achieved. So the idea 
of preliminary terms was dropped. 73 

Hence when the Germans were finally allowed to come to Paris, 
they discovered to their consternation that they were not to negotiate 
a peace but to have it imposed upon them, having already rendered 
themselves impotent by agreeing to an armistice which they now 
regarded as a swindle. Moreover, Clemenceau, for whom hatred and 
fear of the Germans was a law of nature, stage-managed the 
imposition of the diktat. He had failed to secure agreement for a 
federated Germany which reversed the work of Bismarck, or for a 
French military frontier on the Rhine. But on 7 May 1919 he was 
allowed to preside over the ceremony at Versailles, where France had 
been humiliated by Prussia in 1871, at which the German delegation 
at last appeared, not in the guise of a negotiating party but as 
convicted prisoners come to be sentenced. Addressing the sullen 
German plenipotentiary, Count von Brockdorff-Rantzau, he chose 
his words carefully: 

You see before you the accredited representatives of the Allied and 
Associated powers, both small and great, which have waged without 
intermission for more than four years the pitiless war which was imposed 
on them. The hour has struck for the weighty settlement of our accounts. 
You asked us for peace. We are disposed to grant it to you. 74 

He then set a time-limit for outright acceptance or rejection. The 
Count's bitter reply was read sitting down, a discourtesy which 
infuriated many of those present, above all Wilson, who had become 
increasingly anti-German as the conference proceeded: 'What abo- 
minable manners .... The Germans are really a stupid people. They 
always do the wrong thing .... This is the most tactless speech I have 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 27 

ever heard. It will set the whole world against them.' In fact it did 
not. A.J.Balfour did not object to Brockdorff remaining seated. He 
told Nicolson, 'I failed to notice. I make it a rule never to stare at 
people when they are in obvious distress.' 76 There were stirrings of 
pity for the Germans among the British, and thereafter, until 28 
June when the Germans finally signed, Lloyd George made strenu- 
ous efforts to mitigate the severity of the terms, especially over the 
German— Polish frontier. He feared it might provoke a future war — 
as indeed it did. But all he got from a hostile Wilson and 
Clemenceau was a plebiscite for Upper Silesia. 77 Thus the Germans 
signed, 'yielding', as they put it, 'to overwhelming force'. 'It was as 
if, wrote Lansing, 'men were being called upon to sign their own 
death-warrants .... With pallid faces and trembling hands they 
wrote their names quickly and were then conducted back to their 
places.' 78 

The manner in which the terms were nailed onto the Germans 
was to have a calamitous effect on their new Republic, as we shall 
see. Lloyd George's last-minute intervention on their behalf also 
effectively ended the entente cordiale^ and was to continue to 
poison Anglo— French relations into the 1940s: an act of perfidy 
which General de Gaulle was to flourish bitterly in Winston Chur- 
chill's face in the Second World War. 79 At the time, many French- 
men believed Clemenceau had conceded too much, and he was the 
only politician in the country who could have carried what the 
French regarded as an over-moderate and even dangerous set- 
tlement. 80 The Americans were split. Among their distinguished 
delegation, some shared Wilson's anti-Germanism. 81 John Foster 
Dulles spoke of 'the enormity of the crime committed by Germany'. 
The slippery Colonel House was instrumental in egging on Wilson 
to scrap his 'points'. Wilson's chief adviser on Poland, Robert 
H.Lord, was next to Clemenceau himself the strongest advocate of 
a 'big' Poland. 82 But Lansing rightly recognized that the failure to 
allow the Germans to negotiate was a cardinal error and he 
considered Wilson had betrayed his principles in both form and 
substance. 83 His criticisms were a prime reason for Wilson's brutal 
dismissal of him early in 1920. 84 

Among the younger Americans, most were bitterly critical. 
William Bullitt wrote Wilson a savage letter: 'I am sorry that you 
did not fight our fight to the finish and that you had so little faith in 
the millions of men, like myself, in every nation who had faith in 
you .... Our government has consented now to deliver the suffer- 
ing peoples of the world to new oppressions, subjections and 
dismemberments — a new century of war.' 85 Samuel Eliot Morrison, 
Christian Herter and Adolf Berle shared this view. Walter 



28 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

Lippmann wrote: 'In my opinion the Treaty is not only illiberal and 
in bad faith, it is in the highest degree imprudent.' 86 

Many of these young men were to be influential later. But they 
were overshadowed by a still more vehement critic in the British 
delegation who was in a position to strike a devastating blow at the 
settlement immediately. John Maynard Keynes was a clever Cam- 
bridge don, a wartime civil servant and a Treasury representative at 
the conference. He was not interested in military security, frontiers 
and population-shifts, whose intrinsic and emotional importance he 
tragically underestimated. On the other hand he had a penetrating 
understanding of the economic aspects of European stability, which 
most delegates ignored. A durable peace, in his view, would depend 
upon the speed with which the settlement allowed trade and manu- 
facturing to revive and employment to grow. In this respect the treaty 
must be dynamic, not retributive. 87 In 1916 in a Treasury memoran- 
dum, he argued that the 1871 indemnity Germany had imposed on 
France had damaged both countries and was largely responsible for 
the great economic recession of the 1870s which had affected the 
entire world. 88 He thought there should be no reparations at all or, if 
there were, the maximum penalty to be imposed on Germany should 
be £2,000 million: 'If Germany is to be "milked",' he argued in a 
preparatory paper for the conference, 'she must not first of all be 
ruined.' 89 As for the war debts in which all the Allies were entangled 
— and which they supposed would be paid off by what they got out of 
Germany — Keynes thought it would be sensible for Britain to let her 
creditors off. Such generosity would encourage the Americans to do 
the same for Britain, and whereas Britain would be paid by the 
Continentals in paper, she would have to pay the USA in real money, 
so a general cancellation would benefit her. 90 

In addition to limiting reparations and cancelling war-debts, 
Keynes wanted Wilson to use his authority and the resources of the 
United States to launch a vast credit programme to revitalize 
European industry — a scheme which, in 1947—8, was to take the 
form of the Marshall Plan. He called this 'a grand scheme for the 
rehabilitation of Europe'. 91 He sold this proposal to his boss, the 
Chancellor of the Exchequer, Austen Chamberlain, and in April 
1919 drafted two letters which Lloyd George sent to Wilson. The 
first argued 'the economic mechanism of Europe is jammed' and the 
proposal would free it; the second, that 'the more prostrate a country 
is and the nearer to Bolshevism, the more presumably it requires 
assistance. But the less likely is private enterprise to do it.' 92 It was 
Keynes's vieM Jiat America was enjoying a unique 'moment' in 
world affairs, and that Wilson should avoid trying to dictate 
post-war boundaries and the shape of the League and, instead, use 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 29 

US food supplies and economic power to aid Europe's long-term 
recovery. A prosperous Europe would be more likely to forget the 
bitter memories of the immediate past and to place in perspective the 
frontier adjustments which were now so fraught with passion. 

There was much wisdom and some justice in Keynes's view, and he 
was certainly right about America's role, as some American his- 
torians now recognize. 93 But Wilson, obsessed by the League and 
uninterested in economic revival, brushed aside Lloyd George's 
pleas, and the US Treasury was horrified by Keynes's ideas. Its 
representatives, complained Keynes, were 'formally interdicted' from 
'discussing any such question with us even in private conversation'. 94 
There could be no question of cancelling war-debts. Keynes's disgust 
with the Americans boiled over: 'They had a chance of taking a large, 
or at least humane view of the world, but unhesitatingly refused it,' 
he wrote to a friend. Wilson was 'the greatest fraud on earth'. 95 He 
was even more horrified when he read the Treaty through and 
grasped what he saw as the appalling cumulative effect of its 
provisions, particularly the reparations clauses. The 'damned 
Treaty', as he called it, was a formula for economic disaster and future 
war. On 26 May 1919 he resigned from the British delegation. 'How 
can you expect me', he wrote to Chamberlain, 'to assist at this tragic 
farce any longer, seeking to lay the foundation, as a Frenchman put 
it, "d'une guerre juste et durable" V He told Lloyd George: 'I am 
slipping away from this scene of nightmare.' 96 

Keynes's departure was perfectly understandable, for the settle- 
ment his wit and eloquence had failed to avert was a fait accompli. 
But what he now proceeded to do made infinitely more serious the 
errors of judgement he had so correctly diagnosed. Keynes was a 
man of two worlds. He enjoyed the world of banking and politics in 
which his gifts allowed him to flourish whenever he chose to do so. 
But he was also an academic, an aesthete, a homosexual and a 
member both of the secret Cambridge society, The Apostles, and of 
its adjunct and offspring, the Bloomsbury Group. Most of his friends 
were pacifists: Lytton Strachey, the unofficial leader of the Blooms- 
berries, Strachey's brother James, David Garnett, Clive Bell, Adrian 
Stephen, Gerald Shove, Harry Norton and Duncan Grant. 97 When 
conscription was introduced, some of them, rather than serve, 
preferred to be hauled before tribunals as conscientious objectors, 
Lytton Strachey featuring in a widely publicized and, to him, heroic 
case. They did not approve of Keynes joining the Treasury, seeing it 
as 'war work', however non-belligerent. In February 1916, he found 
on his plate at breakfast an insidious note from Strachey, the pacifist 
equivalent of a white feather: 'Dear Maynard, Why are you still at 
the Treasury? Yours, Lytton.' When Duncan Grant, with whom 



30 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

Keynes was having an affair, was up before a tribunal in Ipswich, 
Keynes put the case for him, flourishing his Treasury briefcase with 
the royal cipher to intimidate the tribunal members, who were 
country small-fry. But he was ashamed of his job when with his 
friends. He wrote to Grant in December 1917: 'I work for a 
government I despise for ends I think criminal.' 98 

Keynes continued at the Treasury out of a residual sense of 
patriotism but the tensions within him grew. When the war he had 
hated culminated in a peace he found outrageous, he returned to 
Cambridge in a state of nervous collapse. Recovering, he sat down at 
once to write a scintillating and vicious attack on the whole 
conference proceedings. It was a mixture of truth, half-truth, mis- 
conceptions and flashing insights, enlivened by sardonic character- 
sketches of the chief actors in the drama. It was published before the 
end of the year as The Economic Consequences of the Peace and 
caused a world-wide sensation. The work is another classic illustra- 
tion of the law of unintended consequences. Keynes's public motive 
in writing it was to alert the world to the effects of imposing a 
Carthaginian Peace on Germany. His private motive was to reinstate 
himself with his friends by savaging a political establishment they 
blamed him for serving. It certainly succeeded in these objects. It also 
proved to be one of the most destructive books of the century, which 
contributed indirectly and in several ways to the future war Keynes 
himself was so anxious to avert. When that war in due course came, 
a young French historian, Etienne Mantoux, pointed an accusing 
finger at Keynes's philippic in a tract called The Carthaginian Peace: 
or the Economic Consequences of Mr Keynes. It was published in 
London in 1946, a year after Mantoux himself had been slaughtered 
and the same year Keynes died of cancer. 

The effect of Keynes's book on Germany and Britain was cumula- 
tive, as we shall see. Its effect on America was immediate. As already 
noted, the League of Nations was not Wilson's idea. It emanated 
from Britain. Or rather, it was the brain-child of two eccentric 
English gentlemen, whose well-meaning but baneful impact on world 
affairs illustrates the proposition that religious belief is a bad 
counsellor in politics. Walter Phillimore, who at the age of seventy- 
two chaired the Foreign Office committee whose report coined the 
proposal (20 March 1918), was an international jurist and author of 
Three Centuries of Treaties of Peace (1917). He was also a well- 
known ecclesiastical lawyer, a Trollopian figure, prominent in the 
Church Assembly, an expert on legitimacy, ritual, vestments and 
church furniture, as well as Mayor of leafy Kensington. As a judge he 
had been much criticized for excessive severity in sexual cases, 
though not towards other crimes. It would be difficult to conceive of 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 31 

a man less suited to draw up rules for coping with global Realpolitik, 
were it not for the existence of his political ally, Lord Robert Cecil, 
Tory mp and Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Cecil 
reacted against the political scepticism and cynicism of his prime 
minister father, Lord Salisbury, who had had to cope with Bismarck, 
by approaching foreign affairs with a strong dosage of religiosity. He 
was a nursery lawyer, whom his mother said 'always had two 
Grievances and a Right'. He had tried to organize opposition to 
bullying at Eton. As Minister responsible for the blockade he had 
hated trying to starve the Germans into surrender, and so fell on the 
League idea with enthusiasm. Indeed he wrote to his wife in August 
1918: 'Without the hope that [the League] was to establish a better 
international system I should be a pacifist.' 99 It is important to 
realize that the two men most responsible for shaping the League were 
quasi-pacifists who saw it not as a device for resisting aggression by 
collective force but as a substitute for such force, operating chiefly 
through 'moral authority'. 

The British military and diplomatic experts disliked the idea from 
the start. Colonel Maurice Hankey, the Cabinet Secretary and the 
most experienced military co-ordinator, minuted: '. . . any such 
scheme is dangerous to us, because it will create a sense of security 
which is wholly fictitious .... It will only result in failure and the 
longer that failure is postponed the more certain it is that this 
country will have been lulled to sleep. It will put a very strong lever 
into the hands of the well-meaning idealists who are to be found in 
almost every government who deprecate expenditure on armaments, 
and in the course of time it will almost certainly result in this country 
being caught at a disadvantage.' Eyre Crowe noted tartly that a 
'solemn league and covenant' would be like any other treaty: 'What 
is there to ensure that it will not, like other treaties, be broken?' The 
only answer, of course, was force. But Phillimore had not consulted 
the Armed Services, and when the Admiralty got to hear of the 
scheme they minuted that to be effective it would require more 
warships, not less. 100 All these warnings, made at the very instant the 
League of Nations was conceived, were to be abundantly justified by 
its dismal history. 

Unfortunately, once President Wilson, tiring of the Treaty negotia- 
tions themselves, with their necessary whiff of amoral Realpolitik, 
seized on the League, and made it the vessel of his own copious 
religious fervour, doubts were swept aside. His sponsorship of the 
scheme, indeed, served to strip it of such practical merits as it might 
have had. There is an historical myth that the European powers were 
desperately anxious to create the League as a means of involving the 
United States in a permanent commitment to help keep the peace; 



32 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

that Wilson shared this view; and that it was frustrated by Republi- 
can isolationism. Not so. Clemenceau and Foch wanted a mutual 
security alliance, with its own planning staff, of the kind which had 
finally evolved at Allied hq, after infinite pains and delays, in the last 
year of the war. In short, they wanted something on the lines which 
eventually appeared in 1948-9, in the shape of the North Atlantic 
Treaty Organization. They recognized that a universal system, to 
which all powers (including Germany) belonged, irrespective of their 
record, and which guaranteed all frontiers, irrespective of their 
merits, was nonsense. They were better informed of Congressional 
opinion than Wilson, and knew there was small chance of it 
accepting any such monstrosity. Their aims were limited, and they 
sought to involve America by stages, as earlier France had involved 
Britain. What they wanted America to accept, in the first place, was a 
guarantee of the Treaty, rather than membership of any League. 101 

This was approximately the position of Senator Cabot Lodge, the 
Republican senate leader. He shared the scepticism of both "the 
British experts and the French. Far from being isolationist, he was 
pro-European and a believer in mutual security. But he thought that 
major powers would not in practice accept the obligation to go to 
war to enforce the League's decisions, since nations eschewed war 
except when their vital interests were at stake. How could frontiers 
be indefinitely guaranteed by anything or anybody? They reflected 
real and changing forces. Would the US go to war to protect Britain's 
frontiers in India, or Japan's in Shantung? Of course not. Any 
arrangement America made with Britain and France must be based 
on the mutual accommodation of vital interests. Then it would mean 
something. By September 1919, Lodge and his supporters, known as 
the 'Strong Reservationists', had made their position clear: they 
would ratify the Treaty except for the League; and they would even 
accept US membership of the League provided Congress had a right 
to evaluate each crisis involving the use of American forces. 102 

It was at this juncture that Wilson's defects of character and 
judgement, and indeed of mental health, became paramount. In 
November 1918 he had lost the mid- term elections, and with them 
control of Congress, including the Senate. That was an additional 
good reason for not going to Paris in person but sending a bipartisan 
delegation; or, if he went, taking Lodge and other Republicans with 
him. Instead he chose to go it alone. In taking America into the war, 
he had said in his address to Congress of 2 April 1917: 'The world 
must be made safe for democracy.' His popular History of the 
American People presented democracy as a quasi-religious force, vox 
populi vox dei. The old world, he now told Congress, was suffering 
from a 'wanton rejection' of democracy, of its 'purity and spiritual 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 33 

power'. That was where America came in: 'It is surely the manifest 
destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit 
prevail.' 103 In that work, the League was the instrument, and he himself 
the agent, an embodiment of the General Will. 

It is not clear how Wilson, the ultra-democrat, came to consider 
himself the beneficiary of Rousseau's volonte generate, 2l concept soon 
to be voraciously exploited by Europe's new generation of dictators. 
Perhaps it was his physical condition. In April 1 9 1 9 he suffered his first 
stroke, in Paris. The fact was concealed. Indeed, failing health seems to 
have strengthened Wilson's belief in the righteousness of his course and 
his determination not to compromise with his Republican critics. In 
September 1919 he took the issue of the League from Congress to the 
country, travelling 8,000 miles by rail in three weeks. The effort 
culminated in a second stroke in the train on 25 September. 104 Again, 
there was a cover-up. On 10 October came a third, and massive, attack, 
which left his entire left side paralysed. His physician, Admiral Gary 
Grayson, admitted some months later, 'He is permanently ill physi- 
cally, is gradually weakening mentally, and can't recover.' 105 But 
Grayson refused to declare the President incompetent. The Vice- 
President, Thomas Marshall, a hopelessly insecure man known to 
history chiefly for his remark 'What this country needs is a good 
five-cent cigar', declined to press the point. The private secretary, 
Joseph Tumulty, conspired with Wilson himself and his wife Edith to 
make her the president, which she remained for seventeen months. 

During this bizarre episode in American history, while rumours 
circulated that Wilson was stricken with tertiary syphilis, a raving 
prisoner in a barred room, Mrs Wilson, who had spent only two years at 
school, wrote orders to cabinet ministers in her huge, childish hand 
('The President says . . .'), sacked and appointed them, and forged 
Wilson's signature on Bills. She, as much as Wilson himself, was 
responsible for the sacking of the Secretary of State, Lansing ('I hate 
Lansing', she declared) and the appointment of a totally inexperienced 
and bewildered lawyer, Bainbridge Colby, in his place. Wilson could 
concentrate for five or ten minutes at a time, and even foxily contrived 
to deceive his chief Congressional critic, Senator Albert Fall, who had 
complained, 'We have petticoat government! Mrs Wilson is president!' 
Summoned to the White House, Fall found Wilson with a long, white 
beard but seemingly alert (Fall was only with him two minutes). When 
Fall said, 'We, Mr President, we have all been praying for you,' Wilson 
snapped, 'Which way, Senator?', interpreted as evidence of his 
continuing sharp wit. 106 

Thus America in a crucial hour was governed, as Germany was to be 
in 1932—3, by an ailing and mentally impaired titan on the threshold of 
eternity. Had Wilson been declared incapable, there is little doubt that 



34 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

an amended treaty would have gone through the Senate. As it was, 
with sick or senile pertinacity he insisted that it should accept all he 
demanded, or nothing: 'Either we should enter the League fearlessly,' 
his last message on the subject read, 'accepting the responsibility and 
not fearing the role of leadership which we now enjoy ... or we 
should retire as gracefully as possible from the great concert of 
powers by which the world was saved.' 107 

Into this delicately poised domestic struggle, in which the odds 
were already moving against Wilson, Keynes's book arrived with 
devastating timing. It confirmed all the prejudices of the irreconcila- 
bles and reinforced the doubts of the reservationists; indeed it filled 
some of Wilson's own supporters with foreboding. The Treaty, 
which came before the Senate in March, required a two-thirds 
majority for ratification. Wilson's own proposal went down to 
outright defeat, 38—53. There was still a chance that Lodge's own 
amended text would be carried, and thus become a solid foreign 
policy foundation for the three Republican administrations which 
followed. But with a destructive zest Wilson from his sick-bed wrote 
to his supporters, in letters signed with a quavering, almost illegible 
hand, begging them to vote against. Lodge's text was carried 49-35, 
seven votes short of the two-thirds needed. Of the thirty-five against, 
twenty-three were Democrats acting on Wilson's orders. Thus 
Wilson killed his own first-born, and in doing so loosened the ties 
between Europe and even the well-disposed Republicans. In disgust, 
Lodge pronounced the League 'as dead as Marley's ghost'. 'As dead 
as Hector', said Senator James Reed. Warren Harding, the Republi- 
can presidential candidate, with a sneer at the Democrats' past, 
added: 'As dead as slavery.' When the Democrats went down to 
overwhelming defeat in the autumn of 1920, the verdict was seen as 
a repudiation of Wilson's European policy in its entirety. Eugene 
Debs wrote from Atlanta Penitentiary, where Wilson had put him: 
'No man in public life in American history ever retired so thoroughly 
discredited, so scathingly rebuked, so overwhelmingly impeached 
and repudiated as Woodrow Wilson.' 108 

Thus Britain and France were left with a League in a shape they 
did not want, and the man who had thus shaped it was disavowed by 
his own country. They got the worst of all possible worlds. 
American membership of a League on the lines Lodge had proposed 
would have transformed it into a far more realistic organization in 
general. But in the particular case of Germany, it would have had a 
critical advantage. Lodge and the Republican internationalists be- 
lieved the treaty was unfair, especially to Germany, and would have 
to be revised sooner or later. In fact the Covenant of the League 
specifically provided for this contingency. Article 19, often over- 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 35 

looked and in the end wholly disregarded, allowed the League 'from 
time to time' to advise the reconsideration of 'treaties which have 
become inapplicable' and whose 'continuance might endanger the 
peace of the world'. 109 An American presence in the League would 
have made it far more likely that during the 1920s Germany would 
have secured by due process of international law those adjustments 
which, in the 1930s, she sought by force and was granted by 
cowardice. 

Wilson's decision to go for an international jurist's solution to 
Europe's post-war problems, rather than an economic one, and then 
the total collapse of his policies, left the Continent with a fearful 
legacy of inflation, indebtedness and conflicting financial claims. The 
nineteenth century had been on the whole a period of great price 
stability, despite the enormous industrial expansion in all the ad- 
vanced countries. Retail prices had actually fallen in many years, as 
increased productivity more than kept pace with rising demand. But 
by 1908 inflation was gathering pace again and the war enormously 
accelerated it. By the time the peace was signed, wholesale prices, on 
a 1913 index of 100, were 212 in the USA, 242 in Britain, 357 in 
France and 364 in Italy. By the next year, 1920, they were two and a 
half times the pre-war average in the USA, three times in Britain, five 
times in France and six times in Italy; in Germany the figure was 
1965, nearly twenty times. 110 The civilized world had not coped with 
hyper-inflation since the sixteenth century or on this daunting scale 
since the third century ad. 111 

Everyone, except the United States, was in debt. Therein lay the 
problem. By 1923, including interest, the USA was owed $11.8 
billion. Of this, Britain alone owed the USA $4.66 billion. But 
Britain, in turn, was owed $6.5 billion, chiefly by France, Italy and 
Russia. Russia was now out of the game, and the only chance France 
and Italy had of paying either Britain or the United States was by 
collecting from Germany. Why did the United States insist on trying 
to collect these inter-state debts? President Coolidge later answered 
with a laconic They hired the money, didn't they?' No more 
sophisticated explanation was ever provided. In an essay, 'Inter- 
Allied Debts', published in 1924, Bernard Baruch, the panjandrum of 
the War Industries Board and then Economic Adviser to the US 
Peace Delegation, argued, 'The US has refused to consider the 
cancellation of any debts, feeling that if she should - other reasons 
outside - the major cost of this and all future wars would fall upon 
her and thus put her in a position of subsidizing all wars, having 
subsidized one.' 112 Plainly Baruch did not believe this ludicrous 
defence. The truth is that insistence on war-debts made no economic 
sense but was part of the political price paid for the foundering of 



36 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

Wilsonism, leaving nothing but a hole. At the 1923 Washington 
conference, Britain amid much acrimony agreed to pay the USA £24 
million a year for ten years and £40 million a year thereafter. By the 
time the debts were effectively cancelled after the Great Slump, 
Britain had paid the USA slightly more than she received from the 
weaker financial Allies, and they in turn had received about £1,000 
million from Germany. 113 But of this sum, most had in fact been 
raised in loans in the USA which were lost in the recession. So the 
whole process was circular, and no state, let alone any individual, 
was a penny the better off. 

But in the meantime, the strident chorus of claims and counter- 
claims had destroyed what little remained of the wartime Allied 
spirit. And the attempt to make Germany balance everyone else's 
books simply pushed her currency to destruction. The indemnity 
levied by Germany on France in 1871 had been the equivalent of 
4,000 million gold marks. This was the sum the Reparations 
Commission demanded from Germany for Belgian war damage 
alone, and in addition it computed Germany's debt at 132,000 
million gms, of which France was to get 52 per cent. There were also 
deliveries in kind, including 2 million tons of coal a month. Germany 
had to pay on account 20,000 million gms by 1 May 1921. What 
Germany actually did pay is in dispute, since most deliveries were in 
property, not cash. The Germans claimed they paid 45,000 million 
gms. John Foster Dulles, the US member of the Reparations Com- 
mission, put it at 20-25,000 million gms. 114 At all events, after 
repeated reductions and suspensions, Germany was declared (26 
December 1922) a defaulter under Paragraphs 17-18 of Annex n of 
the Treaty, which provided for unspecified reprisals. On 1 1 January 
1923, against British protests, French and Belgian troops crossed the 
Rhine and occupied the Ruhr. The Germans then stopped work 
altogether. The French imposed martial law on the area and cut off 
its post, telegraph and phone communications. The German retail 
price-index (1913: 100) rose to 16,170 million. The political conse- 
quences for the Germans, and ultimately for France too, were 
dolorous in the extreme. 

Was the Treaty of Versailles, then, a complete failure? Many 
intellectuals thought so at the time; most have taken that view since. 
But then intellectuals were at the origin of the problem - violent 
ethnic nationalism - which both dictated the nature of the Versailles 
settlement and ensured it would not work. All the European nation- 
alist movements, of which there were dozens by 1919, had been 
created and led and goaded on by academics and writers who had 
stressed the linguistic and cultural differences between peoples at the 
expense of the traditional ties and continuing economic interests 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 37 

which urged them to live together. By 1919 virtually all European 
intellectuals of the younger generation, not to speak of their elders, 
subscribed to the proposition that the right to national self- 
determination was a fundamental moral principle. There were a few 
exceptions, Karl Popper being one. 115 These few argued that self- 
determination was a self-defeating principle since 'liberating' peo- 
ples and minorities simply created more minorities. But as a rule 
self-determination was accepted as unarguable for Europe, just as in 
the 1950s and 1960s it would be accepted for Africa. 

Indeed by 1919 there could be no question of saving the old 
arrangements in Central and Eastern Europe. The nationalists had 
already torn them apart. From the distance of seventy years it is 
customary to regard the last years of Austria-Hungary as a tranquil 
exercise in multi-racialism. In fact it was a nightmare of growing 
racial animosity. Every reform created more problems than it 
solved. Hungary got status within the empire as a separate state in 
1867. It at once began to oppress its own minorities, chiefly Slovaks 
and Romanians, with greater ferocity and ingenuity than it itself had 
been oppressed by Austria. Elections were suspect, and the rail- 
ways, the banking system and the principles of internal free trade 
were savagely disrupted in the pursuit of racial advantage imm- 
ediately any reform made such action possible. Czechs and other 
Slav groups followed the Hungarians' example. No ethnic group 
behaved consistently. What the Germans demanded and the Czechs 
refused in Bohemia, the Germans refused and the Italians and south 
Slovenes demanded in the South Tyrol and Styria. All the various 
Diets and Parliaments, in Budapest, Prague, Graz and Innsbruck, 
were arenas of merciless racial discord. In Galicia, the minority 
Ruthenians fought the majority Poles. In Dalmatia the .minority 
Italians fought the majority South Slavs. As a result it was imposs- 
ible to form an effective parliamentary government. All of the twelve 
central governments between 1900 and 1918 had to be composed 
almost entirely of civil servants. Each local government, from which 
minorities were excluded, protected its home industries where it 
was legally empowered to do so, and if not, organized boycotts of 
goods made by other racial groups. There was no normality in the 
old empire. 

But at least there was some respect for the law. In Imperial 
Russia there were anti-Jewish pogroms occasionally, and other 
instances of violent racial conflict. But the two Germanic empires 
were exceptionally law-abiding up to 1914; the complaint even was 
that their peoples were too docile. The war changed all that with a 
vengeance. There is truth in the historian Fritz Stern's remark that 
the Great War ushered in a period of unprecedented violence, and 



38 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

began in effect a Thirty Years' War, with 1919 signifying the 
continuation of war by different means. 116 Of course in a sense the 
calamities of the epoch were global rather than continental. The 
1918—19 influenza virus strain, a pandemic which killed forty 
million people in Europe, Asia and America, was not confined to the 
war areas, though it struck them hardest. 117 New-style outbreaks of 
violence were to be found almost everywhere immediately after the 
formal fighting ended. On 27 July-1 August, in Chicago, the USA 
got its first really big Northern race-riots, with thirty-six killed and 
536 injured. Others followed elsewhere: at Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 30 
May 1921, fifty whites and two hundred blacks were murdered. 118 
In Canada, on 17 June 1919, the leaders of the Winnipeg general 
strike were accused, and later convicted, of a plot to destroy 
constitutional authority by force and set up a Soviet. 119 In Britain, 
there was a putative revolution in Glasgow on 31 January 1919; and 
civil or class war was a periodic possibility between 1919 and the end 
of 1921, as the hair-raising records of cabinet meetings, taken down 
verbatim in shorthand by Thomas Jones, survive to testify. Thus, on 
4 April 1921, the cabinet discussed bringing back four battalions 
from Silesia, where they were holding apart frantic Poles and 
Germans, in order to 'hold London', and the Lord Chancellor 
observed stoically: 'We should decide without delay around which 
force loyalists can gather. We ought not to be shot without a fight 
anyway.' 120 

Even so it was in Central and Eastern Europe that the violence, 
and the racial antagonism which provoked it, were most acute, 
widespread and protracted. A score or more minor wars were fought 
there in the years 1919-22. They are poorly recorded in western 
histories but they left terrible scars, which in some cases were still 
aching in the 1960s and which contributed directly to the chronic 
instability in Europe between the wars. The Versailles Treaty, in 
seeking to embody the principles of self-determination, actually 
created more, not fewer, minorities, and much angrier ones (many 
were German or Hungarian), armed with far more genuine 
grievances. The new nationalist regimes thought they could afford to 
be far less tolerant than the old empires. And, since the changes 
damaged the economic infrastructure (especially in Silesia, South 
Poland, Austria, Hungary and North Yugoslavia), everyone tended 
to be poorer than before. 

Every country was landed with either an anguished grievance or an 
insuperable internal problem. Germany, with divided Prussia and 
lost Silesia, cried to heaven for vengeance. Austria was left fairly 
homogeneous — it even got the German Burgenland from Hungary — 
but was stripped bare of all its former possessions and left with a 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 39 

third of its population in starving Vienna. Moreover, under the 
Treaty it was forbidden to seek union with Germany, which made 
the Anschluss seem more attractive than it actually was. Hungary's 
population was reduced from 20 to 8 million, its carefully integrated 
industrial economy was wrecked and 3 million Hungarians handed 
over to the Czechs and Romanians. 121 

Of the beneficiaries of Versailles, Poland was the greediest and the 
most bellicose, emerging in 1921, after three years of fighting, twice 
as big as had been expected at the Peace Conference. She attacked the 
Ukrainians, getting from them eastern Galicia and its capital Lwow. 
She fought the Czechs for Teschen (Cieszyn), and failed to get it, one 
reason why Poland had no sympathy with the Czechs in 1938 and 
actually helped Russia to invade them in 1968, though in both cases 
it was in her long-term interests to side with Czech independence. 
She made good her 'rights' against the Germans by force, in both the 
Baltic and Silesia. She invaded newly free Lithuania, occupying Vilno 
and incorporating it after a 'plebiscite'. She waged a full-scale war of 
acquisition against Russia, and persuaded the Western powers to 
ratify her new frontiers in 1923. In expanding by force Poland had 
skilfully played on Britain's fears of Bolshevism and France's desire 
to have a powerful ally in the east, now that its old Tsarist alliance 
was dead. But of course when it came to the point Britain and France 
were powerless to come to Poland's assistance, and in the process she 
had implacably offended all her neighbours, who would certainly fall 
on her the second they got the opportunity. 

Meanwhile, Poland had acquired the largest minorities problem in 
Europe, outside Russia herself. Of her 27 million population, a third 
were minorities: West Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Belorussians, Ger- 
mans, Lithuanians, all of them in concentrated areas, plus 3 million 
Jews. The Jews tended to side with the Germans and Ukrainians, had 
a block of thirty-odd deputies in the parliament, and formed a 
majority in some eastern towns with a virtual monopoly of trade. At 
Versailles Poland was obliged to sign a special treaty guaranteeing 
rights to her minorities. But she did not keep it even in the Twenties, 
still less in the Thirties when her minorities policy deteriorated under 
military dictatorship. With a third of her population treated as 
virtual aliens, she maintained an enormous police force, plus a 
numerous but ill-equipped standing army to defend her vast fron- 
tiers. There was foresight in the remark of the Polish nobleman to the 
German ambassador in 1918, 'If Poland could be free, I'd give half 
my worldly goods. But with the other half I'd emigrate.' 122 

Czechoslovakia was even more of an artefact, since it was in fact a 
collection of minorities, with the Czechs in control. The 1921 census 
revealed 8,760,000 Czechoslovaks, 3,123,448 Germans, 747,000 



40 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

Magyars and 461,000 Ruthenians. But the Germans claimed it was 
deliberately inaccurate and that there were, in fact, far fewer in the 
ruling group. In any case, even the Slovaks felt they were persecuted 
by the Czechs, and it was characteristic of this 'country' that the new 
Slovak capital, Bratislava, was mainly inhabited not by Slovaks but 
by Germans and Magyars. 123 In the Twenties the Czechs, unlike the 
Poles, made serious efforts to operate a fair minorities policy. But the 
Great Depression hit the Germans much harder than the Czechs - 
whether by accident or design - and after that the relationship 
became hopelessly envenomed. 

Yugoslavia resembled Czechoslovakia in that it was a miniature 
empire run by Serbs, and with considerably more brutality than the 
Czechs ran theirs. In parts of it there had been continuous fighting 
since 1912, and the frontiers were not settled (if that is the word) 
until 1926. The Orthodox Serbs ran the army and the administra- 
tion, but the Catholic Croats and Slovenes, who had much higher 
cultural and economic standards, talked of their duty to 'European- 
ize the Balkans' (i.e., the Serbs) and their fears that they themselves 
would be 'Balkanized'. R.W.Seton-Watson, who had been in- 
strumental in creating the new country, was soon disillusioned by the 
way the Serbs ran it: The situation in Jugoslavia', he wrote in 1921, 
'reduces me to despair .... I have no confidence in the new constitu- 
tion, with its absurd centralism.' The Serb officials were worse than 
the Habsburgs, he complained, and Serb oppression more savage 
than German. 'My own inclination', he wrote in 1928, '. . . is to 
leave the Serbs and Croats to stew in their own juice! I think they are 
both mad and cannot see beyond the end of their noses.' 124 Indeed, 
MPs had just been blazing away at each other with pistols in the 
parliament, the Croat Peasant Party leader, Stepan Radic, being 
killed in the process. The country was held together, if at all, not so 
much by the Serb political police as by the smouldering hatred of its 
Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Bulgarian and Albanian neighbours, 
all of whom had grievances to settle. 125 

Central and Eastern Europe was now gathering in the grisly 
harvest of irreconcilable nationalisms which had been sown through- 
out the nineteenth century. Or, to vary the metaphor, Versailles lifted 
the lid on the seething, noisome pot and the stench of the brew 
therein filled Europe until first Hitler, then Stalin, slammed it down 
again by force. No doubt, when that happened, elderly men and 
women regretted the easy-going dynastic empires they had lost. Of 
course by 1919 the notion of a monarch ruling over a collection of 
disparate European peoples by divine right and ancient custom 
already appeared absurd. But if imperialism within Europe was 
anachronistic, how much longer would it seem defensible outside it? 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 41 

Self-determination was not a continental principle; it was, or soon 
would be, global. Eyre Crowe's rebuke to Harold Nicolson at the Paris 
Conference echoed a point Maurice Hankey had made to Lord Robert 
Cecil when the latter was working on the embryo League of Nations 
scheme. Hankey begged him not to insist on a general statement of 
self-determination. 'I pointed out to him', he noted in his diary, 'that it 
would logically lead to the self-determination of Gibraltar to Spain, 
Malta to the Maltese, Cyprus to the Greeks, Egypt to the Egyptians, 
Aden to the Arabs or Somalis, India to chaos, Hong Kong to the 
Chinese, South Africa to the Kaffirs, West Indies to the blacks, etc. And 
where would the British Empire be?' 126 

As a matter of fact the principle was already being conceded even at 
the time Hankey wrote. During the desperate days of the war, the Allies 
signed post-dated cheques not only to Arabs and Jews and Romanians 
and Italians and Japanese and Slavs but to their own subject-peoples. 
As the casualties mounted, colonial manpower increasingly filled the 
gaps. It was the French Moroccan battalions which saved Rheims 
Cathedral. The French called it gleefully la force noire, and so it was but 
in more senses than one. The British raised during the war 1,440,437 
soldiers in India; 877,068 were combatants; and 621,224 officers and 
men served overseas. 127 It was felt that in some way India should be 
rewarded; and the cheapest way to do it was in the coinage of political 
reform. 

The capstone on British rule in India had been placed there when 
Disraeli made Victoria Empress in 1876. The chain of command was 
autocratic: it went from the district officer to provincial commissioner 
to governor to governor-general to viceroy. This principle had been 
maintained in the pre-war Morley— Minto reforms, since Lord Morley, 
though a liberal progressive, did not believe democracy would work in 
India. But his Under-Secretary, Edwin Montagu, thought differently. 
Montagu was another Jew with oriental longings, though rather 
different ones: the longing to be loved. He suffered from that corrosive 
vice of the civilized during the twentieth century, which we shall meet in 
many forms: guilt. His grandfather had been a goldsmith, his father 
made millions as a foreign exchange banker, and so earned himself the 
luxury of philanthropy. Montagu inherited all this and the feeling that 
he owed something to society. He was a highly emotional man; people 
used the term 'girlish' about his approach to public affairs. Turning 
down the Ireland secretaryship in 1 9 1 6, he wrote, 'I shrink with horror 
at being responsible for punishment.' When he died a friend wrote to 
The Times: 'He never tired of being sorry for people.' 128 

Lloyd George must have had other things on his mind when he gave 
Montagu India in June 1917. Montagu's aim was to launch India 
irretrievably on the way to independence. He at once set about drafting 



42 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

a statement of Britain's post-war intentions. It came before the 
cabinet on 14 August, at one of the darkest periods of the war. On 
the agenda was the rapid disintegration of the entire Russian front, 
as well as the first really big German air raids on Britain: and the 
minds of the despairing men round the table were hag-ridden by the 
fearful losses in the Passchendaele offensive, then ending its second 
bloody and futile week. Elgar was writing the final bars of his Cello 
Concerto, his last major work, which conveys better than any words 
the unappeasable sadness of those days. Montagu slipped through 
his statement of policy which included one irrevocable phrase: 'the 
gradual development of free institutions in India with a view to 
ultimate self-government'. 129 But Lord Curzon pricked up his ears. 
He was the archetypal imperialist of the silver age, a former viceroy, 
on record as saying: 'As long as we rule India we are the greatest 
power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a 
third-rate power.' 130 He pointed out that, to the men around that 
table, the phrase 'ultimate self-government' might mean 500 years, 
but to excitable Indians it meant a single generation. Confident in the 
magic of his diplomatic penmanship, he insisted on changing the 
statement to 'the gradual development of self-governing institutions 
with a view to the progressive realization of responsible government 
in India as an integral part of the British Empire'. In fact changing the 
phrase made no difference: Montagu meant self-government and 
that was how it was understood in India. 

Indeed, that November and December, while Lenin was taking 
over Russia, Montagu went out to India to consult 'Indian opinion'. 
In his subsequent report he wrote: 'If we speak of "Indian Opinion" 
we should be understood as generally referring to the majority of 
those who have held or are capable of holding an opinion on the 
matter with which we are dealing.' 131 In other words, he was only 
interested in the 'political nation', those like Jinnah, Gandhi and Mrs 
Besant whom he called 'the real giants of the Indian political world' 
and who shared his political mode of discourse. Just as Lenin made 
no effort to consult the Russian peasants in whose name he was now 
turning a vast nation upside down, so Montagu ignored the 400 
million ordinary Indians, the 'real nation', except as the subjects of 
his philanthropic experiment. His action, he wrote, in 'deliberately 
disturbing' what he called the 'placid, pathetic contentment of the 
masses' would be 'working for [India's] highest good'. 132 He got his 
Report through cabinet on 24 May and 7 June 1918, when the 
attention of ministers was focused on the frantic efforts to arrest the 
German breakthrough in France, almost to the exclusion of anything 
else. So it was published (1918), enacted (1919) and implemented 
(1921). By creating provincial legislatures, bodies of course elected 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 43 

by and composed of the 'political nation', Montagu drove a runaway 
coach through the old autocratic chain of command. Thereafter 
there seemed no turning back. 

However, it must not be supposed that already, in 1919, the 
progressive disintegration of the British Empire was inevitable, 
indeed foreseeable. There are no inevitabilities in history. 133 That, 
indeed, will be one of the central themes of this volume. In 1919 the 
British Empire, to most people, appeared to be not only the most 
extensive but the most solid on earth. Britain was a superpower by 
any standards. She had by far the largest navy, which included 
sixty-one battleships, more than the American and French navies put 
together, more than twice the Japanese plus the Italians (the German 
navy was now at the bottom of Scapa Flow); plus 120 cruisers and 
466 destroyers. 134 She also had the world's largest air force and, 
surprisingly in view of her history, the world's third largest army. 

In theory at least the British Empire had gained immeasurably by 
the war. Nor was this accidental. In December 1916, the destruction 
of the frail Asquith government and the formation of the Lloyd 
George coalition brought in the 'Balliol Imperialists': Lord Curzon 
and especially Lord Milner and the members of the 'Kindergarten' he 
had formed in South Africa. The Imperial War Cabinet promptly set 
up a group under Curzon, with Leo Amery (of the Kindergarten) as 
secretary, called the 'Territorial Desiderata' committee, whose func- 
tion was to plan the share of the spoils going not only to Britain but 
to other units in the empire. At the very time when Montagu was 
setting about getting rid of India, this group proved very forceful 
indeed, and secured most of its objects. General Smuts of South 
Africa earmarked South-West Africa for his country, William 
Massey of New Zealand a huge chunk of the Pacific for the 
antipodean dominions. Britain received a number of important 
prizes, including Tanganyika, Palestine and, most important, Jordan 
and Iraq (including the Kirkuk-Mosul oilfields), which made her the 
paramount power throughout the Arab Middle East. It is true that, 
at Wilson's insistence, these gains were not colonies but League of 
Nations mandates. For the time being, however, this appeared to 
make little difference in practice. 

Britain's spoils, which carried the Empire to its greatest extent - 
more than a quarter of the surface of the earth - were also thought to 
consolidate it economically and strategically. Smuts, the most 
imaginative of the silver age imperialists, played a central part in the 
creation of both the modern British Commonwealth and the League. 
He saw the latter, as he saw the Commonwealth, not as an engine of 
self-determination but as a means whereby the white race could 
continue their civilizing mission throughout the world. To him the 



44 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

acquisition of South- West Africa and Tanganyika was not arbitrary, 
but steps in a process, to be finished off by the purchase or 
absorption of Portuguese Mozambique, which would eventually 
produce what he termed the British African Dominion. This huge 
territorial conglomerate, stretching from Windhoek right up to 
Nairobi, and nicely rounded off for strategic purposes, would 
encompass virtually all Africa's mineral wealth outside the Congo, 
and about three-quarters of its best agricultural land, including all 
the areas suitable for white settlement. This creation of a great 
dominion running up the east coast of Africa was itself part of a 
wider geopolitical plan, of which the establishment of a British 
paramountcy in the Middle East was the keystone, designed to turn 
the entire Indian Ocean into a 'British Lake'. Its necklace of mutually 
supporting naval and air bases, from Suez to Perth, from 
Simonstown to Singapore, from Mombasa to Aden to Bahrein to 
Trincomalee to Rangoon, with secure access to the limitless oil 
supplies of the Persian Gulf, and the inexhaustible manpower of 
India, would at long last solve those problems of security which had 
exercised the minds of Chatham and his son, Castlereagh and 
Canning, Palmerston and Salisbury. That was the great and perm- 
anent prize which the war had brought Britain and her empire. It 
all looked tremendously worth while on the map. 

But was there any longer the will in Britain to keep this elaborate 
structure functioning, with the efficiency and ruthlessness and above 
all the conviction it required to hold together? Who was more 
characteristic of the age, Smuts and Milner - or Montagu? It has 
been well observed, 'Once the British Empire became world-wide, 
the sun never set upon its problems.' 135 When troubles came, not in 
single spies but in battalions, would they be met with fortitude? If 
1919 marked the point at which the new Thirty Years' War in 
Europe switched from Great Power conflict to regional violence, 
further east it witnessed the beginning of what some historians are 
now calling 'the general crisis of Asia', a period of fundamental 
upheaval of the kind Europe had experienced in the first half of the 
seventeenth century. 

In February 1919, while the statesmen were getting down to the 
red meat of frontier-fixing in Paris, Montagu's policy of 'deliberately 
disturbing' the 'pathetic contentment' of the Indian masses began to 
produce its dubious fruits, when Mahatma Gandhi's first satyagraha 
(passive resistance) campaign led to some very active disturbances. 
On 10 March there was an anti-British rising in Egypt. On 9 April 
the first serious rioting broke out in the Punjab. On 3 May there was 
war between British India and Afghanistan insurgents. The next day 
students in Peking staged demonstrations against Japan and her 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 45 

western allies, who had just awarded her Chinese Shantung. Later 
that month, Kemal Ataturk in Anatolia, and Reza Pahlevi in Persia, 
showed the strength of feeling against the West across a huge tract of 
the Middle East. In July there was an anti-British rising in Iraq. These 
events were not directly connected but they all testified to spreading 
nationalism, all involved British interests and all tested Britain's 
power and will to protect them. With the country disarming as fast 
as it possibly could, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Henry 
Wilson, complained in his diary: ' ... in no single theatre are we 
strong enough, not in Ireland, nor England, nor on the Rhine, nor in 
Constantinople, nor Batoum, nor Egypt, nor Palestine, nor Mesopo- 
tamia, nor Persia, nor India.' 136 

India: there was the rub. In 1919 there were only 77,000 British 
troops in the entire subcontinent, and Lloyd George thought even 
that number 'appalling': he needed more men at home to hold down 
the coalfields. 137 In India, officers had always been taught to think 
fast and act quickly with the tiny forces at their disposal. Any 
hesitation in the face of a mob would lead to mass slaughter. They 
would always be backed up even if they made mistakes. 138 As was 
foreseeable, Montagu's reforms and Gandhi's campaign tended to 
incite everyone, not just the 'political nation', to demand their rights. 
There were a great many people in India and very few rights to go 
round. Muslim, Hindu and Sikh fundamentalists joined in the 
agitation. One result was an episode at Amritsar on 9-10 April 
1919. There were, in Amritsar in the Punjab, one hundred unarmed 
constables and seventy-five armed reserves. That should have been 
enough to keep order. But the police were handled in pusillanimous 
fashion; some were not used at all - a sign of the times. As a result 
the mob got out of hand. Two banks were attacked, their managers 
and an assistant beaten to death, a British electrician and a railway 
guard murdered, and a woman missionary teacher left for dead. 
General Dyer, commanding the nearest army brigade, was ordered 
in, and three days later he opened fire on a mob in a confined space 
called the Jalianwala Bagh. He had earlier that day toured the whole 
town with beat of drum to warn that any mob would be fired upon. 
The same month thirty-six other orders to fire were given in the 
province. In Dyer's case the firing lasted ten minutes because the 
order to cease fire could not be heard in the noise. That was not so 
unusual either, then or now. On 20 September 1981, again in 
Amritsar, government of India police opened fire for twenty minutes 
on a gang of sword-wielding Sikhs. 138 The mistake made by Dyer, 
who was used to frontier fighting, was to let his fifty men load their 
rifles and issue them with spare magazines. As a result 1,650 rounds 
were fired and 379 people were killed. Dyer compounded his error 



46 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

by ordering the flogging of six men and by an instruction that all 
natives passing the spot where the missionary had been assaulted 
were to crawl on the ground. 140 

Some people praised Dyer: the Sikhs, for whom Amritsar is the 
national shrine and who feared it would be sacked by the mob, made 
him an honorary Sikh. The British Indian authorities returned him 
to frontier duties (the Third Afghan war broke out the next month) 
and privately swore never to let him near a mob again. That was the 
traditional way of dealing with such a case. The Indian nationalists 
raised an uproar and Montagu ordered an inquiry under a British 
judge, Lord Hunter. That was the first mistake. When Dyer was 
questioned by the inquiry in Lahore he was shouted down by 
continuous Hindustani abuse which the judge failed to control and 
could not understand, and Dyer said some foolish things. Hunter 
censured his conduct and as a result Dyer was sacked from the army. 
This was the second mistake. It infuriated the British community and 
the army, who felt that Dyer had not been given a proper trial with 
legal representation. It left the nationalists unappeased because the 
punishment was too slight for what they regarded as a massacre. The 
right-wing Morning Post collected a public subscription of £26,000 
for Dyer. The nationalists responded with a subscription of their 
own, which bought the Bagh and turned it into a public shrine of 
race-hatred. 

Sir Edward Carson, the leader of the Ulster die-hards, organized a 
motion of censure on Montagu, who defended the punishment of 
Dyer in a hysterical speech: 'Are you going to keep hold of India by 
terrorism, racial humiliation and subordination and frightfulness, or 
are you going to rest it upon the goodwill, and the growing goodwill, 
of the people of your Indian Empire?' Lloyd George's secretary 
reported to him that, under noisy interruptions, Montagu 'became 
more racial and Yiddish in screaming tone and gesture' and many 
Tories 'could have assaulted him physically they were so angry'. 
Winston Churchill saved the government from certain defeat by a 
brilliant speech, which he later came to regret bitterly. He said that 
Dyer's use of force was 'an episode which appears to me to be 
without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British 
Empire ... a monstrous event'. 'Frightfulness', he said, using a 
current code-word meaning German atrocities, 'is not a remedy 
known to the British pharmacopoeia. . . . We have to make it clear, 
some way or other, that this is not the British way of doing business.' 
He made skilful use of Macaulay's phrase, 'the most frightful of all 
spectacles, the strength of civilization without its mercy'. 141 But if all 
this were true, why was not Dyer on trial for his life? That was what 
the Indian 'political nation' thought. The episode, which might have 



A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 47 

been quickly forgotten, was thus turned, by the publicity which the 
British government afforded it, into a great watershed in Anglo- 
Indian relations. 

Jawaharlal Nehru, an Old Harrovian of thirty, then working for 
Gandhi as an agitator among the peasants, travelled in the next 
sleeping compartment to Dyer while the General was on his way to 
give evidence to the Hunter inquiry. He overheard Dyer say to other 
British officers that he had felt like reducing Amritsar 'to a heap of 
ashes' but 'took pity on it'. In the morning Dyer 'descended at Delhi 
Station in pyjamas with bright pink stripes and a dressing gown'. 
What he could never forget, wrote Nehru, was the response of the 
British: 'This cold-blooded approval of that deed shocked me 
greatly. It seemed absolutely immoral, indecent; to use public-school 
language, it was the height of bad form. I realized then . . . how 
brutal and immoral imperialism was and how it had eaten into the 
souls of the British upper classes.' 142 As for the inquiry and the 
Commons debate, the British liberals might have saved their breath. 
All they succeeded in doing was to help turn Dyer and Amritsar into 
indelible hate-symbols around which nationalists could rally. 

The episode was a watershed in Indian internal security too. 'From 
then on', one historian of British India has put it, 'it was not the first 
object of the government to keep order.' 143 Security officials, both 
British and Indian, now hesitated to deal promptly with riotous 
assemblies. In 1921 when the Muslim 'Moplahs' rioted against the 
Hindus in the Madras area, the provincial government, with Amrit- 
sar in mind, delayed bringing in martial law. As a result, over 500 
people were murdered and it took a year and huge forces of troops to 
restore order, by which time 80,000 people had been arrested and 
placed in special cages, 6,000 sentenced to transportation, 400 to 
life-imprisonment and 175 executed. Attacks on security forces 
became frequent and audacious. On 4 February 1922 in the United 
Provinces, a mob surrounded the police station and, those inside not 
daring to open fire, all twenty-two of them were torn to pieces or 
burned alive. From that point onwards, large-scale racial, sectarian 
and anti-government violence became a permanent feature of Indian 
life. 144 There too, in the largest and most docile colony in human 
history, the mould of the nineteenth century had been broken. 

The disturbances in Europe and the world which followed the 
seismic shock of the Great War and its unsatisfactory peace were, in 
one sense, only to be expected. The old order had gone. Plainly it 
could not be fully restored, perhaps not restored at all. A new order 
would eventually take its place. But would this be an 'order' in the 
sense the pre-1914 world had understood the term? There were, as 
we have seen, disquieting currents of thought which suggested the 



48 A RELATIVISTIC WORLD 

image of a world adrift, having left its moorings in traditional law 
and morality. There was too a new hesitancy on the part of 
established and legitimate authority to get the global vessel back 
under control by the accustomed means, or any means. It constituted 
an invitation, unwilled and unissued but nonetheless implicit, to 
others to take over. Of the great trio of German imaginative scholars 
who offered explanations of human behaviour in the nineteenth 
century, and whose corpus of thought the post-1918 world inherited, 
only two have so far been mentioned. Marx described a world in 
which the central dynamic was economic interest. To Freud, the 
principal thrust was sexual. Both assumed that religion, the old 
impulse which moved men and masses, was a fantasy and always had 
been. Friedrich Nietzsche, the third of the trio, was also an atheist. 
But he saw God not as an invention but as a casualty, and his demise 
as in some important sense an historical event, which would have 
dramatic consequences. He wrote in 1886: The greatest event of 
recent times - that "God is Dead", that the belief in the Christian 
God is no longer tenable - is beginning to cast its first shadows over 
Europe.' 145 Among the advanced races, the decline and ultimately 
the collapse of the religious impulse would leave a huge vacuum. The 
history of modern times is in great part the history of how that 
vacuum had been filled. Nietzsche rightly perceived that the most 
likely candidate would be what he called the 'Will to Power', which 
offered a far more comprehensive and in the end more plausible 
explanation of human behaviour than either Marx or Freud. In place 
of religious belief, there would be secular ideology. Those who had 
once filled the ranks of the totalitarian clergy would become 
totalitarian politicians. And, above all, the Will to Power would 
produce a new kind of messiah, uninhibited by any religious 
sanctions whatever, and with an unappeasable appetite for controll- 
ing mankind. The end of the old order, with an unguided world 
adrift in a relativistic universe, was a summons to such gangster- 
statesmen to emerge. They were not slow to make their appearance. 



TWO 

The First Despotic Utopias 



Lenin left Zurich to return to Russia on 8 April 1917. Some of his 
comrades in exile accompanied him to the station, arguing. He was 
to travel back through Germany at the invitation of General Luden- 
dorff, who guaranteed him a safe passage provided he undertook not 
to talk to any German trade unionists on the way. War breeds 
revolutions. And breeding revolutions is a very old form of warfare. 
The Germans called it Revolutionierungspolitik. 1 If the Allies could 
incite the Poles, the Czechs, the Croats, the Arabs and the Jews to rise 
against the Central Powers and their partners, then the Germans, in 
turn, could and did incite the Irish and the Russians. If the Germans 
used Lenin, as Churchill later put it, 'like a typhoid bacillus', they 
attached no particular importance to him, lumping him in with thirty 
other exiles and malcontents. The arguing comrades thought Lenin 
would compromise himself by accepting German aid and tried to 
dissuade him from going. He brushed them aside without deigning to 
speak and climbed on the train. He was a fierce little man of 
forty-six, almost bald but (according to the son of his Zurich 
landlady) 'with a neck like a bull'. Entering his carriage he im- 
mediately spotted a comrade he regarded as suspect: 'Suddenly we 
saw Lenin seize him by the collar and . . . pitch him out onto the 
platform.' 2 

At Stockholm, comrade Karl Radek bought him a pair of shoes, 
but he refused other clothes, remarking sourly, 'I am not going to 
Russia to open a tailor's shop.' Arriving at Beloostrov on Russian 
soil, in the early hours of 16 April, he was met by his sister Maria and 
by Kamenev and Stalin, who had been in charge of the Bolshevik 
paper Pravda. He ignored his sister completely, and Stalin whom he 
had not met, and offered no greeting to his old comrade Kamenev 
whom he had not seen for five years. Instead he shouted at him, 
'What's this you have been writing in Pravda} We saw some of your 
articles and roundly abused you.' Late that night he arrived at the 

49 



50 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

Finland Station in Petrograd. He was given a bunch of roses and 
taken to the Tsar's waiting-room. There he launched into the first of 
a series of speeches, one of them delivered, still clutching the roses, 
from the top of an armoured car. The last took two hours and 'filled 
his audience with turmoil and terror'. Dawn was breaking as he 
finished. He retired to bed, said his wife, Krupskaya, hardly speaking 
a word. 3 

The grim lack of humanity with which Lenin returned to Russia to 
do his revolutionary work was characteristic of this single-minded 
man. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in 1870 at Simbirsk on the 
Volga, the son of an inspector of primary schools. When he was 
sixteen, his elder brother Alexander was hanged for conspiring to 
blow up the Tsar with a bomb which he had made himself. His 
supposed reaction to his brother's death, 'We shall never get there by 
that road', is probably apocryphal, since he did not in fact become a 
Marxist (which meant disavowing terrorism) until later, after he had 
been forced out of Kazan University for 'revolutionary activities'. His 
sister Anna said he was 'hardened' by his brother's execution. 4 
Certainly politics now obsessed him, then and for ever, and his 
approach was always cerebral rather than emotional. His 
contemporaries refer to his 'unsociability', his 'excessive reserve' and 
his 'distant manner'. Aged twenty-two, he dissuaded friends from 
collecting money for the victims of a famine, on the grounds that 
hunger 'performs a progressive function' and would 'cause the 
peasants to reflect on the fundamental facts of capitalist society'. 5 
Within a year or two he had acquired a double-bottomed suitcase for 
importing seditious books, and its discovery earned him a three-year 
sentence in Siberia. The few days before his exile he spent in the 
Moscow Library, scrabbling for facts and statistics with which to 
hammer home his theories. In Siberia he married Krupskaya, another 
subversive. 

Men who carry through political revolutions seem to be of two 
main types, the clerical and the romantic. Lenin (he adopted the 
pen-name in 1901) was from the first category. Both his parents were 
Christians. Religion was important to him, in the sense that he hated 
it. Unlike Marx, who despised it and treated it as marginal, Lenin 
saw it as a powerful and ubiquitous enemy. He made clear in many 
writings (his letter to Gorky of 13 January 1913 is a striking 
example) that he had an intense personal dislike for anything 
religious. 'There can be nothing more abominable', he wrote, 'than 
religion.' From the start, the state he created set up and maintains to 
this day an enormous academic propaganda machine against reli- 
gion. 6 He was not just anti-clerical like Stalin, who disliked priests 
because they were corrupt. On the contrary, Lenin had no real 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 51 

feelings about corrupt priests, because they were easily beaten. The 
men he really feared and hated, and later persecuted, were the saints. 
The purer the religion, the more dangerous. A devoted cleric, he 
argued, is far more influential than an egotistical and immoral one. 
The clergy most in need of suppression were not those committed to 
the defence of exploitation but those who expressed their solidarity 
with the proletariat and the peasants. It was as though he recognized 
in the true man of God the same zeal and spirit which animated 
himself, and wished to expropriate it and enlist it in his own cause. 7 
No man personifies better the replacement of the religious impulse by 
the will to power. In an earlier age he would surely have been a 
religious leader. With his extraordinary passion for force, he might 
have figured in Mohammed's legions. He was even closer perhaps to 
Jean Calvin, with his belief in organizational structure, his ability to 
create one and then dominate it utterly, his puritanism, his passionate 
self-righteousness, and above all his intolerance. 

Krupskaya testifies to his asceticism, and tells us how he gave up all 
the things he cared for, skating, reading Latin, chess, even music, to 
concentrate solely on his political work. 8 A comrade remarked, 'He is 
the only one of us who lives revolution twenty-four hours a day.' He 
told Gorky he refused to listen to music often because 'it makes you 
want to say stupid, nice things and stroke the heads of people who 
could create such beauty while living in this vile hell. And now you 
mustn't stroke anyone's head — you might get your hand bitten off.' 9 
We have to assume that what drove Lenin on to do what he did was a 
burning humanitarianism, akin to the love of the saints for God, for he 
had none of the customary blemishes of the politically ambitious: no 
vanity, no self-consciousness, no obvious relish for the exercise of 
authority. But his humanitarianism was a very abstract passion. It 
embraced humanity in general but he seems to have had little love for, 
or even interest in, humanity in particular. He saw the people with 
whom he dealt, his comrades, not as individuals but as receptacles for 
his ideas. On that basis, and on no other, they were judged. So he had 
no hierarchy of friendships; no friendships in fact, merely ideological 
alliances. He judged men not by their moral qualities but by their 
views, or rather the degree to which they accepted his. He bore no 
grudges. A man like Trotsky, whom he fought bitterly in the years 
before the Great War, and with whom he exchanged the vilest insults, 
was welcomed back with bland cordiality once he accepted Lenin's 
viewpoint. Equally, no colleague, however close, could bank the 
smallest capital in Lenin's heart. 

Lenin was the first of a new species: the professional organizer of 
totalitarian politics. It never seems to have occurred to him, from early 
adolescence onwards, that any other kind of human activity was 



52 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

worth doing. Like an anchorite, he turned his back on the ordinary 
world. He rejected with scorn his mother's suggestion that he should 
go into farming. For a few weeks he functioned as a lawyer and hated 
it. After that he never had any other kind of job or occupation, for 
his journalism was purely a function of his political life. And his 
politics were hieratic, not demotic. Lenin surrounded himself with 
official publications, and works of history and economics. He made 
no effort to inform himself directly of the views and conditions of the 
masses. The notion of canvassing an electorate on their doorsteps 
was anathema to him: 'unscientific'. He never visited a factory or set 
foot on a farm. He had no interest in the way in which wealth was 
created. He was never to be seen in the working-class quarters of any 
town in which he resided. His entire life was spent among the 
members of his own sub-class, the bourgeois intelligentsia, which he 
saw as a uniquely privileged priesthood, endowed with a special 
gnosis and chosen by History for a decisive role. Socialism, he wrote 
quoting Karl Kautsky, was the product of 'profound scientific 
knowledge .... The vehicle of [this] science is not the proletariat but 
the bourgeois intelligentsia: contemporary socialism was born in the 
heads of individual members of this class.' 10 

Individual members — or one individual member? In practice it was 
the latter. In the twenty years before his Revolution, Lenin created 
his own faction within the Social Democrats, the Bolsheviks, split it 
off from the Mensheviks, or minority, and then made himself 
absolute master of it. This process, the will to power in action, is well 
documented by his more critical comrades. Plekhanov, the real 
creator of Russian Marxism, through whose Iskra organization 
Lenin first came to prominence, accused him of 'fostering a sectarian 
spirit of exclusiveness'. He was 'confusing the dictatorship of the 
proletariat with dictatorship over the proletariat' and seeking to 
create 'Bonapartism if not absolute monarchy in the old pre 1 
revolutionary style'. 11 Vera Zasulich said that, soon after Lenin 
joined Iskra, it changed from a friendly family into a personal 
dictatorship. Lenin's idea of the party, she wrote, was Louis xiv's 
idea of the state - moil 12 The same year, 1904, Trotsky called Lenin 
a Robespierre and a terrorist dictator seeking to turn the party 
leadership into a committee of public safety. Lenin's methods, he 
wrote in his pamphlet Our Political Tasks, were 'a dull caricature of 
the tragic intransigence of Jacobinism ... the party is replaced by the 
organization of the party, the organization by the central committee 
and finally the central committee by the dictator'. 13 Six years later, in 
1910, Madame Krzhizhanovskaya wrote: 'He is one man against the 
whole party. He is ruining the party.' 14 In 1914 Charles Rappaport, 
while praising Lenin as 'an incomparable organizer', added: 'But he 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 53 

regards only himself as a socialist .... War is declared on anyone who 
differs with him. Instead of combating his opponents in the Social 
Democratic Party by socialist methods, i.e. by argument, Lenin uses 
only surgical methods, those of "blood-letting". No party could exist 
under the regime of this Social Democratic Tsar, who regards himself 
as a super-Marxist, but who is, in reality, nothing but an adventurer 
of the highest order.' His verdict: 'Lenin's victory would be the 
greatest menace to the Russian Revolution ... he will choke it.' 15 
Two years later, on the eve of the Revolution, Viacheslav Menz- 
hinsky described him as 'a political Jesuit . . . this illegitimate child of 
Russian absolutism . . . the natural successor to the Russian 
throne'. 16 

The impressive unanimity of this critical analysis of Lenin, coming 
over a period of twenty years from men and women in close 
agreement with his aims, testifies to an awesome consistency in 
Lenin's character. He brushed aside the attacks, which never seem to 
have caused him to pause or reconsider for one second. There was no 
chink in his self-armour. Authoritarian? Of course: 'Classes are led 
by parties and parties are led by individuals who are called 
leaders .... This is the ABC. The will of a class is sometimes fulfilled 
by a dictator.' 17 What mattered was that the anointed individual, the 
man selected by History to possess the gnosis at the appointed time, 
should understand and so be able to interpret the sacred texts. Lenin 
always insisted that Marxism was identical with objective truth. 
'From the philosophy of Marxism', he wrote, 'cast as one piece of 
steel, it is impossible to expunge a single basic premise, a single 
essential part, without deviating from objective truth.' 18 He told 
Valentinov: 'Orthodox Marxism requires no revision of any kind 
either in the field of philosophy, in its theory of political economy, or 
its theory of historical development.' 19 Believing this, and believing 
himself the designated interpreter, rather as Calvin interpreted 
scripture in his Institutes, Lenin was bound to regard heresy with 
even greater ferocity than he showed towards the infidel. Hence the 
astonishing virulence of the abuse which he constantly hurled at the 
heads of his opponents within the party, attributing to them the 
basest possible motives and seeking to destroy them as moral beings 
even when only minor points of doctrine were at stake. The kind of 
language Lenin employed, with its metaphors of the jungle and the 
farmyard and its brutal refusal to make the smallest effort of human 
understanding, recalls the odium theologicum with poisoned Chris- 
tian disputes about the Trinity in the sixth and seventh centuries, or 
the Eucharist in the sixteenth. And of course once verbal hatred was 
screwed up to this pitch, blood was bound to flow eventually. As 
Erasmus sadly observed of the Lutherans and papists, 'The long war 



54 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

of words and writings will end in blows' — as it did, for a whole 
century. Lenin was not in the least dismayed by such a prospect. Just 
as the warring theologians felt they were dealing with issues which, 
however trivial they might seem to the uninitiated, would in fact 
determine whether or not countless millions of souls burned in Hell 
for all eternity, so Lenin knew that the great watershed of civilization 
was near, in which the future fate of mankind would be decided by 
History, with himself as its prophet. It would be worth a bit of 
blood; indeed a lot of blood. 

Yet the curious thing is that, for all his proclaimed orthodoxy, 
Lenin was very far from being an orthodox Marxist. Indeed in 
essentials he was not a Marxist at all. He often used Marx's 
methodology and he exploited the Dialectic to justify conclusions he 
had already reached by intuition. But he completely ignored the very 
core of Marx's ideology, the historical determinism of the revolution. 
Lenin was not at heart a determinist but a voluntarist: the decisive 
role was played by human will: his. Indeed, for a man who claimed a 
special 'scientific' knowledge of how the laws of History worked, he 
seems to have been invariably surprised by the actual turn of events. 
The outbreak of the 1905 abortive Revolution in Russia astounded 
him. The beginning of the 1914 war came to him like a thunderclap 
from a clear sky; so it did to others but then they did not claim a 
private line to History. He was still more shaken by the total failure 
of the international socialist movement to unite against the war. The 
fall of the Tsar amazed him. He was staggered when the Germans 
offered to get him back to Russia. When he arrived there he predicted 
he would be arrested on the spot, and instead found himself 
clutching those roses. He was again surprised, no less agreeably, by 
the success of his own Revolution. But the international uprising he 
confidently predicted did not materialize. To the end of his days, like 
the early Christians awaiting the Second Coming, he expected the 
Apocalypse any moment. What made Lenin a great actor on the 
stage of history was not his understanding of its processes but the 
quickness and energy with which he took the unexpected chances it 
offered. He was, in short, what he accused all his opponents of being: 
an opportunist. 

He was also a revolutionary to his fingertips, and of a very 
old-fashioned sort. He believed that revolutions were made not by 
inexorable historical forces (they had to be there too, of course) but 
by small groups of highly disciplined men responding to the will of a 
decisive leader. In this respect he had much more in common with 
the French Jacobin revolutionary tradition of 1789-95, and even 
with its more recent exponents, such as Georges Sorel, than with the 
instinctive Marxists, most of whom were German and who saw the 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 55 

triumph of the proletariat almost as a Darwinian process of evolu- 
tion. Lenin cut through that kind of sogginess like a knife: 'Theory, 
my friend, is grey, but green is the everlasting tree of life.' Again: 
'Practice is a hundred time more important than theory.' 20 If the 
whole of Marx appears in his book, wrote Trotsky, 'the whole of 
Lenin on the other hand appears in revolutionary action. His 
scientific works are only a preparation for revolutionary activity'. 21 
Lenin was an activist, indeed a hyper-activist, and it was this which 
made him such a violent figure. He was not a syndicalist like Sorel. 
But the two men shared the same appetite for violent solutions, as 
Sorel later acknowledged when he defined revolutionary violence as 
'an intellectual doctrine, the will of powerful minds which know 
where they are going, the implacable resolve to attain the final goals 
of Marxism by means of syndicalism. Lenin has furnished us with a 
striking example of that psychological violence.' 22 Lenin was ob- 
sessed by force, almost to the point of lip-smacking at the scent of it. 
'Revolutions are the feast-days of the oppressed classes.' 'An op- 
pressed class which does not strive to gain a knowledge of weapons, 
to be drilled in the use of weapons, to possess weapons, an oppressed 
class of this kind deserves only to be oppressed, maltreated and 
regarded as slaves.' His writings abound in military metaphors: 
states of siege, iron rings, sheets of steel, marching, camps, barri- 
cades, forts, offensives, mobile units, guerrilla warfare, firing squads. 
They are dominated by violently activist verbs: flame, leap, ignite, 
goad, shoot, shake, seize, attack, blaze, repel, weld, compel, purge, 
exterminate. 

The truth is, Lenin was too impatient to be an orthodox Marxist. 
He feared the predicament foreseen by Engels when he had written, 
'The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be 
compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the moment 
is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents . . . 
he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class 
for whom conditions are ripe for domination.' 23 Russia was a 
semi-industrialized country, where the bourgeoisie was weak and the 
proletariat small, and the objective conditions for the revolution not 
nearly ripe. It was this dilemma which led Lenin into heresy. If 
'proletarian consciousness' had not yet been created, was it not the 
task of Marxist intellectuals like himself to speed up the process? In 
1902, in What Is To Be Done?, he first used the term 'vanguard 
fighters' to describe the new role of a small revolutionary elite. 24 He 
drew an entirely novel distinction between a revolution created by a 
mature 'organization of workers', in advanced capitalist countries 
like Germany and Britain, and 'an organization of revolutionaries', 
suitable for Russian conditions. The first was occupational, broad, 



56 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

public: in short a mass proletarian party. The second was quite 
different: 'an organization of revolutionaries must contain primarily 
and chiefly people whose occupation is revolutionary activity .... 
This organization must necessarily be not very broad and as secret as 
possible.' As such it had to forgo the 'democratic principle' which 
required 'full publicity' and 'election to all posts'. Working within 
the framework of an autocracy like Russia, that was impossible: 'The 
one serious organizational principle for workers in our movement 
must be strictest secrecy, restricted choice of members, and training 
of professional revolutionaries. Once these qualities are present 
something more than democracy is guaranteed: complete comradely 
confidence among revolutionaries.' But in the same passage he points 
out grimly that revolutionaries know 'by experience that in order to 
rid itself of an unworthy member an organization of genuine 
revolutionaries recoils from nothing'. 25 If comrades must, when 
needs be, murder each other — a point Dostoevsky had already made 
in The Devils — was not this 'comradely confidence' a fantasy? Was it 
not, indeed, belied by what happened to the organization the 
moment Lenin joined it, and still more when he took it over? 26 

Rosa Luxemburg, the most gifted as well as one of the more 
orthodox of the German Marxists, recognized Lenin's heresy for 
what it was: so serious as to destroy the whole purpose and idealism 
of Marxism. She attributed it to Lenin's faults of character, both 
personal and national: 'The "ego", crushed and pulverized by 
Russian absolutism,' she wrote, 'reappeared in the form of the "ego" 
of the Russian revolutionary' which 'stands on its head and pro- 
claims itself anew the mighty consummator of history.' Lenin, she 
argued, was in effect demanding absolute powers for the party 
leadership, and this would 'intensify most dangerously the conser- 
vatism which naturally belongs to every such body'. Once granted, 
such powers would never be relinquished. 27 When Lenin insisted 
that 'consciousness' had to be brought to the proletariat from 
without, by 'vanguard elements', and the revolution pushed forward 
before it was ripe by 'vanguard fighters', he was in fact contradicting 
the whole 'scientific' basis of Marxist theory. She denounced the idea 
as elitist and non-Marxist, and said it would lead inevitably to 
'military ultracentralism'. 28 

Leninism was not only a heresy; it was exactly the same heresy 
which created fascism. Italy was also a semi-industrialized country, 
where Marxists were looking for ways to speed up the coming of 
revolution. Italian Marxists, too, were attracted by Sorel's notions of 
revolutionary violence. In 1903, the year after Lenin first used the 
term 'vanguard fighters', Roberto Michaels, in his introduction to 
the Italian translation of Sorel's Saggi di critica del Marxismo, urged 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 57 

the creation of a 'revolutionary elite' to push forward the proletarian 
socialist millennium. Such an elite, echoed his colleague Angelo 
Olivetti, was essential for an under-industrialized country. 29 These 
ideas were taken up by a third Italian Marxist, Benito Mussolini, 
who was thirteen years younger than Lenin and just entering politics 
at this time. His father, a farrier and small property owner, was a 
socialist-anarchist; his mother a teacher. They filled him with a wide 
range of political philosophy, which included Nietzsche — he knew 
all about 'the will to power' - and he was much more broadly read 
than Lenin. But his political formation was fundamentally Marxist. 
Marx, he wrote, was 'the father and teacher'; he was 'the magni- 
ficent philosopher of working-class violence'. 30 But, like Lenin, he 
advocated the formation of 'vanguard minorities' which could 
'engage the sentiment, faith and will of irresolute masses'. These 
vanguards had to be composed of specially trained, dedicated people, 
elites. Such revolutionary leadership should concern itself with the 
psychology of classes and the techniques of mass-mobilization, and, 
through the use of myth and symbolic invocation, raise the con- 
sciousness of the proletariat. 31 Like Lenin, again, he thought violence 
would be necessary: 'Instead of deluding the proletariat as to the 
possibility of eradicating all causes of bloodbaths, we wish to 
prepare it and accustom it to war for the day of the "greatest 
bloodbath of all", when the two hostile classes will clash in the 
supreme trial.' 32 Again, there is the endless repetition of activist 
verbs, the militaristic imagery. 

In the years before 1914, from his impotent exile in Switzerland, 
Lenin watched the progress of Mussolini with approval and some 
envy. Mussolini turned the province of Forli into an island of 
socialism — the first of many in Italy — by supporting the braccianti 
day-labourers against the landowners. 33 He became one of the most 
effective and widely read socialist journalists in Europe. In 1912, 
aged twenty-nine, and still young-looking, thin, stern, with large, 
dark, luminous eyes, he took over the Italian Socialist Party at the 
Congress of Reggio Emilia, by insisting that socialism must be 
Marxist, thoroughgoing, internationalist, uncompromising. Lenin, 
reporting the congress for Pravda (15 July 1912), rejoiced: 'The 
party of the Italian socialist proletariat has taken the right path.' He 
agreed when Mussolini prevented the socialists from participating in 
the 'bourgeois reformist' Giolitti government, and so foreshadowed 
the emergence of the Italian Communist Party. 34 He strongly en- 
dorsed Mussolini's prophecy on the eve of war: 'With the unleashing 
of a mighty clash of peoples, the bourgeoisie is playing its last card 
and calls forth on the world scene that which Karl Marx called the 
sixth great power: the socialist revolution.' 35 



58 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

As Marxist heretics and violent revolutionary activists, Lenin and 
Mussolini had six salient features in common. Both were totally 
opposed to bourgeois parliaments and any type of 'reformism'. Both 
saw the party as a highly centralized, strictly hierarchical and 
ferociously disciplined agency for furthering socialist objectives. 
Both wanted a leadership of professional revolutionaries. Neither 
had any confidence in the capacity of the proletariat to organize 
itself. Both thought revolutionary consciousness could be brought to 
the masses from without by a revolutionary, self-appointed elite. 
Finally, both believed that, in the coming struggle between the 
classes, organized violence would be the final arbiter. 36 

The Great War saw the bifurcation of Leninism and Mussolini's 
proto-fascism. It was a question not merely of intellect and situation 
but of character. Mussolini had the humanity, including the vanity 
and the longing to be loved, which Lenin so conspicuously lacked. 
He was exceptionally sensitive and responsive to mass opinion. 
When the war came and the armies marched, he sniffed the national- 
ism in the air and drew down great lungfuls of it. It was intoxicating: 
and he moved sharply in a new direction. Lenin, on the other hand, 
was impervious to such aromas. His isolation from people, his 
indifference to them, gave him a certain massive integrity and 
consistency. In one way it was a weakness: he never knew what 
people were actually going to do - that was why he was continually 
surprised by events, both before and after he came to power. But it 
was also his strength. His absolute self-confidence and masterful will 
were never, for a moment, eroded by tactical calculations as to how 
people were likely to react. Moreover, he was seeking power in a 
country where traditionally people counted for nothing; were mere 
dirt beneath the ruler's feet. 

Hence when Lenin returned to Petrograd he was totally unaffected 
by any wartime sentiment. He had said all along that the war was a 
bourgeois adventure. The defeat of the Tsar was 'the least evil'. The 
army should be undermined by propaganda, the men encouraged 'to 
turn their guns on their officers', and any disaster exploited to 
'hasten the destruction ... of the capitalist class'. There should be 
'ruthless struggle against the chauvinism and patriotism of the 
bourgeoisie of all countries without exception'. 37 Lenin was dis- 
mayed by the failure of all socialists to smash the war, and as it 
prolonged itself he lost hope of the millennium coming soon. In 
January 1917 he doubted whether 'I will live to see the decisive 
battles of the coming revolution'. 38 So when the Tsar was sent 
packing six weeks later he was surprised, as usual. To his delight, the 
new parliamentary regime opted to continue the war, while releasing 
political prisoners and thus allowing his own men to subvert it. The 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 59 

Bolsheviks would overturn the new government and seize power by 
opposing the war. Pravda resumed publication on 5 March. Kamenev 
and Stalin hurried back from Siberia to take charge of it eight days 
later. Then, to Lenin's consternation, the two idiots promptly changed 
the paper's line and committed it to supporting the war! That was 
why, the second Lenin set eyes on Kamenev on 3 April, he bawled him 
out. The Pravda line promptly changed back again. Lenin sat down 
and wrote a set of 'theses' to explain why the war had to be resisted 
and ended. Stalin later squared his yard-arm by confessing to 'a 
completely mistaken position' which 'I shared with other party 
comrades and renounced it completely . . . when I adhered to Lenin's 
theses'. 39 Most other Bolsheviks did the same. They were over- 
whelmed by Lenin's certainty. The war did not matter. It had served its 
purpose in destroying the autocracy. Now they must exploit war- 
weariness to oust the parliamentarians. He was indifferent to how 
much territory Russia lost, so long as a nucleus was preserved in which 
to install Bolshevism. Then they could await events with confidence. A 
German victory was irrelevant because their German comrades would 
soon be in power there — and in Britain and France too — and the day of 
the world socialist revolution would have dawned. 40 

In outlining this continental fantasy Lenin had, almost by chance, 
hit upon the one line of policy which could bring him to power. He had 
no real power-base in Russia. He had never sought to create one. He 
had concentrated exclusively on building up a small organization of 
intellectual and sub-intellectual desperadoes, which he could com- 
pletely dominate. It had no following at all among the peasants. Only 
one of the Bolshevik elite even had a peasant background. It had a few 
adherents among the unskilled workers. But the skilled workers, and 
virtually all who were unionized, were attached — in so far as any had 
political affiliations — to the Mensheviks. 41 That was not surprising. 
Lenin's intransigence had driven all the ablest socialists into the 
Menshevik camp. That suited him: all the easier to drill the remainder 
to follow him without argument when the moment to strike came. As 
one of them put it, 'Before Lenin arrived, all the comrades were 
wandering in the dark.' 42 The other Bolshevik with clear ideas of his 
own was Trotsky. In May tie arrived in Petrograd from America. He 
quickly realized Lenin was the only decisive man of action among 
them, and became his principal lieutenant. Thereafter these two men 
could command perhaps 20,000 followers in a nation of over 160 
million. 

The Russian Revolution of 1917, both in its 'February' and its 
'October' phases, was made by the peasants, who had grown in 
number from 56 million in 1867 to 103.2 million by 1913. 43 In 
pre-war Russia there were less than 3.5 million factory workers and 



60 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

miners, and even by the widest definition the 'proletariat' numbered 
only 15 million. Many of the 25 million inhabitants of large towns 
were part of extended peasant families, working in town but based 
on villages. This connection helped to transmit radical ideas to the 
peasants. But in essence they were there already, and always had 
been. There was a Russian tradition of peasant collectivism, based on 
the commune (obshchina) and the craftsmen's co-operative {artel). It 
had the sanction of the Orthodox Church. Private enrichment was 
against the communal interest. It was often sinful. The grasping 
peasant, the kulak ('fist'), was a bad peasant: the kulaks were not a 
class (that was a later Bolshevik invention). Most peasants har- 
boured both a respect for hierarchy and an egalitarian spirit, the 
latter liable to surface in moments of crisis when notions of freedom 
(volya) drove them to seize and confiscate. But the peasants never 
evinced the slightest desire for 'nationalization' or 'socialization': 
they did not even possess words for such concepts. What many 
wanted were independent plots, as was natural. The steps taken to 
create peasant proprietors since 1861 merely whetted their appetites, 
hence the rural agitation of 1905. From 1906, a clever Tsarist 
minister, P.A.Stolypin, accelerated the process, partly to appease the 
peasants, partly to boost food supplies to the towns, thus assisting 
the rapid industrialization of Russia. He also helped peasants to 
come out of the communes. Up to the middle of 1915 nearly 2 
million got title to individual plots, plus a further 1.7 million 
following the voluntary break-up of communes. As a result, in the 
decade before the war, Russian agricultural productivity was rising 
rapidly, the peasants becoming better educated and, for the first 
time, investing in technology. 44 

The war struck a devastating blow at this development, perhaps the 
most hopeful in all Russian history, which promised to create a 
relatively contented and prosperous peasantry, as in France and 
central Europe, while providing enough food to make industrializa- 
tion fairly painless. The war conscripted millions of peasants, while 
demanding from those who remained far more food to feed the 
swollen armies and the expanded war-factories. There were massive 
compulsory purchases. But food prices rose fast. Hence tension 
between town and countryside grew, with each blaming the other for 
their misery. The Bolsheviks were later able to exploit this hatred. As 
the war went on, the government's efforts to gouge food out of the 
villages became more brutal. So agrarian rioting increased, with 557 
outbreaks recorded up to December 1916. But food shortages 
increased too, and food prices rose fast. As a result there was an 
unprecedented rise in the number of factory strikes in 1916, despite 
the fact that many industrial areas were under martial law or 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 61 

'reinforced security'. The strikes came to a head at the end of 
February 1917, and would have been smashed, but for the fact that 
the peasants were angry and desperate also. Nearly all the soldiers 
were peasants, and when the Petrograd garrison was ordered to 
coerce the factory workers it mutinied. About a third, some 66,000, 
defied their officers. As they were armed, the regime collapsed. So the 
first stage of the Revolution was the work of peasants. 

The destruction of the autocracy inevitably carried with it the rural 
hierarchy. Those peasants without plots began to seize and parcel up 
the big estates. That might not have mattered. The Provisional 
Government was bound to enact a land reform anyway, as soon as it 
got itself organized. But in the meantime it was committed to 
carrying on the war. The war was going badly. The Galician 
offensive failed; Lwov had fallen by July. There was a change of 
ministry and Kerensky was made Prime Minister. He decided to 
continue the war, and to do this he had to get supplies out of the 
peasants. It was at this point that Lenin's anti-war policy, by pure 
luck, proved itself inspired. He knew nothing about the peasants; 
had no idea what was going on in the countryside. But by opposing 
the war he was opposing a policy which was bound to fail anyway, 
and aligning his group with the popular peasant forces, both in the 
villages and, more important, within the army. As a result, the 
Bolsheviks for the first time even got a foothold in the countryside: 
by the end of 1917 they had about 2,400 rural workers in 203 
centres. Meanwhile, the attempt to enforce the war policy wrecked 
the Provisional Government. A decree it had passed on 25 March 
obliged the peasants to hand over their entire crop, less a proportion 
for seed, fodder and subsistence. Before the war, 75 per cent of the 
grain had gone onto the market and 40 per cent had been exported. 
Now, with the countryside in revolt, there was no chance of 
Kerensky collecting what he needed to keep the war going. For the 
first time in modern Russian history, most of the harvest remained 
down on the farms. Kerensky got less than a sixth of it. 45 The 
attempt to grab more merely drove the peasants into open revolt and 
the authority of the Provisional Government in the countryside 
began to collapse. At the same time, the failure to get the grain to the 
towns meant a rapid acceleration of food prices in September, no 
bread at all in many places, mutiny in the army and navy, and strikes 
in the factories. By the beginning of October, the revolt of the 
peasants had already kicked the guts out of Kerensky's 
government. 46 

The moment had now arrived for Lenin to seize power with the 
Vanguard elite' he had trained for precisely this purpose. He had, of 
course, no mandate to destroy parliamentary government. He had no 



62 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

mandate for anything, not even a notional Marxist one. He was not a 
peasant leader. He was not much of a proletarian leader either. In any 
case the Russian proletariat was tiny. And it did not want Leninism. Of 
more than one hundred petitions submitted by industrial workers to the 
central authorities in March 1917, scarcely any mentioned Socialism. 
Some 5 1 per cent demanded fewer hours, 1 8 per cent higher wages, 1 5 
per cent better work conditions and 12 per cent rights for workers' 
committees. There was no mass support for a 'revolution of the 
proletariat'; virtually no support at all for anything remotely resem- 
bling what Lenin was proposing to do. 47 This was the only occasion, 
from that day to this, when Russian factory workers had the chance to 
say what they really wanted; and what they wanted was to improve 
their lot, not to turn the world upside down. By 'workers' committees' 
they meant Soviets. These had first appeared in 1905, quite spon- 
taneously. Lenin was baffled by them: according to the Marxist texts 
they ought not to exist. However, they reappeared in the 'February 
Revolution', and when he returned to Russia in April 1917 he decided 
they might provide an alternative vehicle to the parliamentary system 
he hated. He thought, and in this respect he was proved right, that some 
at least of the factory Soviets could be penetrated and so manipulated by 
his men. Hence his 'April Theses' advocated 'Not a parliamentary 
republic . . . but a republic of Soviets of Workers', Poor Peasants' and 
Peasants' Deputies throughout the country, growing from below 
upwards'. 48 Ever a skilful opportunist, he began to see Soviets as a 
modern version of the 1 870 Paris Commune: they could be managed by 
a determined group, such as his own, and so become the instrument for 
the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'. Hence when the Bolsheviks met in 
conference later in April he got them to voice the demand that 
'proletarians of town and country' should bring about 'the rapid 
transfer of all state power into the hands of the Soviets'. 49 When 
Trotsky, who had actually worked in a 1905 Soviet, arrived in May he 
was put in charge of an effort to capture the most important of the town 
Soviets, in Petrograd. 

In early June 1917, the first All-Russian Congress of Soviets met with 
822 delegates. The towns were absurdly over-represented. The Social 
Revolutionaries, who spoke for the peasants, had 285 delegates. The 
Mensheviks, who represented the organized workers, had 248. There 
were minor groups totalling 150 and forty-five with no label. The 
Bolsheviks had 1 05 . 50 The anarchists staged a trial of strength on 3 July 
when they ordered big street demonstrations against the war. But they 
were scattered by loyal troops, Pravda was shut down and some 
Bolsheviks, including Kamenev and Trotsky, put in gaol. Lenin was 
allowed to escape to Finland : he was not yet considered a fatal enemy. 5 1 
The decisive change came during the summer and early autumn. The 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 63 

war-fronts began to collapse. In August Kerensky held an all-party 
'State Conference' in Moscow, attended by 2,000 delegates. It 
accomplished nothing. At the end of the month, a Tsarist general, 
Kornilov, staged a military revolt which ended in fiasco. All these 
events played into Lenin's hands, especially the last which allowed 
him to create an atmosphere of fear in which he could persuade 
people it was necessary to break the law to 'preserve' the new 
republic. But it was, above all, the failure of Kerensky to get food out 
of the peasants which sapped legal order. Troops were demobilizing 
themselves and flocking to the cities where there was no bread for 
them. There, they joined or formed Soviets, and were soon electing 
Bolshevik spokesmen who promised an immediate end to the war 
and the distribution of all estates to the peasants. By early September 
the Bolsheviks had majorities on both the Petrograd and the Moscow 
Soviets, the two that really mattered, and on 14 September Lenin, 
still in hiding, felt strong enough to issue the slogan 'All power to the 
Soviets'. 52 Trotsky, just out of gaol, immediately became president of 
the Petrograd Soviet, the focus of the coming uprising. 

Trotsky, indeed, was the active agent of the Revolution. But Lenin 
was the master-mind, who took all the key decisions and provided 
the essential 'will to power'. The Bolshevik Revolution, let alone the 
creation of the Communist state, would have been quite impossible 
without him. He slipped back into Petrograd in disguise on 9 
October and at a meeting of the Central Committee the next day he 
won a 10-2 vote for an armed rising. A Political Bureau or 
'Politburo' — the first we hear of it — was created to manage the 
rising. But the actual military preparations were made by a 'military- 
revolutionary committee', formed under Trotsky from the Petrograd 
Soviet. The rising was timed to make use of the second All-Russian 
Congress of Soviets, which met on 25 October. The previous 
evening, Lenin formed an embryo government, and in the morning 
Trotsky's men went into action and seized key points throughout the 
city. The members of the Provisional Government were taken 
prisoner or fled. There was very little bloodshed. That afternoon the 
Bolsheviks got the Congress of Soviets to approve the transfer of 
power. The following day, before dispersing, it adopted a decree 
making peace, another abolishing landed estates and a third approv- 
ing the composition of the Council of People's Commissars, or 
Sovnarkom for short, the first Workers' and Peasants' 
Government. 53 But as Stalin was later careful to point out, it was the 
military revolutionary committee which seized power, and the 
Congress of Soviets 'only received the power from the hands of the 
Petrograd Soviet'. 54 His object in making* this distinction was to 
preserve the notion of a Marxist proletarian revolution. Certainly 



64 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

there was nothing legal about the way in which Lenin came to 
power. But it was not a revolutionary uprising either. It was an 
old-style coup, or as the Germans were soon to call it, a putsch. 
There was nothing Marxist about it. 

At the time, however, Lenin astutely made the greatest possible use 
of the spurious legitimacy conferred upon his regime by the Soviets. 
Indeed for the next two months he carefully operated at two levels, 
which corresponded in a curious way to the Marxist perception of 
the world. On the surface was the level of constitutional arrange- 
ments and formal legality. That was for show, for the satisfaction of 
the public, and for the outside world. At a lower level were the deep 
structures of real power: police, army, communications, arms. That 
was for real. At the show level, Lenin described his government as 
'provisional' until the 'Constituent Assembly', which the Kerensky 
government had scheduled for election on 12 November, had had a 
chance to meet. So the elections proceeded, with the Bolsheviks 
merely one of the participating groups. It was the first and last true 
parliamentary election ever held in Russia. As expected it returned a 
majority of peasant-oriented Social Revolutionaries, 410 out of 707. 
The Bolsheviks had 175 seats, the Mensheviks were down to sixteen, 
the bourgeois Kadets had seventeen and 'national groups' made up 
the remaining members. Lenin fixed the Assembly's first meeting for 
5 January 1918. To keep up the show he invited three members of 
the sr left wing to join his Sovnarkom. This had the further 
advantage of splitting the srs so that he now had a majority in the 
Congress of Soviets, and he summoned that to meet three days after 
the Assembly had been dealt with. He intended it would thereafter 
remain the tame instrument of his legitimacy. Reassured, perhaps, by 
these constitutional manoeuvres, the great city of Petrograd went 
about its business and pleasures. Even on the day Kerensky was 
overthrown, all the shops remained open, the trams ran, the cinemas 
were crowded. The Salvation Army, which the republic had admitted 
for the first time, played on street-corners. Karsavina was at the 
Mariinsky. Chaliapin sang at concerts. There were packed public 
lectures. Society congregated at Contant's restaurant. There was 
extravagant gambling. 55 

Meanwhile, down among the structures, Lenin worked very fast. It 
is significant that, when he had so much else to do, he gave priority 
to controlling the press. In September, just before the putsch, he had 
publicly called for 'a much more democratic' and 'incomparably 
more complete' freedom of the press. In fact under the republic the 
press had become as free as in Britain or France. Two days after he 
seized power, Lenin ended this freedom with a decree on the press. 
As part of 'certain temporary, extraordinary measures', any news- 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 65 

papers 'calling for open resistance or insubordination to the Wor- 
kers' or Peasants' Government', or 'sowing sedition through demon- 
strably slanderous distortions of fact', would be suppressed and their 
editors put on trial. By the next day the government had closed down 
ten Petrograd newspapers; ten more were shut the following week. 56 
Management of the news was entrusted primarily to the Bolshevik 
party newspaper, Pravda, and the paper of the Soviets, Isvestia, now 
taken over by Sovnarkom. 

Meanwhile, with great speed if in some confusion, the physical 
apparatus of power was being occupied by the Bolshevik activists. 
The method was corporatist. Every organization, from factories to 
the trams, held Soviet-style elections. This was the easiest way to 
ensure that delegates chosen were broadly acceptable to the regime. 
Later, Boris Pasternak was to give a vignette of the process: 

Everywhere there were new elections: for the running of housing, trade, 
industry and municipal services. Commissars were being appointed to each, 
men in black leather jerkins, with unlimited powers and an iron will, armed 
with means of intimidation and revolvers, who shaved little and slept less. 
They knew the shrinking bourgeois breed, the average holder of cheap 
government stocks, and they spoke to them without the slightest pity and 
with Mephistophelean smiles, as to petty thieves caught in the act. These 
were the people who reorganized everything in accordance with the plan, 
and company after company, enterprise after enterprise, became Bolshe- 
vised. 57 

This physical takeover was quickly given an infrastructure of 
decree-law. 10 November: Peter the Great's Table of Ranks abo- 
lished. 22 November: house searches authorized; fur coats confi- 
scated. 11 December: all schools taken from the Church and handed 
to the state. 14 December: state monopoly of all banking activity; all 
industry subjected to 'workers' control'. 16 December: all army 
ranks abolished. 21 December: new law code for 'revolutionary 
courts'. 24 December: immediate nationalization of all factories. 29 
December: all payments of interest and dividends stopped; bank- 
withdrawals strictly limited. As the novelist Ilya Ehrenburg put it 
later: 'Every morning the inhabitants carefully studied the new 
decrees, still wet and crumpled, pasted on the walls: they wanted to 
know what was permitted and what was forbidden.' 58 

But even at this stage some of the key moves in the consolidation 
of power were not reflected in public decree-laws. In the initial stages 
of his take-over, Lenin depended entirely on the armed bands 
Trotsky had organized through the Petrograd Soviet. They were 
composed partly of politically motivated young thugs, the 'men in 
black leather jerkins', partly of deserters, often Cossacks. An eye- 



66 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

witness described the scene in the rooms of the Smolny Institute, 
from which the Bolsheviks initially operated: 'The Bureau was 
packed tight with Caucasian greatcoats, fur caps, felt cloaks, gal- 
loons, daggers, glossy black moustaches, astounded, prawn-like eyes, 
and the smell of horses. This was the elite, the cream headed by 
"native" officers, in all perhaps five hundred men. Cap in hand they 
confessed their loyalty to the Revolution.' 59 These men were effective 
in overawing the crumbling republic. But for the enforcement of the 
new order, something both more sophisticated and more ruthless 
was required. Lenin needed a political police. 

Believing, as he did, that violence was an essential element in the 
Revolution, Lenin never quailed before the need to employ terror. He 
inherited two traditions of justification for terror. From the French 
Revolution he could quote Robespierre: The attribute of popular 
government in revolution is at one and the same time virtue and 
terror, virtue without which terror is fatal, terror without which 
virtue is impotent. The terror is nothing but justice, prompt, severe, 
inflexible; it is thus an emanation of virtue.' 60 Brushing aside the 
disastrous history of the Revolutionary Terror, Marx had given the 
method his own specific and unqualified endorsement. There was, he 
wrote, 'only one means to curtail, simplify and localize the bloody 
agony of the old society and the bloody birth-pangs of the new, only 
one means — the revolutionary terror'. 61 But Marx had said different 
things at different times. The orthodox German Marxists did not 
accept that terror was indispensable. A year after Lenin seized 
power, Rosa Luxemburg, in her German Communist Party pro- 
gramme of December 1918, stated: 'The proletarian revolution 
needs for its purposes no terror, it hates and abominates murder.' 62 
Indeed, one of the reasons why she opposed Lenin's 'vanguard elite' 
attempt to speed up the historical process of the proletarian revolu- 
tion was precisely because she thought it would tempt him to use 
terror - as the Marxist text hinted - as a short-cut, especially against 
the background of the Tsarist autocracy and general Russian barbar- 
ism and contempt for life. 

In fact the real tragedy of the Leninist Revolution, or rather one of 
its many tragedies, is that it revived a savage national method of 
government which was actually dying out quite fast. In the eighty 
years up to 1917, the number of people executed in the Russian 
empire averaged only seventeen a year, and the great bulk of these 
occurred in the earlier part of the period. 63 Wartime Russia in the 
last years of the Tsars was in some ways more liberal than Britain 
and France under their wartime regulations. The Republic abolished 
the death penalty completely, though Kerensky restored it at the 
front in September 1917. Most of Lenin's own comrades were 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 67 

opposed to it. Most of the early Bolshevik killings were the work of 
sailors, who murdered two former ministers on 7 January 1918, 
and carried out a three-day massacre in Sevastopol the following 
month, or were indiscriminate peasant slaughters deep in the coun- 
tryside. 64 

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the decision to use 
terror and oppressive police power was taken very early on by 
Lenin, endorsed by his chief military agent Trotsky; and that it was, 
as Rosa Luxemburg feared it would be, an inescapable part of his 
ideological approach to the seizure and maintenance of authority, 
and the type of centralized state he was determined to create. And 
this in turn was part of Lenin's character, that will to power he had 
in such extraordinary abundance. As early as 1901 Lenin warned: 
'In principle we have never renounced terror and cannot renounce 
it.' 65 Again: 'We'll ask the man, where do you stand on the 
question of the revolution? Are you for it or against it? If he's 
against it, we'll stand him up against a wall.' Shortly after he came 
to power he asked: 'Is it impossible to find among us a Fouquier- 
Tinville to tame our wild counter-revolutionaries?' 66 The number of 
times Lenin, as head of the government, began to use such express- 
ions as 'shoot them', 'firing-squad', 'against the wall', suggests a 
growing temperamental appetite for extreme methods. 

There was also a revealing furtiveness, or rather deliberate du- 
plicity, in the manner in which Lenin set up the instrument to be 
used, if necessary, for counter-revolutionary terror. The original 
Bolshevik armed force, as already explained, was Trotsky's milit- 
ary-revolutionary committee of the Petrograd Soviet. Trotsky had 
no scruples about continuing to use force even after the Revolution 
had succeeded: 'We shall not enter into the kingdom of socialism in 
white gloves on a polished floor', was how he put it. 67 Immediately 
after 25— 26 October 1917, this committee became a sub-committee 
of the Central Executive and was given security jobs including 
fighting 'counter-revolution', defined as 'sabotage, concealment 'of 
supplies, deliberate holding up of cargoes, etc'. Its constitution was 
made public in a Sovnarkom decree of 12 November 1917. 68 As it 
was charged with examining suspects, it set up a special section 
under Felix Dzerzhinsky, a fanatical Pole who was in charge of 
security at Smolny. However, when on 7 December 1917 the 
military committee was finally dissolved by another Sovnarkom 
decree, Dzerzhinsky's section remained in being, becoming the 
'All-Russian Extraordinary Commission' (Cheka), charged with 
combating 'counter-revolution and sabotage'. The decree which 
created the Cheka was not made public until more than ten years 
later (Pravda, 18 December 1927), so that Lenin's security force 



68 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

was from the beginning and remained for the rest of his life a secret 
police in the true sense, in that its very existence was not officially 
acknowledged. 69 

There was no question that, from the very start, the Cheka was 
intended to be used with complete ruthlessness and on a very large 
scale. A week before it came into official though secret existence, 
Trotsky was challenged about the growing numbers of arrests and 
searches. He defended them to the All-Russian Congress of Peasants' 
Deputies, insisting that 'demands to forgo all repressions at a time of 
civil war are demands to abandon the civil war'. 70 The Cheka had a 
committee of eight under Dzerzhinsky and he quickly filled up its 
ranks, and the corps of senior inspectors and agents, with other 
fanatics. Many of them were fellow Poles or Latvians, such as the 
sinister Latsis, or 'Peters', brother of Peter the Painter of the Sidney 
Street Siege, perpetrator of a series of murders in Houndsditch, and 
Kedrov, a sadist who eventually went mad. The speed with which the 
force expanded was terrifying. It was recruiting people as fast as it 
could throughout December 1917 and January 1918, and one of its 
first acts was to see set up a nationwide intelligence service by asking 
all local Soviets for 'information about organizations and persons 
whose activity is directed against the revolution and popular author- 
ity'. This decree suggested that local Soviets should themselves set up 
security committees to report back to professional agents, and from 
the first the Cheka was assisted by a growing horde of amateur and 
part-time informers. Its full-time ranks grew inexorably. The Tsar's 
secret police, the Okhrana, had numbered 15,000, which made it by 
far the largest body of its kind in the old world. By contrast, the 
Cheka, within three years of its establishment, had a strength of 
250,000 full-time agents. 71 Its activities were on a correspondingly 
ample scale. While the last Tsars had executed an average of 
seventeen a year (for all crimes), by 1918-19 the Cheka was 
averaging 1,000 executions a month for political offences alone. 72 

This figure is certainly an understatement — for a reason which 
goes to the heart of the iniquity of the system Lenin created. Almost 
immediately after the Cheka came into being, a decree set up a new 
kind of 'revolutionary tribunal', to try those 'who organize uprisings 
against the authority of the Workers' and Peasants' Government, 
who actively oppose it o.r do not obey it, or who call on others to 
oppose or disobey it', and civil servants guilty of sabotage or 
concealment. The tribunal was authorized to fix penalties in accor- 
dance with 'the circumstances of the case and the dictates of the 
revolutionary conscience'. 73 This decree effectively marked the end 
of the rule of law in Lenin's new state, then only weeks old. It 
dovetailed into the Cheka system. Under the Tsars, the Okhrana was 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 69 

empowered to arrest, but it then had to hand over the prisoner to the 
courts for public trial, just like anyone else; and any punishments were 
meted out by the ordinary civil authorities. Under Lenin's system, the 
Cheka controlled the special courts (which met in secret) and carried 
out their verdicts. Hence once a man fell into the Cheka's hands, his only 
safeguard was 'the dictates of the revolutionary conscience'. As the 
Cheka arrested, tried, sentenced and punished its victims, there was 
never any reliable record of their numbers. Within weeks of its 
formation, the Cheka was operating its first concentration and labour 
camps. These arose from a Sovnarkom decree directing 'bourgeois men 
and women' to be rounded up and set to digging defensive trenches in 
Petrograd. 74 Camps were set up to house and guard them, and once the 
Cheka was given supervision over the forced labour programme, its 
prison-camps began to proliferate on the outskirts of towns, or even 
deep in the countryside —the nucleus of what was to become the gigantic 
'Gulag Archipelago'. By the end of 1 9 1 7, when Lenin had been in power 
only nine or ten weeks, it would be correct to say that the Cheka was 
already a 'state within a state'; indeed as regards many activities it was 
the state. 

We can dismiss the notion that its origins and growth were contrary 
to Lenin's will. All the evidence we possess points in quite the opposite 
direction. 75 It was Lenin who drafted all the key decrees and 
Dzerzhinsky was always his creature. Indeed it was Lenin personally 
who infused the Cheka with the spirit of terror and who, from January 
1918 onwards, constantly urged it to ignore the doubts and humanita- 
rian feelings of other Bolsheviks, including many members of Sovnar- 
kom. When Lenin transferred the government from Petrograd to 
Moscow for security reasons, and placed Sovnarkom within the 
Kremlin, he encouraged Dzerzhinsky to set up his own headquarters 
independently of Sovnarkom. A large insurance company building was 
taken over in Lubyanka Square; inside it an 'inner prison' was built for 
political suspects ; and from this point on the Cheka was an independent 
department of state reporting directly to Lenin. He left its officials in no 
doubt what he wanted. In January 1918, three months before the civil 
war even began, he advocated 'shooting on the spot one out of every ten 
found guilty of idling'. A week later he urged the Cheka publicly: 'Until 
we apply the terror - shooting on the spot - to speculators, we shall 
achieve nothing.' A few weeks later he demanded 'the arrest and 
shooting of takers of bribes, swindlers, etc'. Any breach of the decree 
laws must be followed by 'the harshest punishment'. 76 On 22 February, 
he authorized a Cheka proclamation ordering local Soviets to 'seek out, 
arrest and shoot immediately' a whole series of categories of 'enemies, 
speculators, etc'. 77 He followed this general decree with his own 
personal instructions. Thus, by August 1918, he was telegraphing the 



70 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

Soviet at Nizhni-Novgorod: 'You must exert every effort, form a 
troika of dictators . . . instantly introduce mass terror, shoot and 
transport hundreds of prostitutes who get the soldiers drunk, ex- 
officers, etc. Not a minute to be wasted.' 78 His example inspired 
others. The next month the army newspaper proclaimed: 'Without 
mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of 
hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in 
their own blood ... let there be floods of blood of the bourgeois.' 79 
Lenin's incitements brought their results. In the first six months of 
1918 the Cheka executed, according to its official figures, only 
twenty-two prisoners. In the second half of the year it carried out 
6,000 executions, and in the whole of 1919 some 10,000. 
W.H. Chamberlain, the first historian of the revolution, who was an 
eye-witness, calculated that by the end of 1920 the Cheka had 
carried out over 50,000 death sentences. 80 

However, the most disturbing and, from the historical point of 
view, important characteristic of the Lenin terror was not the 
quantity of the victims but the principle on which they were 
selected. Within a few months of seizing power, Lenin had aban- 
doned the notion of individual guilt, and with it the whole Judeo- 
Christian ethic of personal responsibility. He was ceasing to be 
interested in what a man did or had done - let alone why he had 
done it — and was first encouraging, then commanding, his repress- 
ive apparatus to hunt down people, and destroy them, not on the 
basis of crimes, real or imaginary, but on the basis of generaliza- 
tions, hearsay, rumours. First came condemned categories: 'pros- 
titutes', 'work-shirkers', 'bagmen', 'speculators', 'hoarders', all of 
whom might vaguely be described as criminal. Following quickly, 
however, came entire occupational groups. The watershed was 
Lenin's decree of January 1918 calling on the agencies of the state 
to 'purge the Russian land of all kinds of harmful insects'. This was 
not a judicial act: it was an invitation to mass murder. Many years 
later, Alexander Solzhenitsyn listed just a few of the groups who 
thus found themselves condemned to destruction as 'insects'. They 
included 'former zemstvo members, people in the Cooper 
movements, homeowners, high-school teachers, parish councils and 
choirs, priests, monks and nuns, Tolstoyan pacifists, officials of 
trade unions' - soon all to be classified as 'former people'. 81 Quite 
quickly the condemned group decree-laws extended to whole 
classes and the notion of killing people collectively rather than 
individually was seized upon by the Cheka professionals with 
enthusiasm. Probably the most important Cheka official next to 
Dzerzhinsky himself was the ferocious Latvian M.Y. Latsis. He 
came nearest to giving the Lenin terror its true definition: 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 71 

The Extraordinary Commission is neither an investigating commission nor 
a tribunal. It is an organ of struggle, acting on the home front of a civil war. 
It does not judge the enemy: it strikes him .... We are not carrying out war 
against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. We are 
not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal deeds or words against the 
Soviet power. The first question we ask is — to what class does he belong, 
what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions 
define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror. 82 

Once Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had 
started to 'exterminate' (a word he frequently employed) whole 
classes, merely on account of occupation or parentage, there was no 
limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. Might not 
entire categories of people be classified as 'enemies' and condemned 
to imprisonment or slaughter merely on account of the colour of 
their skin, or their racial origins or, indeed, their nationality? There is 
no essential moral difference between class-warfare and race- 
warfare, between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus the 
modern practice of genocide was born. 

While the Cheka was getting itself organized, Lenin proceeded to 
wind up the democratic legacy of the republic. The Constituent 
Assembly had been elected on 12 November 1917. Lenin made clear 
his attitude towards it on 1 December: 'We are asked to call the 
Constituent Assembly as originally conceived. No thank you! It was 
conceived against the people and we carried out the rising to make 
certain that it will not be used against the people.' 83 In his 'Theses on 
the Constituent Assembly', published anonymously in Pravda of 13 
December, he contrasted a parliament, which 'in a bourgeois repub- 
lic .. . is the highest form of the democratic principle', with a Soviet, 
which 'is a higher form of the democratic principle'. Hence 'any 
attempt ... to look at the . . . Constituent Assembly from the formal, 
juridical standpoint, within the framework of bourgeois democracy' 
was treason to the proletariat. Unless the Assembly made 'an 
unconditional declaration of acceptance of the Soviet power', it 
would face a crisis to be 'solved only by revolutionary means'. 84 This 
was not so much an argument as a blunt statement by Lenin that his 
regime would not accept any form of democratic control by a 
parliament. Four days later, to underline his point, he arrested the 
leader of the right-wing section of the Social Revolutionaries, 
Avksientiev, and his chief followers, 'for the organization of a 
counter-revolutionary conspiracy'. 85 

By the time the Assembly met on 5 January 1918, Lenin had 
already put together the essentials of a repressive regime, albeit on a 
small scale as yet (the Cheka had only 120 full-time agents), and was 



72 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

therefore in a position to treat the parliament with the contempt he felt 
it deserved. He did not put in an appearance but he had written the 
script down to the last line. The building was 'guarded' by the Baltic 
Fleet sailors, the most extreme of the armed groups at Lenin's 
disposal. Izvestia had warned the deputies the day before they met 
that 'all power in the Russian republic belongs to the Soviets and 
Soviet institutions' and that if they sought to 'usurp this or that 
function of state power' they would be treated as counter- 
revolutionaries and 'crushed by all means at the disposal of the Soviet 
power, including the use of armed force'. 86 As soon as the deputies 
gathered, Lenin's henchman, Sverdlov, simply pushed from the 
tribune its oldest member, who by a Russian tradition was about to 
open proceedings, and took charge. There followed a long debate, 
culminating in a vote after midnight which went against the Bolshe- 
viks and their allies, 237-138. The Bolsheviks then withdrew, 
followed an hour later by their partners, the Left srs. At 5 am on 6 
January, following instructions sent direct from Lenin, the sailor in 
charge of the guard told the Assembly that its meeting must close 
'because the guard is tired'. It adjourned for twelve hours but never 
reassembled, for later that day, after a speech by Lenin, the Central 
Executive Committee formally dissolved it and a guard was placed on 
the doors to tell the deputies to go back to their homes. An unarmed 
demonstration in favour of the parliament was dispersed, several in 
the crowd being killed. 87 Thus briefly and brutally did Lenin destroy 
parliamentary democracy in Russia. Three days later, in the same 
building and with Sverdlov presiding, the Soviets met to rubber-stamp 
the decisions of the regime. 

By the end of January 1918, after about twelve weeks in authority, 
Lenin had established his dictatorship so solidly that nothing short of 
external intervention could have destroyed his power. Of course by 
this time the Germans were in a position to snuff him out without 
difficulty. They were advancing rapidly on all fronts, meeting little 
opposition. But on 3 March Lenin signed their dictated peace-terms, 
having argued down Trotsky and other colleagues, who wanted to 
pursue a 'no war no peace' line until the German workers' revolution 
broke out. Thereafter, for the rest of the war, the Germans had an 
interest in keeping Lenin going. As their Foreign Minister, Admiral 
Paul von Hintze, put it in July 1918: 'The Bolsheviks are the best 
weapon for keeping Russia in a state of chaos, thus allowing Germany 
to tear off as many provinces from the former Russian Empire as she 
wishes and to rule the rest through economic controls.' 88 

For equal and opposite reasons the Allies were anxious to oust 
Lenin and get Russia back into the war. But Lenin was clearly right to 
settle with the Germans, whose threat to him was near and immediate, 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 73 

rather than the Allies, who were distant and divided in their aims. As 
early as 14 December 1917 the British War Cabinet decided to pay 
money to anti-Bolsheviks 'for the purpose of maintaining alive in 
South East Russia the resistance to the Central Powers'. On 26 
December Britain and France divided up Russia into spheres of 
influence for this end, the French taking the south, the British the 
north. 89 In March 1918 the first British troops went to Archangel 
and Murmansk, initially to protect British war stores there. After the 
German armistice the Allies continued with their intervention, for 
Lenin had signed a separate peace with the enemy and at one time 
Winston Churchill hoped to persuade the Council of Ten in Paris to 
declare war formally on the Bolshevik regime. 90 By the end of 1918, 
there were 180,000 Allied troops on Russian territory - British, 
French, American, Japanese, Italian and Greek, as well as Serb and 
Czech contingents - plus 300,000 men of various anti-Bolshevik 
Russian forces supported by Allied money, arms and technical 
advisers. It may be asked: granted the slender, almost non-existent 
popular support Lenin enjoyed in Russia, how did his regime manage 
to survive? 

The short answer is that it was very nearly extinguished in the late 
summer and early autumn of 1919. There was absolutely nothing 
inevitable about its endurance. A number of quite different factors 
worked in its favour. In the first place, with one exception none of 
the Allied statesmen involved even began to grasp the enormous 
significance of the establishment of this new type of totalitarian 
dictatorship, or the long-term effect of its implantation in the heart 
of the greatest land power on earth. The exception was Winston 
Churchill. With his strong sense of history, he realized some kind of 
fatal watershed was being reached. What seems to have brought the 
truth home to him was not only the murder of the entire Russian 
royal family on 16 July 1918, without any kind of trial or justifica- 
tion, but Lenin's audacity, on 31 August, in getting his men to break 
into the British Embassy and murder the naval attache, Captain 
Crombie. To Churchill it seemed that a new kind of barbarism had 
arisen, indifferent to any standards of law, custom, diplomacy or 
honour which had hitherto been observed by civilized states. He told 
the cabinet that Lenin and Trotsky should be captured and hanged, 
'as the object upon whom justice will be executed, however long it 
takes, and to make them feel that their punishment will become an 
important object of British policy'. 91 He told his Dundee electors on 
26 November 1918 that the Bolsheviks were reducing Russia 'to an 
animal form of barbarism', maintaining themselves by 'bloody and 
wholesale butcheries and murders carried out to a large extent by 
Chinese executions and armoured cars .... Civilization is being 



74 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

completely extinguished over gigantic areas, while Bolsheviks hop 
and caper like troops of ferocious baboons amid the ruins of cities 
and corpses of their victims.' 'Of all the tyrannies in history', he 
remarked on 11 April 1919, 'the Bolshevik tyranny is the worst, the 
most destructive, the most degrading.' Lenin's atrocities were 'in- 
comparably more hideous, on a larger scale and more numerous than 
any for which the Kaiser is responsible'. His private remarks to 
colleagues were equally vehement. Thus, to Lloyd George: 'You 
might as well legalize sodomy as recognize the Bolsheviks.' To 
H. A. L.Fisher: 'After conquering all the Huns — the tigers of the 
world - I will not submit to be beaten by the baboons.' Once the 
regime consolidated itself it would become far more expansionist 
than Tsarist Russia and, he warned Field Marshal Wilson, 'highly 
militaristic'. 92 Churchill never wavered in his view that it ought to be 
a prime object of the policy of the peaceful, democratic great powers 
to crush this new kind of menace while they still could. 

But even Churchill was confused about means. He resented 
suggestions his colleagues fed the press that he had some kind of 
master-plan to suppress Bolshevism throughout the world. He wrote 
to Lloyd George (21 February 1919): 'I have no Russian policy. I 
know of no Russian policy. I went to Paris to look for a Russian 
policy! I deplore the lack of a Russian policy.' He admitted it was not 
the job of the West to overthrow Lenin: 'Russia must be saved by 
Russian exertions.' 93 All the other Western leaders, in varying 
degrees, were lukewarm about the business. On 14 February 1919 
Wilson said he was for withdrawal: 'Our troops were doing no sort 
of good in Russia. They did not know for whom or for what they 
were fighting.' The French were more interested in building up their 
new ally, Poland, into a big state. Lloyd George was thinking in 
terms of public opinion at home: 'The one thing to spread Bolshev- 
ism was to attempt to suppress it. To send our soldiers to shoot down 
the Bolsheviks would be to create Bolshevism here.' Sir David 
Shackleton, head official at the Ministry of Labour, warned the 
cabinet in June 1919 that British intervention was the main cause of 
industrial unrest. The War Office warned of 'revolutionary talk in 
the Brigade of Guards' and General Ironside, in charge at Archangel, 
cabled home news of 'very persistent and obstinate' mutinies among 
his own troops. 94 

None of this might have mattered if Lloyd George, in particular, 
had regarded Leninism as the ultimate evil. But he did not. Leninism 
subscribed to self-determination. It was prepared to let go, had 
indeed already let go, all the small nations on its fringes: Finland, the 
Baltic states, Poland, possibly the Ukraine, the Crimean and the 
Georgian republics. Marshal Foch, for the French, spoke in terms of 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 75 

welding these new democratic states into a cordon sanitaire to seal 
off Bolshevism from civilized Europe. Unlike Churchill, most wes- 
tern opinion saw the Bolsheviks as non-expansionist, prepared to 
settle for a weak Russia, internationally minded. To them, it was the 
anti-Bolshevik commanders, Admiral Kolchak and General Denikin, 
who stood for Tsarist imperialism, the old fear-images of 'the Bear', 
the 'Russian Steamroller' and so forth. This view was by no means 
unfounded. Kolchak persistently refused to give the Allies the 
assurances they wanted about confirming the independence of 
Finland and the Baltic states after he had overthrown Lenin. He 
would not even promise to permit democratic elections in Russia 
itself. Denikin showed himself strongly anti-Polish and hotly op- 
posed to liberty for the Ukrainians, the Caucasus and other small 
nations. He appeared to want to re-establish the Tsarist empire in all 
its plenitude and, worse, with all its traditional ferocity. What 
damaged the image of the White Russians in the West more than 
anything else, not least with Churchill himself, was Denikin's 
identification of Bolshevism with Jewry and the anti-Semitic atroci- 
ties of his troops: during 1919 over 100,000 Jews appear to have 
been murdered in south Russia, by no means all of them in peasant 
pogroms. 95 

The anti-Bolshevik commanders, in fact, never accommodated 
themselves either to the Allies or to the oppressed nationalities. 
Hence, when Denikin took Kiev on 31 August 1919 and advanced 
towards Moscow, Allied forces were already being evacuated in the 
north, releasing masses of Lenin's troops to move south. Again, on 
16 October 1919, General Yudenich's troops were only twenty-five 
miles from Petrograd and Denikin was near Tula west of Moscow: 
within a week his Cossacks had deserted, there were nationalist 
risings in the Ukraine and a general rebellion in the Caucasus. From 
that moment the White Russian tide began to recede and by the end 
of the year their cause was finished. 

Lenin's biggest single asset was his willingness to hand out 
post-dated cheques not only to the nationalists but above all to the 
peasants. No one was then to know that none of the cheques would 
be honoured. The White leaders felt they could not match these 
promises. General Sir Henry Rawlinson, Britain's last commander on 
the spot, thought the victory was due to the character and determina- 
tion of the Bolshevik leaders: 'They know what they want and are 
working hard to get it.' 96 There were only a few thousand Bolshevik 
cadres, but Lenin had filled them with his will to power and given 
them a clear vision to strive for. They had not yet begun to murder 
each other. They were absolutely ruthless - far more so than their 
opponents - in shooting failed commanders, deserters, faint-hearts, 



76 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

saboteurs and anyone who argued or caused trouble. Such ferocity, it 
is sad to record, has nearly always paid among the Great Russians; 
and of course it was the Great Russians who constituted the bulk of 
the people behind Lenin's lines. The real intransigent elements, the 
minorities and racial nationalities, were all behind the lines of the 
Whites, who felt unable to make them any concessions. The conjunc- 
tion was fatal. 

Lenin, however, was not without secret friends abroad. The links 
of self-interest established between his regime and the German 
military in November 1917 seem to have been maintained, albeit 
sometimes in tenuous form, even after the Armistice. German 
military assistance to the Bolsheviks is frequently referred to by 
British officers advising Denikin and other White commanders. 97 
The help took the immediate form of Freikorps officers, munitions 
and in due course industrial expertise in building new war factories. 
The last point was vital to the Germans, who under the Versailles 
Treaty had to dismantle their armaments industry. By secretly 
coaching the Bolsheviks in arms technology and developing new 
weapons in Russia they were maintaining a continuity of skills 
which, when the time was ripe, could once more be openly exploited 
back at home. Thus a strange, covert alliance was formed, which 
occasionally broke surface, as at the Rapallo Conference in 1922 
and, still more sensationally, in August 1939, but which for most of 
the time was carefully hidden: a working relationship of generals, 
arms experts, later of secret police, which was to continue in one 
form or another until 22 June 1941. It is one of the ironies of history 
that German specialists first taught Soviet Communism how to make 
excellent tanks, a weapon used to overwhelm Germany in 1943-5. 
The deeper irony is that this was a marriage of class enemies: what 
could be further apart than Prussian generals and Bolsheviks? Yet in 
the final crisis and aftermath of the war, both groups saw themselves, 
and certainly were seen, as outlaws. There was a spirit of gangster 
fraternization in their arrangements, the first of many such Europe 
was to experience over the next twenty years. 

The earliest of Lenin's post-dated cheques to be dishonoured 
was the one he issued to the nationalities. Here, the methodology 
was Lenin's but the agent he used was the former seminarist, Josef 
Djugashvili, or Stalin, whom he made People's Commissar of the 
People's Commissariat of Nationalities (Narkomnats). Throughout 
his career, Lenin showed a brilliant if sinister genius for investing 
words and expressions with special meanings which suited his 
political purposes - a skill with which the twentieth century was to 
become depressingly familiar, in many different forms. Just as, to 
Lenin, a parliament, which he could not control, was 'bourgeois 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 77 

democracy', whereas a Soviet, which he could, was 'proletarian 
democracy', so self-determination took on class distinctions. Fin- 
land, the Baltic states, Poland, were lost to Russia. These countries 
were, accordingly, termed 'bourgeois republics', the reservation 
being that, at some convenient future time, when Soviet power was 
greater, they could be transformed into 'proletarian republics' and 
brought into a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. The 
Ukraine, whose grain supplies were essential to the regime's survival, 
was not permitted to opt for 'bourgeois self-determination' and in 
1921-2, after fearful struggles, was obliged to accept 'proletarian 
self-determination', that is, membership of the Soviet Union. 98 

Stalin applied this technique to the Caucasus and Russian Asia 
wherever Bolshevik military power made it possible. If self- 
determination raised its head it was branded 'bourgeois' and 
stamped upon. Such breakaway movements, as he put it, were simply 
attempts 'to disguise in a national costume the struggle with the 
power of the working masses'. Self-determination was a right 'not of 
the bourgeoisie but of the working masses' and must be used solely 
as an instrument in 'the struggle for Socialism'. 99 True, that is 
proletarian, self-determination could not manifest itself until Soviets 
or other authentic proletarian bodies had been formed. Then each 
nationality could exercise its 'right'. Using Narkomnats, Stalin 
created a system to implant in each nationality officials whose party 
loyalties were stronger than their local affiliations, a method which 
his deputy Pestkovsky later described as 'supporting the old tradition 
of Russification'. 100 When, after the defeat of Denikin, a new 
Council of Nationalities was formed, it was merely the mouthpiece 
of Narkomnats policies, and it served to guide local Soviets and 
representative bodies into renouncing 'the right to separate' in favour 
of 'the right to unite', another example of Lenin's verbal sleight. 101 

By the end of 1920, the crucial year, all the nationalities which had 
not already escaped had been safely locked into the Soviet state. The 
Ukraine followed as soon as the Red Army had finally established its 
control there. The key was Lenin's concept of the 'voluntary union', 
the local party supplying the needful element of 'volition' on orders 
from Party headquarters in Moscow. Thanks, then, to the principle 
of 'democratic centralism' within the party, Lenin and later Stalin 
were able to rebuild the Tsarist empire, and Stalin to expand it. A 
propagandist outer structure was provided by the so-called Union of 
Soviet Socialist Republics, which was and still remains a mask for 
Great Russian imperialism. For the constitution of the USSR, the 
first All-Union Congress of Soviets, on 10 January 1923, appointed a 
commission of twenty-five, including three each from the Transcau- 
casian and White Russian republics, five from the Ukraine and five 



78 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

from the autonomous republics. But as each one of them was a 
party official under strict orders from above, the constitution was 
actually drawn up in Moscow right at the top (in fact by Stalin 
himself). It was a federal constitution only in superficial nomencla- 
ture; it merely gave an external legal form to a highly centralized 
autocracy, where all real power was in the hands of a tiny ruling 
group. 102 

The stages by which Lenin created this autocracy are worth 
describing in a little detail because they became the grim model, in 
essentials, for so many other regimes in the six decades which have 
followed. His aims were fourfold. First, to destroy all opposition 
outside the party; second, to place all power, including government, 
in party hands; third, to destroy all opposition within the party; 
fourth, to concentrate all power in the party in himself and those he 
chose to associate with him. As with the constitution-making and 
the creation of the USSR, all four objects were pursued simul- 
taneously, though some were attained more quickly than others. 

The elimination of all non-party opposition posed few problems 
once Lenin had got the Cheka organized. The 1918 constitution, 
drafted by Stalin on Lenin's instructions, embodied 'the dictatorship 
of the proletariat', which Lenin once brutally described as 'a special 
kind of cudgel, nothing else'. 103 It contained no constitutional 
safeguards and gave nobody any rights against the state. The power 
of the state was unlimited, indivisible - no separation of legislative 
and executive function, no independent judiciary - and absolute. 
Lenin scorned the antithesis between the individual and the state as 
the heresy of the class society. In a classless society, the individual 
was the state, so how could they be in conflict, unless of course the 
individual were a state enemy? Hence there was no such thing as 
equality of rights; or one man, one vote. In fact, voting for the 
All-Russian Congress of Soviets contained a fundamental gerryman- 
der, in that city Soviets elected a legate for every 25,000 voters, 
whereas rural ones (where the Bolsheviks were weaker) had a 
deputy for every 125,000 inhabitants. In any case entire categories 
of people, as well as countless individuals, were denied the vote 
(and all other civil 'privileges') altogether, and the constitution 
listed among its 'general principles' the laconic observation: 'In the 
general interest of the working class, [the state] deprives individuals 
or separate groups of any privileges which may be used by them to 
the detriment of the socialist revolution.' 104 

Though the Bolsheviks controlled all 'representative' organs from 
the early weeks of 1918 onwards, opposition politicians lingered on 
for a time, though thousands were shot during the civil war. In May 
1920 members of a British Labour delegation visiting Moscow were 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 79 

allowed, according to Bertrand Russell, 'complete freedom to see 
politicians of opposition parties'. 105 Six months later, the eighth 
All-Russian Congress of Soviets was the last to admit delegates 
calling themselves Mensheviks or Social Revolutionaries, and even 
these had long since lost all voting rights. By then Martov, the only 
remaining Social Democrat of Consequence, had left Russia and had 
denounced Bolshevism at the Halle congress of independent German 
socialists. 

The last real challenge to the regime from outside the party came 
from the Kronstadt mutiny of 28 February 1921, which began on the 
battleship Petropavlovsk. The sailors had always been the revolu- 
tionary hotheads. They actually believed in freedom and equality. 
They foolishly supposed Lenin did so as well. Had they followed the 
advice of the few ex-Imperial officers left in the navy, they would 
have established a bridgehead on the mainland (Petrograd was 
seventeen miles away) and spread the revolt to the capital, pressing 
their demands by force. That might have entailed the end of the 
regime, for by early 1921 Bolshevism was universally unpopular, as 
the sailors' grievances indicated. In fact they amounted to a total 
indictment of the regime. They asked for the election of Soviets by 
secret ballot, instead of 'show of hands' at 'mass meetings'; and free 
campaigning by the rival candidates. They denounced all existing 
Soviets as unrepresentative. They called for freedom of speech and of 
the press for 'workers, peasants, the anarchist and the Left socialist 
parties', free trade unions, freedom of assembly, the formation of 
peasants' unions, the freeing of 'all socialist political prisoners' and 
anyone imprisoned 'in connection with workers' and peasants' 
movements', the setting up of a commission to review the cases of all 
those in prison or concentration camps, the abolition of 'political 
departments' in the army, navy and public transport, since 'no one 
party can enjoy privileges for the propaganda of its ideas and receive 
money from the state for this purpose', and, lastly, the right of the 
peasants to 'do as they please with all the land'. What they were 
objecting to, in short, was virtually everything Lenin had done since 
he came to power. They were naive, to put it mildly, to assume that 
any single one of their demands would be granted except over 
gun-barrels, or indeed over Lenin's dead body. 

The failure of the sailors to spread revolt to the mainland allowed 
the regime to get itself organized. The fortress was stormed across 
the ice on 18 March, Tukhachevsky, who was in charge, using young 
Army cadets from the military schools, who had to be driven at 
pistol-point by a body of 200 desperate Bolsheviks drafted from the 
tenth Party Congress. The regime's line was that the mutiny had been 
organized from abroad by White Guards and led by Tsarist ex- 



80 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

officers. No public trials were held but Lenin carefully selected for 
publication a list of thirteen 'ringleaders', which included a former 
priest, five ex-officers and seven peasants. Hundreds, perhaps thou- 
sands, were murdered after the mutiny was crushed, though the 
details will probably never be known: the episode had been en- 
tombed by official Soviet historiography beneath a massive pyramid 
of lies. 106 

Once the mutiny was crushed, Lenin determined he would no 
longer tolerate any form of political activity outside the party. All 
those, he said, who were not in the party were 'nothing else but 
Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries dressed up in modern, Kron- 
stadt, non-party attire'. Such creatures, he added, 'we shall either 
keep safely in prison or send them to Martov in Berlin for the free 
enjoyment of all the amenities of free democracy'. 107 After this 
declaration, in May 1921, the Cheka quickly moved in to break up 
any remaining Social Democrat activity; that summer marked the 
extinction of visible political opposition in Lenin's state. He had 
given non-Communists the choice that still faces them today sixty 
years later: acquiescent silence, prison or exile. 

At the same time the process began whereby party membership 
became essential to the holding of any important position in the state 
and its endlessly proliferating organs. 'As the governing party,' wrote 
Lenin in 1921, 'we could not help fusing the Soviet "authorities" 
with the party "authorities" — with us they are fused, and they will 
be.' 108 And Kamenev: 'We administer Russia and it is only through 
Communists that we can administer it.' Party members were in- 
structed to take over 'the network of the state administration 
(railways, food supplies, control, army, law-courts etc.)', trade 
unions, and all factories and workshops, even public baths and 
dining rooms and other welfare organs, schools and housing com- 
mittees. In every sphere they were to constitute 'organized fractions' 
and 'vote solidly together'. 109 Communist Party membership was 
now essential to getting on; the party had swollen from 23,600 in 
1917 to 585,000 at the beginning of 1921. From this point date the 
first systematic efforts to screen party members (a 'central verifica- 
tion committee' was set up in October), expel those lacking in zeal, 
subservience or connections, and turn the party card into a valuable 
privilege, to be earned. 110 

Thus there came into being what is, perhaps, the most important 
single characteristic of the Communist totalitarian state: the hier- 
archy of party organs in town, district, region and republic, placed at 
each level in authority over the corresponding organs of the state. 
The 'vanguardism' of the Revolution was now transformed into the 
'vanguardism' of perpetual rule, the party becoming and remaining 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 81 

what Lenin called the 'leading and directing force' in Soviet society. 
Nowhere was party control more marked than in the central 
government, and in Sovnarkom itself, which was in theory answer- 
able to the Soviets. S.Lieberman, one of the 'experts' employed by 
Lenin, testified that, by 1921-2, the two key government depart- 
ments, the Council of People's Commissars and the Council of 
Labour and Defence, were already mere rubber-stamps for decisions 
taken within the party. 111 Lydia Bach, who studied the process at the 
time, wrote in 1923 that Sovnarkom, 'having ceased to be a body 
with a will of its own, does nothing but register automatically 
decisions taken elsewhere and place its seal on them'. 112 

Lenin had thus displaced one ruling class by another, the party. 
The 'new class' which the Yugoslav dissident Communist Milovan 
Djilas denounced in the 1950s was already in existence by 1921—2. 
But if the 'vanguard elite', now half a million strong, ultimately to be 
fifteen million, enjoyed privileges, even administrative authority, it 
did not share real power. That was to be the sole right of an inner 
vanguard, a secret elite. One of the most depressing features of the 
Lenin regime, as Rosa Luxemburg had feared, was the almost 
conscious reproduction of the very worst features of Tsardom. The 
Tsars, too, had periodically experimented with 'responsible govern- 
ment', a cabinet system like Sovnarkom. Peter the Great had had his 
'Senate', Alexander I his 'Committee of Ministers' in 1802, Alexan- 
der ii his 'Council of Ministers' in 1857, and there had been another 
such body in 1905. 113 In each case, the combination of autocracy 
plus bureaucracy wrecked the system, as the Tsar dealt privately with 
individual ministers instead of allowing the cabinet to function. The 
whiff of Divine Right was too strong in the Tsar's nostrils, just as 
now the whiff of History, and its handmaiden the Dictatorship of the 
Proletariat, was too strong in Lenin's. 114 When it came to the point, 
he did not want 'responsible government', any more than he wanted 
any kind of legal, constitutional or democratic restraints on his 
decisions. 

This meant crushing all opposition within the party, the third stage 
in the building of Lenin's autocracy. To do Lenin justice, he had 
always made it clear that he believed in a small, centralized party, 
with real decisions in the hands of a very few. He had set this all 
down in a letter to party workers dated September 1902. 115 His 
notions of 'democratic centralism' were clear and well known, 
though not officially defined until a decade after his death in 1934: 
'(1) Application of the elective principle to all leading organs of the 
party from the highest to the lowest; (2) periodic accountability of 
the party organs to their respective party organizations; (3) strict 
party discipline and subordination of the minority to the majority; 



82 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

(4) the absolutely binding character of the decision of the higher 
organs upon the lower organs and upon all party members.' 116 Now 
the most obvious thing about this list is that (3) and especially (4) 
completely cancel out (1) and (2). That in fact had been Lenin's 
practice. The Party Congress, though in theory sovereign, and 
meeting annually between 1917 and 1924, in fact took no leading 
part after its ratification of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 
1918. It became a mere form, like the All-Russian Congress of 
Soviets. The Central Committee succeeded to its authority. 

Lenin took advantage of the thrill of terror the Kronstadt mutiny 
had sent through the party to end any lingering notion of democracy 
within it. At the tenth Party Congress, which took place while the 
mutineers were still uncrushed, he told the delegates (9 March 1921) 
that the time had come to make the party monolithic: 'We do not 
need any opposition now, comrades. Now is not the time. Either on 
this side or on that — with a rifle, not with the opposition! No more 
opposition now, comrades! The time has come to put an end to 
opposition, to put the lid on it. We have had enough opposition!' 
They must end 'the luxury of discussions and disputes'. It was 'a 
great deal better to "discuss with rifles" than with the theses of the 
opposition'. 117 

Under the influence of this speech, and with the feeling perhaps 
that, if the mutiny succeeded, they would all be hanged in a fortnight, 
the comrades concentrated their minds wonderfully and passed a 
series of resolutions which gave Lenin everything he wanted. They 
included a secret rider, known as 'Point Seven', which gave the 
Central Committee 'full powers ... to apply all measures of party 
sanctions, including expulsion from the party' when any 'breach of 
discipline or revival or toleration of factionalism' took place. Such 
explusion would apply even to members of the cc, by a two-thirds 
vote, and the cc need not even refer the matter to the Congress, 
which thus abdicated. Moreover, 'factionalism' was now created an 
offence on a par with 'counter-revolution', so that all the newly 
created forces of repression, hitherto reserved for enemies of the 
party, could now be used against party members, who would be tried 
and condemned in secret. Some of those present were fully aware of 
the risks. Karl Radek, who had bought Lenin that pair of shoes, told 
the Congress: 'In voting for this resolution, I feel that it can well be 
turned against us. And nevertheless I support it ... . Let the Central 
Committee in a moment of danger take the severest measures against 
the best party comrades if it find this necessary .... Let the Central 
Committee even be mistaken! That is less dangerous than the 
wavering which is now observable.' 118 He knew that party demo- 
cracy was signing its death-warrant. What he (and many, many 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 83 

others present) did not realize was that he was signing his own actual 
death-warrant. 

That was doubtless because the extent to which the Central 
Committee itself had forfeited power to small groups within it, 
including its own bureaucracy, was not yet generally realized, in even 
the higher reaches of the party. The party bureaucracy was a 
deliberate creation of Lenin's. He had not merely a distrust but a 
positive loathing for the old imperial bureaucracy, not least because 
he felt compelled to use it. He wanted his own corps of officials, 
rather as the Tsars (again the sinister parallel) had developed a 
'Personal Chancery' to get round the system of cabinet and respon- 
sible government. 119 On 9 April 1919, in order to counter the 'evils' 
of the old bureaucracy, Lenin issued a decree setting up a People's 
Commissariat of State Control, to keep a watchful eye over state 
officials, and replace them when necessary by reliable people. As the 
Commissar of this bureau he appointed Stalin — it was in fact Stalin's 
first independent job of major importance. 

What Lenin liked in Stalin was undoubtedly his enormous capacity 
for endless drudgery behind a desk. A man like Trotsky was happy 
enough in violent action, or in violent polemics in speech and print. 
What he lacked was the willingness to engage, day after day and 
month after month, in the hard slog of running the party or state 
machinery. For this Stalin had an insatiable appetite, and since he 
appeared to possess no ideas of his own, or rather adopted Lenin's 
the moment they were explained to him, Lenin piled more and more 
offices and detailed bureaucratic work upon this patient and eager 
beast of burden. At the eighth Party Congress in the spring of 1919, 
three new bodies of great importance emerged. These were a 
six-member Secretariat of the Central Committee, an Organization 
Bureau (Orgburo) to run the party on a day-to-day basis, and a 
Political Bureau or Politburo of five, to 'take decisions on questions 
not permitting of delay'. To avoid the dangers of a clash between 
these three bodies, an interlocking membership was arranged. 
Stalin's name appeared on both the Politburo and the Orgburo lists. 

Holding this multiplicity of posts (which included membership of 
several other important committees), and exercising to the full his 
capacity for work, Stalin in the years 1919—21, and clearly on 
Lenin's instructions and with his full support, began to move men 
around within the labyrinthine hierarchies of party and government 
and Soviet organs, with a view to securing a more homogeneous, 
disciplined and docile machine, totally responsive to Lenin's will. He 
thus acquired an immensely detailed knowledge of personalities, 
throughout Russia as well as at the centre, and gradually also gained 
his own following since he became known as the most consistent 



84 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

job-provider. All this time he was Lenin's instrument. He was the 
perfect bureaucrat; and he had found the perfect master, with a huge 
will and an absolutely clear sense of direction. 

It is significant that Stalin's handiwork in the recesses of the party 
first began to be visible at the tenth Party Congress in 1921, when 
Lenin got the party to abdicate power over itself. This procedure, 
which in effect gave the Central Committee the right to pass death 
sentences on any members (including its own), meant that Lenin had 
to possess an absolutely dependable two-thirds majority on the cc. 
Stalin supplied it. The newly elected Central Committee included 
many already closely linked to him: Komarov, Mikhailov, Yaro- 
slavsky, Ordzhonikidze, Voroshilov, Frunze, Molotov, Petrovsky, 
Tuntal, and candidate-members like Kirov, Kuibyshev, Chubar and 
Gusev. These were the pliable legion Stalin had recruited on Lenin's 
behalf. He was also extremely active in the new 'Personal Chancery' 
or Party Secretariat, which began to grow almost as fast as the 
Cheka, and for similar reasons. In May 1919 it had a staff of thirty; 
this had risen to 150 by the ninth Party Congress of March 1920; 
and the next year, when Lenin killed democracy in the party, it was 
swollen to 602, plus its own 140-strong staff of guards and messen- 
gers. 120 Finally, at the eleventh Party Congress, Lenin gave Stalin 
formal possession of this little private empire he had so lovingly 
assembled when he made him General-Secretary of the party, with 
his henchmen Molotov and Kuibyshev as assistants. This was 
decided secretly and announced in a little tucked-away story in 
Pravda on 4 April 1922. One of the Bolsheviks, Preobrazhensky, 
protested against such concentration of power in Stalin's personal 
grip. Was it 'thinkable', he asked, 'that one man should be able to 
answer for the work of two commissariats as well as the work of the 
Politburo, the Orgburo and a dozen party committees?' 121 The 
protest seems to have been ignored. 

Two months later Lenin had his first stroke. But his work was 
already complete. He had systematically constructed, in all its 
essentials, the most carefully engineered apparatus of state tyranny 
the world had yet seen. In the old world, personal autocracies, except 
perhaps for brief periods, had been limited, or at least qualified, by 
other forces in society: a church, an aristocracy, an urban bourgeoi- 
sie, ancient charters and courts and assemblies. And there was, too, 
the notion of an external, restraining force, in the idea of a Deity, or 
Natural Law, or some absolute system of morality. Lenin's new 
despotic Utopia had no such counterweights or inhibitions. Church, 
aristocracy, bourgeoisie had all been swept away. Everything that 
was left was owned or controlled by the state. All rights whatsoever 
were vested in the state. And, within that state, enormous and 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 85 

ever-growing as it was, every single filament of power could be 
traced back to the hands of a minute group of men - ultimately to 
one man. There was, indeed, an elaborate and pretentious structure 
of representation. By 1922 it meant nothing whatever. You could 
search its echoing corridors in vain to find a spark of democratic 
life. How could it be otherwise? Lenin hated the essence of demo- 
cracy; and he regarded its forms merely as a means to legitimize 
violence and oppression. In 1917, the year he took power, he 
defined a democratic state as 'an organization for the systematic use 
of violence by one class against the other, by one part of the 
population against another'. 122 Who— whom? was his paramount 
criterion. Who was doing what to whom? Who was oppressing 
whom; exploiting or shooting whom? To a man who thought in 
such terms, who seems to have been incapable of thinking in any 
other terms, how could it have been possible to envisage a set of 
political arrangements except as a despotism, conducted by an 
autocrat and ruling by violence? 

At Lenin's last Party Congress, his imagery, more than ever, was 
militaristic: rifles, machine-guns, firing-squads. 'It is indispensable', 
he said, 'to punish strictly, severely, unsparingly the slightest breach 
of discipline.' Or again, 'Our revolutionary courts must shoot.' 123 
Not 'desirable' but indispensable. Not 'may' but must. It was he 
himself, at this time, who drafted the paragraph which remains to 
this day the basis, in Soviet criminal law, of the despotism: 

Propaganda or agitation or participation in an organization or co- 
operation with organizations having the effect ... of helping in the 
slightest way that part of the international bourgeoisie which does not 
recognize the equal rights of the Communist system coming to take the 
place of capitalism, and which is endeavouring to overthrow it by force, 
whether by intervention or blockade or by espionage or by financing of 
the press or by any other means - is punishable by death or imprison- 
ment. 124 

What else was this paragraph, as all-inclusive as words could make 
it, but an unrestricted licence for terror? That indeed was its 
purpose, as he explained in a letter to the Commissar of Justice, 
Kursky, written 17 May 1922, on the eve of his stroke: 'The 
paragraph on terror must be formulated as widely as possible, since 
only revolutionary consciousness of justice and revolutionary con- 
science can determine the conditions of its application in 
practice.' 125 Here, Lenin was encapsulating his lifelong contempt 
for any system of moral law. Just as, a few years later, Adolf Hitler 
was to justify his actions in accordance with what he termed 'the 
higher law of the party', so Lenin laid down the 'revolutionary 



86 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

conscience' as the only moral guide to the use of the vast machine for 
slaughter and cruelty he had brought into existence. 

It may be that Lenin believed there was such a thing as a 
'revolutionary conscience'. No doubt he thought he possessed one. 
Up to the end of 1918 he occasionally intervened in the terror to save 
the life of someone he knew personally. But everything else he said 
and did, in speech and writing, in public pronouncements and 
private letters, was to goad on his subordinates to further savagery, 
particularly towards the end. There is no doubt whatever that Lenin 
was corrupted by the absolute power he forged for himself. So were 
his colleagues. The very process of violent revolution, and violent 
self-preservation thereafter, inevitably destroyed conscience and all 
other elements of idealism. The point had been well made a decade 
before, by the wise and sad old Pole Joseph Conrad, in his novel 
about revolution, Under Western Eyes (1911): 

In a real revolution, the best characters do not come to the front. A violent 
revolution falls into the hands of narrow-minded fanatics and of tyrannical 
hypocrites at first. Afterwards come the turn of all the pretentious intellec- 
tual failures of the time. Such are the chiefs and the leaders. You will notice 
that I have left out the mere rogues. The scrupulous and the just, the noble, 
humane and devoted natures, the unselfish and the intelligent may begin a 
movement, but it passes away from them. They are not the leaders of a 
revolution. They are its victims: the victims of disgust, disenchantment - 
often of remorse. Hopes grotesquely betrayed, ideals caricatured - that is 
the definition of revolutionary success. 

Only Lenin's curious myopia about people, springing from his 
fundamental lack of interest in them as individuals, prevented him 
from recognizing that the civil war destroyed the last vestiges of what 
'revolutionary conscience' might once have existed. By that time, of 
course, he himself had been consumed by the organic cancer of 
power. The process had been described in a novel he must surely, 
once, have read, Dostoevsky's House of the Dead: 

Whoever has experienced the power, the unrestrained ability to humiliate 
another human being . . . automatically loses power over his own sensa- 
tions. Tyranny is a habit, it has its own organic life, it develops finally into a 
disease. The habit can kill and coarsen the very best man to the level of a 
beast. Blood and power intoxicate .... The man and the citizen die with the 
tyrant forever; the return to human dignity, to repentance, to regeneration, 
becomes almost impossible. 

Certainly, Lenin never showed the slightest regrets about his 
lifework, though in the last two-and-a-half years of his existence he 
was a sick, angry, frustrated and ultimately impotent creature. It is 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 87 

argued that, towards the end, he recognized Stalin as the emergent 
monster he undoubtedly was, and sought desperately to build up 
Trotsky's influence as a countervailing force. One would like to 
think that Lenin became a victim of his own despotism. But the facts 
are by no means clear. There is however one suggestive and sinister 
element. As part of his dehumanizing process, Lenin had insisted 
from the beginning of his rule that the party organs take an interest 
in the health of senior party men, and issue them (on medical advice) 
with orders about leave, hospitalization and rest. In mid-1921 Lenin 
began to experience severe headaches. On 4 June the Orgburo 
ordered him to take leave; he disobeyed it. He took a month's leave 
in July, and began to work less thereafter; there were further orders, 
from the Politburo, in August. He resumed normal work on 13 
September for nearly three months, but in early December his health 
got worse and he spent more time at his country house at Gorky 
outside Moscow. In the early weeks of 1922 there were more orders 
to do little or no work, and he was supposed to visit Moscow only 
with the permission of the Party Secretariat. His impress was on the 
tenth Party Congress throughout but ostensibly he only chaired a few 
committees. He had just left Moscow for a further rest when he had 
his first stroke on 25 May 1922. He was then completely out of 
action for months, and when he returned to work on 2 October, the 
Secretariat, in the name of the Central Committee, enforced a strict 
regime and prevented him from getting access to papers. There is no 
doubt at all that Stalin was the most active agent of this medical 
restriction, and on 18 December he had himself formally appointed 
supervisor of Lenin's health. 126 

This led directly to the Lenin-Stalin breach. Stalin discovered that 
Lenin had been secretly working, contrary to party orders, and, in 
particular, had been dictating letters to his wife. He abused Krup- 
skaya on the phone and threatened to have her investigated by the 
Central Control Commission. 127 On 24 December Lenin dictated his 
so-called 'testament'. This discussed six Soviet leaders by name. 
Stalin was said to have too much power, which he might wield with 
too little caution. Trotsky was described as 'over-preoccupied with 
the purely administrative side of things' ('administrative' was Lenin's 
euphemism for force and terror). On the night of 30 December 
Lenin dictated a further note, showing increased hostility to Stalin, 
and his last two articles were attacks on Stalin's Control Commis- 
sion. On 4 January 1923 Lenin dictated a postscript to his 'tes- 
tament': 'Stalin is too rude . . . intolerable in a Secretary-General. I 
therefore propose to our comrades to consider a means of removing 
Stalin from this post.' 128 On the night of 5 March Lenin wrote to 
Stalin, rebuking him for abusing his wife on the phone and telling 



88 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

him to apologize or face 'the rupture of relations between us'. Four 
days later came the second, debilitating stroke which robbed Lenin 
of speech, movement and mind. A final stroke killed him in January 
1924 but by then he had long since ceased to count. 

Lenin thus bequeathed to his successor all the elements of a 
personal despotism in furious working order. What, in the mean- 
time, had happened to the Utopia? In 1919 the American journalist 
Lincoln Steffens accompanied an official US mission sent by Wilson 
to Russia to find out what was going on there. On his return, 
Bernard Baruch asked him what Lenin's Russia was like, and Steffens 
replied, 'I have been over into the future - and it works!' 129 This was 
one of the earliest comments by a western liberal on the new kind of 
totalitarianism, and it set the pattern for much that was to come. 
What on earth can Steffens have seen? The whole object of Lenin's 
'vanguard elite' revolution was to speed up the industrialization of 
the country and thus the victory of the proletariat. Yet once Lenin 
took over the reverse happened. Before the war, Russian industrial 
production was increasing very fast: 62 per cent between 1900 and 
1913. 130 Until the end of 1916 at any rate it continued to expand in 
some directions. But once the peasants refused to hand over their 
1917 harvest (to Lenin's delight and profit) and food ceased to flow 
into the towns, the industrial workers, many of them born peasants, 
began to drift back to their native villages. Lenin's revolution turned 
the drift into a stampede. Beginning in the winter of 1917-18, the 
population of Petrograd fell from 2.4 to 1.5 million; by 1920 it was a 
ghost town, having lost 71.5 per cent of its population; Moscow lost 
44.5 per cent. The year Steffens 'went over into the future', the 
Russian industrial labour force had fallen to 76 per cent of its 1917 
total, and the wastage was greatest among skilled workers. Produc- 
tion of iron ore and cast iron fell to only 1.6 and 2.4 per cent of their 
1913 totals, and total output of manufactured goods, by 1920, was a 
mere 12.9 per cent of pre-war. 131 By 1922, the year Lenin had his 
first stroke, the more independent-minded members of the regime 
were talking of the de-industrialization of Russia. Maxim Gorky told 
a French visitor: 

Hitherto the workers were masters, but they are only a tiny minority . . . the 
peasants are legion .... The urban proletariat has been declining steadily 
for four years .... The immense peasant tide will end by engulfing 
everything .... The peasant will become master of Russia, since he repre- 
sents numbers. And it will be terrible for our future. 132 

What had happened? The truth is, though Lenin understood very 
well how to create a despotism, he had no practical vision of the 
Utopia at all. Marx provided no clue. He described the capitalist 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 89 

economy; he said nothing about the socialist economy. It would, 
Marx remarked vaguely, be organized by 'society'. All he was sure 
about was that once 'all elements of production' were 'in the hands 
of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organized as the ruling class', then 
'productive forces would reach their peak and the sources of wealth 
flow in full abundance'. 133 Lenin had no ideas on this subject either. 
He deduced from Marx that 'the state' ought to run the industrial 
economy. Just as the 'vanguard elite' had to take the place of the 
proletariat in forcing through the revolution in an underdeveloped 
industrial economy, so too it would have to represent it in running 
'all elements of production'. And since Lenin believed in ultra- 
centralism in political matters, and had created a machine with 
precisely this end in view, so there must be central control in 
industry, with the party (i.e., himself and immediate associates) 
exercising it. This crude line of thought underlay the 'April Theses' 
and his two other wartime writings, Will the Bolshevists Retain State 
Power? and State and Revolution, It also prompted his decision, in 
December 1917, to create a body called Vesenkha (Supreme Council 
of National Economy) and, during the next dozen or so weeks, 
separate ministries to control the major industries, all of them staffed 
by bureaucrats. 

Thus, almost haphazardly, did Soviet Russia acquire a centralized 
'planned' economy of the type which she has maintained ever since 
and exported to a third of the world. As usual, Lenin thought entirely 
in terms of control; not of production. He thought that provided he 
got the system of control right (with the Politburo taking all the key 
decisions), the results would flow inevitably. He was wholly ignorant 
of the process whereby wealth is created. What he liked were figures: 
all his life he had an insatiable appetite for bluebooks. One some- 
times suspects that inside Lenin there was a book-keeper of genius 
struggling to get out and bombard the world with ledgers. In all his 
remarks on economic matters once he achieved power, the phrase 
which occurs most frequently is 'strict accounting and control'. To 
him, statistics were the evidence of success. So the new ministries, 
and the new state-owned factories, produced statistics in enormous 
quantities. The output of statistics became, and remains to this day, 
one of the most impressive characteristics of Soviet industry. But the 
output of goods was another matter. 

The shape of the Soviet economy was also determined by another 
accidental factor, which gave Lenin a practical vision. This was the 
German war-production machine. One must remember that, during 
the formative period of the Leninist state, its first twelve months, 
Russia was first the negotiating partner, then the economic puppet, 
of Germany. By 1917, as we have seen, the Germans had seized upon 



90 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

the state capitalist model of pre-war Russia and married it to their 
own state, now run by the military. They called it 'war socialism'. It 
looked impressive; indeed in many ways it was impressive, and it 
certainly impressed Lenin. From then on his industrial ideas were all 
shaped by German practice. His first industrial supremo, the former 
Menshevik Larin, was also an enthusiastic exponent of German 
methods, which of course fitted in perfectly with Lenin's notions of 
central control. He began to hire German experts, another example 
of the special relationship developing between the anti-democratic 
elements in both countries. When other Bolsheviks objected, Lenin 
replied with his pamphlet On 'Left' Infantilism and the Petty 
Bourgeois Spirit: 

Yes: learn from the Germans! History proceeds by zigzags and crooked 
paths. It happens that it is the Germans who now, side by side with bestial 
imperialism, embody the principle of discipline, of organization, of solid 
working together, on the basis of the most modern machinery, of strict 
accounting and control. And this is precisely what we lack. 134 

German 'state capitalism', he said, was a 'step forward' to socialism. 
History had played a 'strange trick'. It had just given birth to 'two 
separate halves of socialism, side by side, like two chickens in one 
shell': political revolution in Russia, economic organization in 
Germany. Both were necessary to socialism. So the new Russia must 
study the 'state capitalism of the Germans' and 'adopt it with all 
possible strength, not to spare dictatorial methods in order to hasten 
its adoption even more than Peter [the Great] hastened the adoption 
of westernism by barbarous Russia, not shrinking from barbarous 
weapons to fight barbarism.' 135 

So one might say that the man who really inspired Soviet economic 
planning was Ludendorff. His 'war socialism' certainly did not 
shrink from barbarism. It employed slave-labourers. In January 1918 
Ludendorff broke a strike of 400,000 Berlin workers by drafting tens 
of thousands of them to the front in 'labour battalions'. Many of his 
methods were later to be revived and intensified by the Nazis. It 
would be difficult to think of a more evil model for a workers' state. 
Yet these were precisely the features of German 'war socialism' Lenin 
most valued. What the Germans had, what he wanted, was a docile 
labour force. He set about getting it. The first illusion he dispelled 
was that the workers' Soviets which had taken over the factories 
were to run them. His trade union spokesman, Lozovsky, warned: 
'The workers in each enterprise should not get the impression that 
the enterprise belongs to them.' 136 No fear of that with Lenin in 
control! 'Such disturbers of discipline', he said, 'should be shot.' 137 By 
January 1918, the Bolshevik regime had taken over the unions and 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 91 

brought them into the government. They were weak anyway. The 
only strong one was the railwaymen's, which put up some resistance 
and was not finally crushed till 1920—1. The other union leaders 
acquired jobs, offices, salaries and became tame government offi- 
cials. As Zinoviev put it, the unions had become 'organs of socialist 
power' and 'organs of the socialist state', and for all workers 
'participation in the trade unions will be part of their duty to the 
state'. So the closed shop was universally imposed and in return 
union officials (who soon had to be party members under party 
discipline) worked closely with ministry bureaucrats and factory 
managers to 'raise socialist production'. In short they became 
company unions of the most debased kind, the 'company' being the 
state. In this corporatist system their main task became 'labour 
discipline' and they found themselves acting as an industrial police- 
force. 138 

Such policing became necessary as Lenin applied his notion of 
'universal labour service' on the analogy of military conscription. 139 
The seventh Party Congress demanded 'the most energetic, unspar- 
ingly decisive, draconian measures to raise the self-discipline and 
discipline of workers'. From April 1918 the unions were set to work 
issuing 'regulations' to 'fix norms of productivity'. Workers who 
rebelled were expelled from the union, with consequent loss of job 
and food-rations, on the lines of Lenin's dictum 'He who does not 
work, neither shall he eat'. 140 Strikes became illegal. 'No strikes can 
take place in Soviet Russia', said the trade union confederation head, 
Tomsky, in January 1919, 'let us put the dot on that "i'Y Strike 
funds were confiscated and sent to promote strikes in 'bourgeois 
countries'. In June 1919 'labour books', modelled on the work- 
passes imposed on natives by various colonial governments, were 
introduced in the big towns. About the same time, the first organized 
labour camps came into existence: 'undisciplined workers', 'hooli- 
gans' and other disaffected or idle people could be sent there by the 
Cheka, revolutionary tribunals or Narkomtrud, the body responsible 
for general labour mobilization. From January 1920 anybody could 
be called up for compulsory corvee: road-making, building, carting 
etc. As a Narkomtrud spokesman put it: 'We supplied labour 
according to plan, and consequently without taking account of 
individual peculiarities or qualifications or the wish of the worker to 
engage in this or that kind of work.' 142 The provincial Chekas ran 
the camps, whose administration was in the hands of a special 
section of the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs, the nkvd. 
There was a second tier of camps, with a harsher regime and 
'difficult and unpleasant' work (i.e. in the Arctic), supposedly for 
counter-revolutionaries only, but soon full of ordinary workers. 143 



92 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

The end of the civil war did not end compulsory labour. Like all 
Lenin's 'emergency' institutions, it became permanent. Indeed, the 
Third Army in the Urals promptly found itself transformed into 'the 
First Revolutionary Army of Labour' by a decree of 15 January 
1920, and most of its 'soldiers' never saw their homes again. Trotsky 
exulted in what he called 'the militarization of the working class'. 
Radek denounced 'the bourgeois prejudice of "freedom of labour"'. 
The ninth Party Congress in 1920 ordered workers leaving their jobs 
to be branded as 'labour deserters' and punished by 'confinement in 
a concentration camp'. 144 The new anti-society was christened in a 
flourish of Leninist Newspeak: 'We know slave-labour,' Trotsky told 
the third Trade Union Congress, 'we know serf -labour. We know the 
compulsory, regimented labour of the medieval guilds, we have 
known the hired wage-labour which the bourgeoisie calls "free". We 
are now advancing towards a type of labour socially regulated on the 
basis of an economic plan which is obligatory for the whole 
country .... This is the foundation of socialism.' Compulsory labour 
under capitalism, wrote Bukharin, was quite the reverse of compul- 
sory labour under the dictatorship of the proletariat: the first was 
'the enslavement of the working class', the second the 'self- 
organization of the working class'. 145 Both these men were later to 
be murdered by the same verbal fictions. 

In fact, as we have seen, the working class was organizing itself 
back into the villages at an alarming rate. Lenin, like the Tsars and 
Kerensky before him, had somehow to gouge food out of the 
peasants. How to do it - by the market or by bayonets? First he tried 
bayonets. In 1917 he had incited the peasants to seize their land. In 
1918 he tried to grab the land for the state. His 'On the Socialization 
of the Land' law of 19 February 1918 said the object of policy was 
'to develop the collective system of agriculture' at 'the expense of 
individual holdings' in order to bring about 'a socialist economy'. 146 
But in practice, as an official of Narkomzen, the state agriculture 
ministry, put it, 'the land was simply seized by the local peasants'. 
They got 86 per cent of the confiscated land, and only 14 per cent 
went to the newly established state farms and communes. So for the 
autumn 1918 harvest, Lenin sent armed detachments of factory 
workers into the countryside to confiscate what food they could, and 
tried to encourage 'committees of poor peasants' to tyrannize over 
those he termed 'kulaks and rich peasants' who had 'amassed 
enormous sums of money'. 147 Later, Lenin grouped these devices 
together, into twenty-five-strong bands of 'workers and poor pea- 
sants', who got a cut of any food they managed to steal. But, said 
Tsuryupa, Commissar for Agriculture, as soon as they reached the 
country 'they begin to break out and get drunk.' Later still, Lenin 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 93 

invented a new category of 'middle peasants', whom he tried to set 
against the 'kulaks'. As these classes existed only in his own mind, 
and bore no relation to actual peasants in real villages, that tactic did 
not work either. 

By the spring of 1921, when the Kronstadt sailors rose, Lenin's 
whole economic policy, such at it was, lay in manifest ruins. Industry 
was producing practically nothing. There was no food in the towns. 
On Lenin's own admission 'tens and hundreds of thousands of 
disbanded soldiers' were becoming bandits. 148 About the only thing in 
plentiful supply was the paper rouble, which the printing presses 
poured out ceaselessly, and which had now fallen to little over 1 per 
cent of its November 1917 value. Some of the Bolsheviks tried to make 
a virtue of necessity and boasted that the inflation was deliberately 
created to smash the old regime of money. One described the presses 
of the state mint as 'that machine-gun of the Commissariat of Finance 
pouring fire into the arse of the bourgeois system'. Zinoviev told the 
German Social Democrats, 'We are moving towards the complete 
abolition of money.' In a sense this was true: paper money has never 
recovered its old significance in the Soviet Union. But the price has 
been permanent shortages in the shops. 

In any case, the peasants would not look at Lenin's paper rouble, 
and in May 1921 he threw in his hand. Plainly, if he did not get some 
food to the towns, his regime would collapse. He may have been 
short of genuine economic ideas, but he was never short of verbal 
ones. He now coined the phrase 'New Economic Planning', nep was, 
in fact, surrender to the peasants and the return to a market system 
based on barter. The goon-squads were withdrawn, and the peasants 
were allowed to get what they could for their food. Small factories 
and workshops were allowed to start up again, outside the control of 
the state, to produce goods the peasants were willing to accept in 
exchange for grain. Unfortunately, the Bolshevik capitulation came 
too late to affect the 1921 sowing, and a dry summer brought 
famine, the first in Russian history to be substantially created by 
government policy. It affected, according to Kalinin, about 27 
million people. As many as 3 million may have died in the winter of 
1921-2. In desperation, the government turned to the American 
Relief Administration organized under Herbert Hoover. For the first 
time, Russia, hitherto one of the world's greatest food-exporting 
countries, had to turn to American capitalist agriculture to save it 
from the disastrous consequences of its experiment in collectivism. 
Sixty years later, the same pattern was being repeated. The peasants 
had destroyed the Tsar and made Leninism possible. Lenin had failed 
to reward them, as he had promised. They exacted a price. It is still 
being paid. 149 



94 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

Thus ended, in total failure, the first major experiment in what it 
was now fashionable to call social engineering. Lenin termed it 'a 
defeat and retreat, for a new attack'. 150 But soon he was dead, and 
the 'new attack' on the peasants was to be left to the bureaucratic 
monster he left behind him. Lenin believed in planning because it was 
'scientific'. But he did not know how to do it. He thought there must 
be some magical trick, which in his case took the form of 'electrifica- 
tion'. Fascinated, as he always was, by Germanic 'thoroughness', he 
greatly admired Karl Ballod's Der Zukunftsstaat, published in 1919. 
It inspired his slogan: 'Communism is Soviet power plus electrifica- 
tion of the whole country.' Electricity would do it! It was the last 
word in modern science! 151 It would transform stubborn Russian 
agriculture. Much better to try to electrify everything than to work 
out a complicated general plan, which was nothing but 'idle talk', 
'boring pedantry', 'ignorant conceit'. 152 He took little interest in 
Gosplan (1921), the new planning machinery, until it gave top 
priority to electrification. Then, in his last few active weeks, he 
became enthusiastic about it: it would build vast power-stations! 
Thus began a curious cult which has persisted in the Soviet Union to 
this day, and which has made the heavy electrical engineer the most 
valued figure in Soviet society (next to the arms designer). Lenin's 
legacy was a solidly built police state surrounded by economic ruins. 
But he went to eternity dreaming of electricity. 

Lenin's confident expectations of Marxist risings in the advanced 
industrial countries have long since been buried. How would they 
have succeeded? Lenin's own revolution had only been made poss- 
ible by a huge, inchoate, undirected and pragmatic movement among 
the peasants, which he did not understand and never troubled to 
analyse. His fellow Marxist revolutionaries in industrial Europe had 
no such luck. Besides, by November 1918, when the opportunity for 
revolutionary change in central Europe arrived, the dismal exper- 
iences of Lenin's social enginering — economic breakdown, starva- 
tion, civil war and mass terror — already constituted an awful 
warning, not least to the more moderate socialists. The extremists 
did, indeed, try their hands, and were burnt in the flames they lit. On 
4 November 1918, German sailors and soldiers took over Kiel and 
formed workers' councils. Three days later, the Left socialist Kurt 
Eisner led a rising of the garrison in Munich, and overturned the 
Bavarian government. But the Social Democrats who came to power 
in Germany when the Kaiser fled did not make Kerensky's mistakes. 
Their military expert, Gustav Noske, turned to the army, which 
provided a Freikorps of ex-officers and ncos. The refusal of the 
Leninists to seek power by parliamentary means played into his 
hands. On 6 January 1919 the Berlin Leninists (who called them- 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 95 

selves Spartacists) took over the city. Noske marched on it at the 
head of 2,000 men. Three days after he took it, Rosa Luxemburg and 
her friend Karl Liebknecht were murdered by the ex-officers charged 
with taking them to prison. Eisner, too, was murdered on 21 
February. His followers contrived to win only three seats in the 
Bavarian elections. When, despite this, they set up a Communist 
Republic on 7 April, it lasted less than a month and was destroyed by 
the Freikorps without difficulty. It was the same story in Halle, 
Hamburg, Bremen, Leipzig, Thuringia, Brunswick. The Communists 
could neither win elections nor practise violence successfully. 152 

The wind of change was blowing in rather a different direction. By 
the second half of 1919 new types of 'vanguard elites' were making 
their appearance in Europe. They too were socialists. Marx was 
often in their pantheon. But they appealed to something broader 
than an abstract 'proletariat' which was mysteriously failing to 
respond — at any rate as an electoral or a fighting force — and their 
collective dynamic was not so much class as nation, even race. They 
also had a powerful and immediate grievance in common: dissatis- 
faction with the Treaty of Versailles. In Austria, one of the big losers, 
they were called Heimwehren, In Hungary, the biggest loser of all, 
the national temper had not been improved by a putative Communist 
republic, set up in March 1919 by Lenin's disciple Bela Kun. In 
August it collapsed in fire and blood, and the spirit of its successor 
was increasingly that of the anti-Semitic leader Julius Gombos, who 
called himself a National Socialist and appealed passionately for 
justice, revenge and a purge of 'alien elements'. 153 In Turkey, which 
had lost its Arab empire and appeared to be losing its western littoral 
also, Mustafa Kemal Pasha, soon to be 'Ataturk', likewise offered 
national socialism and was already proving that a settlement deter- 
mined in Paris could not be enforced on the spot. Italy, too, though a 
big gainer, still had a grievance against Versailles: she had not got the 
Dalmatian coast. On 1 1 September, the poet and war-hero Gabriele 
d'Annunzio led a raggle-taggle force of army deserters into the port 
of Fiume. It was an impudent bluff: but Britain and France, the 
custodians of the settlement, backed down - an ominous portent. 
D'Annunzio, too, was a national socialist. 

From Milan, Mussolini sniffed this new wind and liked it, just as 
five years earlier he had caught the whiff of wartime excitement, and 
liked that too. The coming of war and his own determination to 
bring Italy into it had taken him right out of the official socialist 
party. It had made him a nationalist, not merely in the romantic- Left 
tradition of Mazzini but in the acquisitive tradition of the old 
Romans, whose fasces, turned into a radical emblem in the French 
Revolution, he found a useful symbol, just as Lenin had picked on 



96 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

the hammer and sickle of the old Social Democrats. It made him hate 
Lenin for taking Russia out of the war and so jeopardizing Italy's 
promised gains. He urged the Japanese to march through Russia with 
the command 'Avanti, il Mikado /' By 1919 Lenin's economic failure 
had turned him away from the outright expropriation of industry. 
He now wanted to use and exploit capitalism rather than destroy it. 
But his was to be a radical revolution nonetheless, rooted in the 
pre-war Vanguard elite' Marxism and syndicalism (workers' rule) 
which was to remain to his death the most important single element 
in his politics. Many other young Italian former socialists shared his 
radicalism while abandoning their internationalism. 154 Internation- 
alism had not worked either in 1914, when it had failed to stop war, 
or in 1917, when it had failed to respond to Lenin's call for world 
revolution. But the desire to install a new economic Utopia remained. 

On 23 March 1919 Mussolini and his syndicalist friends founded 
a new party. Its programme was partial seizure of finance capital, 
control over the rest of the economy by corporative economic 
councils, confiscation of church lands and agrarian reform, and 
abolition of the monarchy and senate. In compiling this list Musso- 
lini frequently cited Kurt Eisner as a model. 155 Eisner's Bavarian 
fighting-squads, themselves an imitation of Lenin's 'men in black 
leather jerkins', served to inspire Mussolini's Fasci di Combat- 
timento.^ 56 Indeed, he had shed none of the attachment to violent 
activism he shared with Lenin. Paraphrasing Marx, he pledged 
himself 'to make history, not to endure it'. His other favourite 
quotation was Vivre, ce nest pas calculer, cest agir. 157 His vocabul- 
ary was very like Lenin's, abounding in military imagery and strong, 
violent verbs. Like Lenin, he was impatient to get history moving, 
fast - to velocizzare I'ltalia, as the Futurists like Marinetti put it. 
Indeed he radiated impatience, furiously studying his watch, turning 
with anger on the agents of delay. 

Yet Mussolini was changing. The lean and hungry look had gone 
with his hair. On his bald head a huge cyst had emerged and a dark 
oval mole on his thrusting and now fleshy chin. His teeth were the 
colour of old ivory and widely separated, considered lucky in 
Italy. 158 He was handsome, vigorous, well-launched in a sexual 
career that would bring him 169 mistresses. 159 He was very vain and 
ambitious. He wanted power and he wanted it now. D'Annunzio's 
success persuaded him that radicalism, even radical nationalism, was 
not enough. For fascism to succeed, it must invoke poetry, drama, 
mystery. This had always been a complaint, among the Italian 
Marxists, about Marx himself: he did not understand human beings 
well enough. He omitted the potency of myth, especially national 
myth. Now that Freud had demonstrated - scientifically, too - the 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 97 

power of dark and hidden forces to move individuals, was it not time 
to examine their impact on mass-man? D'Annunzio wrote of 'the 
terrible energies, the sense of power, the instinct for battle and 
domination, the abundance of productive and fructifying forces, all 
the virtues of Dionysian man, the victor, the destroyer, the 
creator'. 160 Italy was not short of poetic myths. There was the 
nineteenth-century nationalist myth of Garibaldi and Mazzini, still 
enormously powerful, the Realpolitik myth of Machiavelli (another 
of Mussolini's favourite authors), and the still earlier myth of Rome 
and its empire, waiting to be stirred from its long sleep and set to 
march with new legions. On top of this there was the new Futurist 
myth, which inspired in Mussolini a vision of a socialist Italy, not 
unlike Lenin's electrified Russia, in which 'life will become more 
intense and frenetic, ruled by the rhythm of the machine'. Mussolini 
stirred all these volatile elements together to produce his heavy 
fascist brew, flavouring all with the vivifying dash of violence: 'No 
life without shedding blood', as he put it. 161 

But whose blood? Mussolini was a complex and in many respects 
ambivalent man. Unlike Lenin, he rarely did the evil thing of his own 
accord; he nearly always had to be tempted into it, until long years of 
power and flattery atrophied his moral sense almost completely. He 
was not capable of embarking on a deliberate course of unprovoked 
violence. In 1919-20 he was desperate for a fighting cause. He spoke 
forlornly of fascism as 'the refuge of all heretics, the church of all 
heresies'. 162 Then the socialists, by resorting to violence, gave him 
what he wanted. Their mentor was a frail young Marxist called 
Antonio Gramsci, who came from exactly the same intellectual 
tradition as Mussolini: Marxism, Sorel, syndicalism, a repudiation of 
historical determinism, a stress on voluntarism, the need to force 
history forward by an emphasis on struggle, violence and myth; plus 
Machiavellian pragmatism. 163 But Gramsci, though much more 
original than Mussolini, lacked his aplomb and self-confidence. He 
came from a desperately poor Sardinian family. His father had gone 
to jail and Gramsci, who already suffered from Pott's Disease of the 
lungs, had begun working a ten-hour day at the age of eleven. He 
was amazed when his future wife fell in love with him (and wrote her 
some striking love-letters). Unable to see himself in a leadership role, 
he drew from Machiavelli not a personal prince, like Mussolini, but a 
collective one: 'The modern Prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real 
person, a concrete individual: it can only be an organization.' 

Thus Gramsci stuck to syndicalism when Mussolini turned to 
romance and drama, and he preached the take-over of factories. In 
1920 the socialists began to follow his advice and soon the Red Flag 
flew over workshops and offices scattered all over the country. There 



98 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

was no determined effort to take over the state. Indeed the socialists 
were divided about tactics, and in January 1921 they split, with a 
Communist Party (pci) forging off to the left. The take-over accom- 
plished little except to terrify the middle class. As Errico Malatesta 
warned the moderates: 'If we do not go on to the end, we shall have 
to pay with tears of blood for the fear we are now causing the 
bourgeoisie.' 164 There was not much violence, but enough to give 
Mussolini the excuse to resort to it himself. As in Germany, the 
socialists made a catastrophic mistake in using it at all. 165 As 
Mussolini boasted, the fascist leopard could easily deal with the 'lazy 
cattle' of the socialist masses. 166 

The fascist 'action squads' were formed mainly from ex- 
servicemen, but they constantly recruited students and school- 
leavers. They were much better disciplined and more systematic than 
the socialists and co-ordinated their efforts by telephone. They often 
had the passive or even active support of the local authorities and 
cafabinieri, who would search a socialist casa del popolo for arms, 
then give the go-ahead to the squads, who would burn it down. The 
socialists claimed fascism was a class party, and its terror a Jacquerie 
borghese. Not so: there were thousands of working-class fascists, 
especially in areas like Trieste where a racial element could be 
invoked (the socialists there were mainly Slovenes). It was in these 
fringe areas that fascism first got a mass-following, spreading 
gradually inland to Bologna, the Po Valley and the hinterland of 
Venice. Mussolini, always sensitive towards people, early grasped 
the point that Italy was a collection of cities, each different, each to 
be played by ear. As he got inland, the middle-class element became 
more dominant. Fascism began to exercise a powerful appeal to 
well-to-do youth. One of the most important and dangerous recruits 
was Italo Balbo, who at the age of twenty-five brought Mussolini his 
home town, Ferrara, and soon became head of the fascist militia and 
by far the most ruthless and efficient of the condottieri. 167 In 1921 he 
moved through central Italy, like one of the Borgias, leaving behind 
the smoking ruins of trade union headquarters and a trail of corpses. 
It was Balbo who first terrified bien-pensant Italy into believing 
fascism might be an irresistible force. 

He even terrified Mussolini, who always disliked large-scale 
violence, especially violence for its own sake, and wrote and spoke 
against it. 168 But the expansion of fascism, which pushed him and 
thirty-five other deputies into parliament in May 1921, had also 
placed him, and other former socialists, in a minority within the 
movement. At the fascist Congress of Rome the same year, he was 
forced to compromise. In return for being made Duce, he agreed to 
violence, and 1922 was the year of fascist terror. In effect, the 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 99 

authorities connived while a private, party army began an internal 
conquest. In city after city, the town halls were stormed, socialist 
councils driven out of office by force, and local prefects, who wished 
to use the police to resist fascist illegality, were dismissed. The 
parliamentarians could not agree to form a strong government under 
Giolitti, who would have snuffed Mussolini out — the Duce would 
not have fought the state — because the Vatican effectively prevented 
the Church-influenced parties and the moderate socialists from 
coalescing. The new Communist Party (as later in Germany) actually 
hoped for a fascist regime, which it thought would precipitate a 
Marxist revolution. 169 When Balbo seized Ravenna in July 1922 the 
socialists responded by calling a General Strike, which was a 
disastrous failure. 

Italy was not a happy or a well-governed country. It had appalling 
poverty, the highest birth-rate in Europe and, after Germany, one of 
the highest inflation-rates. The risorgimento had brought disappoint- 
ment instead of the promised land. The war and its victories had 
divided Italy rather than united it. The parliamentary regime was 
grievously corrupt. The monarchy was unloved. The state itself had 
been at daggers with the Church since 1871, and was denounced 
from every pulpit on Sundays. The public services were breaking 
down. There was genuine fear of a Red Terror, for the Catholic 
newspapers were full of Lenin's atrocities and the Russian famine. 
Mussolini was not personally identified with violence. On the 
contrary: he seemed to many to be the one to stop it. He had become 
a wonderful public speaker. He had learnt from d'Annunzio the gift 
of conducting a quasi-operatic dialogue with the crowd {'A chi 
I'ltalia?' 'A noiV). But he was not just a demagogue. His speeches 
specialized in the wide-ranging philosophical reflections Italians 
love. Liberals from Benedetto Croce downwards attended his meet- 
ings. By the early autumn of 1922 his oratory had acquired a 
confident and statesmanlike ring. He was now in secret contact with 
the palace, the Vatican, the army, the police and big business. What, 
they all wanted to know, did he want? At Udine he told them, in the 
last of a series of major speeches given all over the country: 'Our 
programme is simple: we wish to govern Italy.' 170 He would govern 
Italy as it had never been governed since Roman times: firmly, fairly, 
justly, honestly, above all efficiently. 

On 16 October 1922 Mussolini decided to force the issue, 
believing that if he waited, Giolitti, the one man he feared, might 
steal his role. He arranged for a march on Rome for the end of the 
month, by four divisions totalling 40,000 blackshirted men. Many 
army and police commanders agreed not to fire on them, and his 
paper, // Popolo d'ltalia, carried the banner: J grigioverdi fraterniz- 



100 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

zano con le Camicie Nere! Mussolini had a lifelong capacity for 
hovering uneasily between grandeur and farce. By the time his 
ill-equipped, badly clothed and unfed army had halted outside Rome, 
in pouring rain, on the evening of 28 October, it did not present a very 
formidable spectacle. The government, though weak, had a Rome 
garrison of 28,000 under a reliable commander and it agreed to 
proclaim a state of emergency. But Rome buzzed with rumours and 
misinformation. The little King Victor Emmanuel, tucked up in the 
Quirinale Palace, was told only 6,000 ill-disciplined troops faced a 
horde of 100,000 determined fascists. He panicked and refused to sign 
the decree, which had to be torn down from the walls where it had just 
been posted. At that point the government lost heart. 

Mussolini, for an impatient man, played his cards skilfully. When 
he was telephoned in Milan by the King's adc, General Cittadini, and 
offered partial power in a new ministry, he simply replaced the 
receiver. The next day, 29 October, he graciously consented to form 
his own government, provided the invitation by phone was confirmed 
by telegram. The wire duly came, and that evening he went to Milan 
Station in state, wearing his black shirt, to catch the night-sleeper to 
Rome. As it happened, the wife of the British ambassador, Lady Sybil 
Graham, was also on the train. She saw Mussolini, who was 
surrounded by officials, impatiently consult his watch and turn 
fiercely on the station-master. 'I want the train to leave exactly on 
time', he said. 'From now on, everything has got to function 
perfectly.' 171 Thus a regime, and a legend, were born. 

In the last decade of his life Mussolini became an increasingly tragic, 
even grotesque, figure. Looking back from this later perspective it is 
hard to grasp that, from the end of 1922 to the mid-1930s, he 
appeared to everyone as a formidable piece on the European 
chess-board. Once installed, he did not make any of Lenin's obvious 
mistakes. He did not create a secret police, or abolish parliament. The 
press remained free, opposition leaders at liberty. There were some 
murders, but fewer than before the coup. The Fascist Grand Council 
was made an organ of state and the Blackshirts were legalized, giving 
an air of menace to the April 1924 elections, which returned a large 
fascist majority. But Mussolini saw himself as a national rather than a 
party leader. He said he ruled by consent as well as force. 172 He seems 
to have possessed not so much the will to power as the will to office. 
He wanted to remain there and become respectable; he wished to be 
loved. 

In 1924 the murder of Giacomo Matteotti, the most vigorous of the 
opposition deputies, ended these illusions. Mussolini was generally 
believed to be responsible. 173 Deputies had been killed before, and it is 
curious that this particular crime aroused such fury in Italy and raised 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 101 

eyebrows abroad. It did Mussolini great damage, some of it perman- 
ent, and became for him a kind of Rubicon, cutting any remaining 
links with the socialists and liberals and driving him into the arms of 
his extremists. In a very characteristic mixture of arrogance and 
fatalistic despair, he announced the beginning of fascism in a 
notorious speech delivered on 3 January 1925. Opposition newspap- 
ers were banned. Opposition leaders were placed in confino on an 
island. As Mussolini put it, opposition to the monolithic nation was 
superfluous - he could find any that was needed within himself and 
in the resistance of objective forces - a bit of verbal legerdemain that 
even Lenin might have envied. 174 He produced a resounding totalita- 
rian formula, much quoted, admired and excoriated then and since: 
'Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing 
against the state.' A whole series of 'fascist laws' were drawn up, 
some constitutional, some punitive, some positive, the last being the 
Leggi di riforma sociale^ which purported to bring the Corporate 
State into existence. 

But there was always something nebulous about Italian fascism. Its 
institutions, like the Labour Charter, the National Council of 
Corporations and the Chamber of Fasces and Corporations, never 
seemed to get much purchase on the real Italy. Mussolini boasted, 
'We control the political forces, we control the moral forces, we 
control the economic forces. Thus we are in the midst of the 
corporative fascist state.' 175 But it was a state built of words rather 
than deeds. After all, if Mussolini's totalitarian definition repre- 
sented reality, how was it he was able to come to terms with the 
Church, which was certainly 'outside the state', and even sign a 
concordat with the Vatican, something none of his parliamentary 
predecessors had been able to do? He once defined fascism as 
'organized, concentrated, authoritarian democracy on a national 
basis'. 176 Yes: but what was all this authority for} One senses that 
Mussolini was a reluctant fascist because, underneath, he remained a 
Marxist, albeit a heretical one; and to him 'revolution' was meaning- 
less without large-scale expropriation, something the bulk of his 
followers and colleagues did not want. So the fascist Utopia tended 
to vanish round the corner, leaving only the despotism. As late as 
1943, just before the debacle, an article in Critica fascista by the 
young militant Vito Panunzio declared that the regime could still win 
provided it at last brought about the 'fascist revolution'. 177 By then 
Mussolini had been in apparently dictatorial power for more than 
two decades. 

But if Mussolini did not practise fascism, and could not even 
define it with any precision, it was equally mystifying to its op- 
ponents, especially the Marxists. Sophisticated Anglo-Saxon liberals 



102 THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 

could dismiss it as a new kind of mountebank dictatorship, less 
bloodthirsty than Leninism and much less dangerous to property. 
But to the Marxists it was much more serious. By the mid-1 920s 
there were fascist movements all over Europe. One thing they all had 
in common was anti-Communism of the most active kind. They 
fought revolution with revolutionary means and met the Commun- 
ists on the streets with their own weapons. As early as 1923 the 
Bulgarian peasant regime of Aleksandr Stamboliski, which practised 
'agrarian Communism', was ousted by a fascist putsch. The Comin- 
tern, the new international bureau created by the Soviet government 
to spread and co-ordinate Communist activities, called on the 
'workers of the world' to protest against the 'victorious Bulgarian 
fascist clique', thus for the first time recognizing fascism as an 
international phenomenon. But what exactly was it? There was 
nothing specific about it in Marx. It had developed too late for Lenin 
to verbalize it into his march of History. It was unthinkable to 
recognize it for what it actually was — a Marxist heresy, indeed a 
modification of the Leninist heresy itself. Instead it had to be squared 
with Marxist-Leninist historiography and therefore shown to be not 
a portent of the future but a vicious flare-up of the dying bourgeois 
era. Hence after much lucubration an official Soviet definition was 
produced in 1933: fascism was 'the unconcealed terrorist dictator- 
ship of the most reactionary, chauvinistic and imperialistic elements 
of finance capital'. 178 This manifest nonsense was made necessary by 
the failure of 'scientific' Marxism to predict what was the most 
striking political development of the inter-war years. 

In the meantime, Mussolini's Italy was now an empirical fact, just 
like Lenin's Russia, inviting the world to study it, with a view to 
imitation, perhaps, or avoidance. The historian of modern times is 
made constantly aware of the increasingly rapid interaction of 
political events over wide distances. It was as though the develop- 
ment of radio, the international telephone system, mass-circulation 
newspapers and rapid forms of travel was producing a new concep- 
tion of social and political holism corresponding to new scientific 
perceptions of the universe and matter. According to Mach's Princi- 
ple, formulated first at the turn of the century and then reformulated 
as part of Einstein's cosmology, not only does the universe as a whole 
influence local, terrestrial events but local events have an influence, 
however small, on the universe as a whole. Quantum mechanics, 
developed in the 1920s, indicated that the same principle applied at 
the level of micro-quantities. There were no independent units, 
flourishing apart from the rest of the universe. 179 'Splendid isolation' 
was no longer a practicable state policy, as even the United States 
had implicitly admitted in 1917. There were many who welcomed 



THE FIRST DESPOTIC UTOPIAS 103 

this development, and saw the League of Nations as a response to 
what they felt was a welcome new fact of life. But the implications of 
global political holism were frightening as well as uplifting. The 
metaphor of disease was apt. The Black Death of the mid-fourteenth 
century had migrated over the course of more than fifty years and 
there were some areas it had never reached. The influenza virus of 
1918 had enveloped the world in weeks and penetrated almost 
everywhere. The virus of force, terror and totalitarianism might 
prove equally swift and ubiquitous. It had firmly implanted itself in 
Russia. It was now in Italy. 

If Lincoln Steffens could detect a working future even in Lenin's 
Moscow, what might not be discerned in totalitarian Rome? Musso- 
lini could not or would not conjure a new fascist civilization out of 
his cloudy verbal formulae. But what he liked doing and felt able to 
do, and indeed was gifted at doing, was big construction projects. He 
tackled malaria, then the great, debilitating scourge of central and 
southern Italy. 180 The draining of the Pontine Marshes was a 
considerable practical achievement, as well as a symbol of fascist 
energy. Mussolini encouraged Balbo, a keen pilot, to build a large 
aviation industry, which won many international awards. Another 
fascist boss, the Venetian financier Giuseppe Volpi, created a specta- 
cular industrial belt at Mughera and Mestre on the mainland. He 
also, as Minister of Finance, revalued the lira, which became a 
relatively strong currency. 181 Train, postal and phone services all 
markedly improved. There were no strikes. Corruption continued, 
perhaps increased; but it was less blatant and remarked upon. In 
Sicily, the Mafia was not destroyed, but it was effectively driven 
underground. Above all, there was no more violence on the streets. 
Some of these accomplishments were meretricious, others harmful in 
the long run. But taken together they looked impressive, to 
foreigners, to tourists, to many Italians too. No Utopia was emerging 
in Italy, but the contrast with hungry, terrorized Russia was striking. 
To those north of the Alps, who rejected alike the Bolshevism of the 
East and the liberalism of the West, the Italian renaissance seemed to 
offer a third way. 



THREE 

Waiting for Hitler 



On 10 November 1918 the Lutheran chaplain at the Pasewalk 
Military Hospital in Pomerania summoned the patients to tell them 
that the House of Hohenzollern had fallen: Germany was now a 
republic. The news came like a thunderbolt to the wounded soldiers. 
One of them was Adolf Hitler, a twenty-nine-year-old junior nco. 
He had fought on the Western Front throughout the war, had twice 
distinguished himself in action, and earlier that year had received the 
rare accolade of the Iron Cross First Class. A month before, on 13 
October south of Ypres, he had been temporarily blinded in a British 
mustard gas attack. He had not been able to read the newspapers and 
had dismissed rumours of collapse and revolution as a 'local affair', 
got up by 'a few Jewish youths' who had 'not been at the Front' but 
'in a clap hospital'. Now the aged pastor, tears pouring down his 
face, told them their Kaiser had fled, the war was lost and the Reich 
was throwing itself unconditionally upon the mercy of its enemies. 
The news of the surrender was, as Hitler later wrote, 'the most 
terrible certainty of my life. Everything went black before my eyes. I 
tottered and groped my way back to the dormitory, threw myself on 
my bunk, and dug my burning head into my blanket and pillow. 
Since the day I had stood on my mother's grave, I had not wept .... 
But now I could not help it.' 1 

The shock of defeat to most Germans, especially the soldiers, was 
enormous. It was something no one in the West understood. The 
Germans knew they were retreating on the Western Front. But the 
withdrawal was orderly; the army was intact. And it was not in the 
West that Germany's main anxieties and ambitions lay. Germany 
had fought the war principally from fear of the growing industrial 
and military strength of Russia, a huge, overbearing, tyrannical and 
barbarous neighbour, right on Germany's doorstep and threatening 
to overwhelm her. By the middle of 1918 Germany, despite the 
desperate struggles on the Western Front, had exorcized what to her 

104 



WAITING FOR HITLER 105 

was the principal spectre. Tsarist Russia had been beaten and 
destroyed. Its successor had signed a dictated peace. The Treaty of 
Brest-Litovsk gave Germany all the security she had ever needed. It 
deprived Russia of 70 per cent of her iron and steel capacity, 40 per 
cent of her total industry. It gave Germany everything in European 
Russia she considered of any value: as a member of the German 
government gloated, 'It is in the East that we shall collect the interest 
on our War Bonds.' 2 Indeed it gave more, because it reopened the 
prospect of a vast economic empire in Eastern Europe, a colonization 
of the great plains which had been the aim of the expanding German 
civilization of the Middle Ages. The 'pull of the East' had always 
meant more to average Germans than their belated exercise in African 
colonization or even the Kaiser's bid for commercial and maritime 
supremacy. It was Tsarist Great Russia which had blocked Germany's 
'manifest destiny' to the East. Now that monstrous despotism was at 
last in ruins. The programme of the Teutonic Knights could again be 
resumed. 

On 1 March 1918 Kiev fell and Ludendorff occupied the Ukraine, 
set up a 'Landowners' Republic' under German supervision, and laid 
the foundation of a satellite-colony of the Reich. The Kaiser became 
Duke of Courland, embracing Livonia and Estonia, to be run by their 
small German minorities and tied to Germany's economy. In April 
German troops landed in Finland, another potential satellite. On 7 
May Germany forced a dictated peace on Romania, and there too 
economic colonization proceeded quickly. Ludendorff put troops in 
the Crimea, which was earmarked for a German settlement, and in 
September he had penetrated as far as the Baku oilfields, preparatory 
to a plunge into Transcaucasia, to take up a strategic position on the 
rim of Central Asia. Even rumours of the downfall of the Habsburgs 
and the break-up of Turkey were seen by German geopoliticians as 
opportunities for further plunder and economic penetration, in 
central Europe and the Middle East. In the early autumn of 1918 it 
appeared to them that the war, far from being lost, had in all essentials 
been won - and won overwhelmingly. Indeed Germany might emerge 
from the settlement the equal, in military and economic potential, of 
the United States and the British Empire, the third superpower. 

Some illusions survived even the first, overwhelming shock of 
defeat. Leaving aside the fact that Wilson and Colonel House had 
already secretly accepted the Anglo-French interpretation of the 
'Fourteen Points', the optimistic construction the Germans placed on 
them was totally unwarranted. One south German town welcomed its 
demobilized soldiers with the banner 'Welcome, brave soldiers, your 
work has been done,/God and Wilson will carry it on'. 3 The truth was 
finally brought home to Germany only when the terms of the Treaty 



106 WAITING FOR HITLER 

were published in May 1919. In fact Versailles, for Germany, was 
not really a 'Carthaginian Peace'. Keynes was quite wrong in this 
respect. Austria and Hungary fared much worse. Versailles allowed 
Germany to retain all the essentials of Bismarck's work. Had she 
chosen the path of peace, Germany must inevitably have become, 
over the next two decades, the dominant economic force in the whole 
of central and eastern Europe. 

But Germany's losses have to be seen in the perspective of the 
colossal gains she thought she had secured only a short time before. 
The thought that Tsarist Russia would have imposed infinitely worse 
terms on Germany (very like, no doubt, those dictated in 1945) does 
not seem to have occurred to the Germans. In any case Tsarist Russia 
had been destroyed by German arms! Why, then, was Germany 
being forced in the East to hand over entire German communities to 
the barbarous Slavs, in the Polish Corridor, in East Prussia, and 
above all in Silesia, rich in coal and iron and industry? It was these 
losses which caused the Germans the most grief and anger because 
they struck at their pride: it was, to them, against nature for 
Germans to live under Slav rule. Even the Silesian plebiscite, an 
important concession secured for Germany by Lloyd George, became 
a further source of German anger, for the government never ex- 
plained to the German public that, under the Versailles Treaty, 
division of the province was permitted in accordance with local 
results. The plebiscite on 21 March 1921 gave a 60 per cent majority 
to Germany. But the League awarded some 40 per cent of the 
territory, containing a Polish majority, to Poland, and this portion 
included the most valuable industrial area. The Germans thought 
they had been swindled again; and this time their rage turned against 
the League. 4 

In a sense the Germans had been swindled for many years, but 
chiefly by their own governments, which had never told the country 
the truth about their foreign policy aims and methods. The full truth, 
indeed, did not begin to emerge until 1961 when the great German 
historian Fritz Fischer published his Griff nach der Weltmacht, in 
which he traced the aggressive continuities in Germany's expansive 
foreign and military policy. 5 A long and bitter controversy followed 
among German historians, culminating in the Berlin meeting of the 
German Historical Association in 1964. 6 During this debate, the 
essentials of the case for German war guilt were established beyond 
doubt, and in time accepted even by most of his critics. They are 
worth restating briefly. 

In the second half of the nineteenth century Germany became an 
enormous and highly successful industrial power. This involved 
bringing into existence a vast industrial proletariat, who could not be 



WAITING FOR HITLER 107 

managed like peasants and with whom the German ruling class of 
landowners and military men was unwilling to share power. Bismarck 
created a dual solution to this problem. On the one hand, in the 1880s, 
he expanded the traditional social welfare services of the Prussian 
monarchy into the world's first welfare state. 7 On the other, after his 
expansionary wars were done, he deliberately sought to preserve 
domestic unity by creating largely imaginary foreign threats of 'en- 
circlement', thus enclosing the nation in a homogeneous state of siege 
mentality. Bismarck knew how to manage this artificial nightmare. His 
successors did not. Indeed they came to believe in it themselves, victims 
of a growing irrationalism and dread. By 1 9 1 1 at the latest, Germany's 
ruling group had unleashed a new ethnic nationalism: 'The aim was to 
consolidate the position of the ruling classes with a successful foreign 
policy; indeed it was hoped a war would resolve the growing social 
tensions. By involving the masses in the great struggle those parts of the 
nation that had hitherto stood apart would be integrated into the 
monarchical state.' 8 The object of the 1914 war was to create a new 
European order in which Germany would be dominant. As Bethmann 
Hollweg's secretary, Riezler, described the proposed European eco- 
nomic union, it was 'The European disguise of our will to power'. 9 
Bethmann Hollweg recognized that Britain could not possibly accept 
total German dominance in Europe. Therefore Britain (as well as 
France and Russia) had to be defeated; and that meant Germany 
exercising the role of a world superpower. As Riezler put it, echoing 
Bethmann's thoughts : 'England's tragic error might consist of compell- 
ing us to rally all our strength, to exploit all our potentialities, to drive us 
into world-wide problems, to force upon us - against our will - a desire 
for world domination.' 10 This last formulation was very characteristic 
of the German desire to shift the moral responsibility for its aggression 
onto others. 

If the responsibility for starting the war was shared jointly by the 
military and civilian wings of the German ruling establishment, the 
magnitude of the defeat was the fault of the generals and the 
admirals. Germany ceased to be in any sense a civilian empire on 9 
January 1917 when Bethmann Hollweg surrendered to the demand, 
which he had resisted for three years, to wage unrestricted submarine 
warfare. Thereafter the admirals and Ludendorff were in charge. It 
was their war. They raised the stakes at the gambling table, thus 
making it certain that, when the inevitable crash came, Germany 
would not merely be defeated but broken, bankrupted, shamed and 
humiliated. As Riezler put it: 'We will practically have to accept the 
Diktat. Slavery for a hundred years. The dream about the world 
finished forever. The end of all hubris. The dispersion of Germans 
around the world. The fate of the Jews.' 11 



108 WAITING FOR HITLER 

It is a pity that Keynes could not have been privy to these desperate 
thoughts of a man who was at the very centre of the German 
decision-making machine. He could then have appreciated that the 
so-called 'Carthaginian Peace' was in fact very much more generous 
than Germany's rulers secretly expected. But of course the over- 
whelming mass of the Germans were even more ignorant than 
Keynes. They had been taught, and they believed, that the war had 
been caused principally by Russian expansionism and British com- 
mercial jealousy. For Germany it had been a defensive war of 
survival. The tragedy is that, when the collapse came in 1918, the 
opportunity to tell the truth to the German people was missed. Even 
among the German Socialists, the only ones to admit German 
war-guilt were Kurt Eisner, who was murdered in 1919, Karl 
Kautsky, who had the job of putting the pre-war diplomatic doc- 
uments in order, and Eduard David, who had seen the key papers 
when he was Under-Secretary at the Foreign Ministry immediately 
after the monarchy fell. 12 But none of the really revealing documents 
was published or made accessible. German historians, the best in the 
world, betrayed their profession and deluded themselves. Equally 
important, the chief actors in the tragedy lied or concealed the facts. 
Bethmann Hollweg could have told the truth about the origins of the 
war and the role of the military in losing it. He did not do so, despite 
provocation. Both Tirpitz and Ludendorff savaged him in their 
memoirs. But Bethmann's own account says very little: he feared to 
deepen the already wide divisions in German society. 13 

Not only was the truth not told: it was deliberately concealed 
beneath a myth that the German war-machine had been 'stabbed in 
the back' by civilian defeatism and cowardice. It is, looking back on 
it, extraordinary that this myth should have been accepted. No force 
in Wilhelmine Germany was capable of defying the military, let alone 
stabbing it in the back. Germany was in many ways the most 
militarized society on earth. Even the new industry was regimented 
in a military fashion. The factory-towns grew up around the 
barrack-cities of the Hohenzollern soldier-kings. The continuous 
military drill affected the business classes, and even the early stages 
of the trade union and Social Democratic movements, with their 
profound stress on discipline. Uniforms were everywhere. The Kaiser 
referred contemptuously to ministers, politicians and diplomats as 
'stupid civilians'. To raise their prestige, members of the government 
affected military dress. Bismarck sported the rig of a cavalry general. 
When Bethmann Hollweg first appeared as Chancellor in the Reich- 
stag he was dressed as a major. The Kaiser himself sat at his desk 
perched on a military saddle instead of a chair. 14 The idea of civilians 
somehow overturning this enormous and all-pervasive military struc- 



WAITING FOR HITLER 109 

ture, above all in the middle of the greatest war in history, was 
preposterous. 

It was, in fact, the other way round. It was Ludendorff, suddenly 
aware the game was up, and determined to preserve the army intact 
while there was still time, who insisted on an armistice. It was his 
successor, General Wilhelm Groener, who gave the Kaiser his 
marching-orders, telling him the army was going home in good 
order 'but not under the command of Your Majesty, for it stands 
no longer behind Your Majesty'. 15 And it was the army, having 
helped to engineer the war, having raised the stakes and ensured 
that the defeat was calamitous, which then slipped out of its 
responsibilities and handed back authority to the civilians. They 
were left with the task and the odium of arranging the armistice 
and signing the peace, while the generals prepared their stab-in-the- 
back exculpation. 

Thus, by a curious piece of national myopia, containing elements 
of self-deception, the Germans exonerated those who had got the 
country into the fearful mess in which it found itself. The Allies 
dropped their notion of war-crimes tribunals. They even backed 
down on extraditing German officers known to have broken The 
Hague Convention. These men were released to appear in German 
courts where they received ridiculously small sentences, and were 
then allowed to escape, returning to their homes as heroes. 

Instead, it was the Socialists and the politicians of the Centre who 
got the blame for Germany's troubles. The Socialists had been the 
biggest party in the Reichstag before the war, but they were never 
admitted to government; and because parliament had inadequate 
control over finance - the central weakness of pre-war German 
'democracy' - they could do nothing effective to stop German 
imperialism, though they voted against it. They were the only party 
to oppose Germany's annexations in Russia in early 1918. When 
the war ended, they briefly held power at last, but merely as the 
legal receivers of a bankrupt empire, whose sins they were made to 
bear. When the Centre politicians took over, as they soon did, they 
too were tainted with defeat, surrender, of being 'the men of the 
Allies'. 

To a greater or lesser degree, indeed, the stigma of Versailles was 
attached to all the politicians of the new Republic, and even to the 
notion of the Republic itself, and so to the whole idea of par- 
liamentary democracy. For the first time the Germans had the 
chance to run themselves. Everyone over twenty, male and female, 
had the vote. Elections to all public bodies were henceforth equal, 
secret, direct and according to proportional representation. The 
censorship was abolished. Rights of assembly were guaranteed. 



110 WAITING FOR HITLER 

Trade unions were recognized by employers. The eight-hour day was 
made mandatory. 16 When the first elections were held in January 
1919, three-quarters of those who took part in the 80 per cent poll 
favoured a republic. 

The new Weimar constitution was drawn up under the guidance of 
the great sociologist Max Weber. It gave parliament full financial 
sovereignty for the first time. It was supposed to embody all the best 
features of the American constitution. But it had one serious 
weakness. The President, elected for a seven-year term, was not the 
head of government: that was the Chancellor, a party figure respon- 
sible to parliament. But the President, under Article 48, was endowed 
with emergency powers when parliament was not in session. From 
1923 onwards this article was pervertedly invoked whenever par- 
liament was deadlocked. And parliament was often deadlocked, 
because proportional representation prevented the development of a 
two-party system and absolute majorities. To many Germans, who 
had been brought up on the notion that Germany and the Germans 
were a metaphysical, organic unity, the spectacle of a divided, 
jammed parliament was unnatural. The argument that parliament 
was the forum in which quite genuine and unavoidable conflicts of 
interest were peacefully resolved was alien to them, unacceptable. 
Instead they saw the Reichstag as a mere theatre for the enactment of 
'the game of the parties', while the real, eternal, organic and 
honourable Germany was embodied in the person of the President 
and Article 48. This constitutional cleavage was apparent even under 
the first president, the Socialist Friedrich Ebert. He preferred to use 
his power rather than force parliamentarians into the habit of 
settling their differences. It became far worse when Field-Marshal 
Hindenburg replaced him. 

Although Ludendorff had run the war, Hindenburg had been the 
nominal war-lord and public hero. In 1916 a gigantic wooden image 
had been made of him, to symbolize German determination to win. If 
you bought a War Bond you were allowed to knock a nail into it. 
About 100,000 nails were thus hammered into the colossus. 
Immediately the war was over the statue was broken up for 
firewood, as though to symbolize the disappearance of the military 
and the reign of the civilians. It was they, Weimar, and especially 
parliament, which were identified with the Treaty and all the 
post-war difficulties and shame. When the wooden titan returned as 
President, he personified not only wartime heroism and German 
unity, as opposed to party disunity, but the anti-republican 
counter-principle embedded in the Weimar Constitution itself. And it 
was under Hindenburg that presidential prerogative was used to 
appoint and dismiss chancellors and dissolve the Reichstag, leading 



WAITING FOR HITLER 111 

in the last years to the virtual suspension of parliamentary govern- 
ment. Hitler climaxed the process by exploiting the article to lay the 
foundations of his dictatorship even before parliament disappeared 
in April 1933. 

The cleavage within the constitution might not have mattered so 
much had it not reflected a much deeper division in German 
society, and indeed in German minds. I call this the East— West 
division, and it is one of the central themes of modern times, in so 
far as they have been influenced by Germany's destiny. The princi- 
pal characteristic of the pre-war German regime of princes, generals 
and landowners, the law-professors who endowed it with academic 
legitimacy, and the Lutheran pastors who gave it moral authority, 
was illiberalism. This ruling caste hated the West with passionate 
loathing, both for its liberal ideas and for the gross materialism and 
lack of spirituality which (in their view) those ideas embodied. They 
wanted to keep Germany 'pure' of the West, and this was one 
motive for their plans to resume the medieval conquest and set- 
tlement of the East, carving out a continental empire for Germany 
which would make her independent of the Anglo-Saxon world 
system. These Easterners drew a fundamental distinction between 
'civilization', which they defined as rootless, cosmopolitan, immo- 
ral, un-German, Western, materialistic and racially defiled; and 
'culture', which was pure, national, German, spiritual and authen- 
tic. 17 Civilization pulled Germany to the West, culture to the East. 
The real Germany was not part of international civilization but a 
national race-culture of its own. When Germany responded to the 
pull of the West, it met disaster; when it pursued its destiny in the 
East, it fulfilled itself. 

In point of fact, it was the Easterners who had ruled Germany 
throughout, who had created the war-anxiety, got Germany into 
war, and then lost it. In the minds of most Germans, however, the 
'stab-in-the-back' mythology refuted this factual analysis because it 
attributed the loss of the war to the defeatism and treachery of the 
Westerners, who had then signed the armistice, accepted the disas- 
trous peace, introduced the Republic and enthroned 'the rule of the 
parties'. It was thus the Westerners who were responsible for all 
Germany's misfortunes in the post-war world, as was only logical, 
for they were the puppets or paid agents of the politicians of the West 
in Paris and London, and of the international financial community in 
Wall Street and the City. Their outpost in Germany was the 
parliament in Weimar. But authentic German culture still had its 
redoubt within the Republic, in the person of President Hindenburg, 
an Easterner par excellence, and in the authority of Article 48. In 
time, that vital bridgehead could be extended. 



112 WAITING FOR HITLER 

For the moment, however, the Westerners were triumphant. 
Weimar was a 'Western' republic. It stood for civilization rather than 
culture: civilization was in office, culture in opposition. It is no 
coincidence, either, that German civilization reached its gaudiest 
flowering during the 1920s, when Germany, for a brief period, 
became the world-centre of ideas and art. This triumph had been 
building up for a long time. Germany was by far the best-educated 
nation in the world - as long ago as the late eighteenth century it had 
passed the 50 per cent literacy mark. During the nineteenth century it 
had progressively established a system of higher education which for 
thoroughness and diversity of scholarship was without equal. There 
were world-famous universities at Munich, Berlin, Hamburg, 
Gottingen, Marburg, Freiburg, Heidelberg and Frankfurt. The Ger- 
man liberal intelligentsia had opted out of public and political life in 
the 1860s, leaving the field to Bismarck and his successors. But it had 
not emigrated; indeed, it had spread itself, and when it began to 
resurface just before the Great War, and took command in 1918, 
what was most striking about it was its polycentral strength. 

Of course Berlin, with its 4 million population, held the primacy. 
But, unlike Paris, it did not drain all the country's intellectual and 
artistic energies into itself. While Berlin had its Alexanderplatz and 
Kurfurstendamm, there were plenty of other cultural magnets: the 
Bruehl in Dresden, the Jungfernsteg in Hamburg, the Schweidnitzter- 
strasse in Breslau or the Kaiserstrasse in Frankfurt. The centre of 
architectural experiment, the famous Bauhaus, was in Weimar, later 
moving to Dessau. The most important centre of art studies, the 
Warburg Institute, was in Hamburg. Dresden had one of the finest 
art galleries in the world as well as a leading European opera house, 
under Fritz Busch, where two of Richard Strauss's operas had their 
first performance. Munich had a score of theatres, as well as another 
great gallery; it was the home of Simplicissimus, the leading satirical 
magazine, and of Thomas Mann, the leading novelist. Frankfurter 
Zeitung was Germany's best newspaper, and Frankfurt was a leading 
theatrical and operatic centre (as was Munich); and other cities, 
such as Nuremberg, Darmstadt, Leipzig and Diisseldorf, saw the first 
performances of some of the most important plays of the Twenties. 18 

What particularly distinguished Berlin was its theatre, by far the 
world's richest in the 1920s, with a strongly political tone. Its 
pre-eminence had begun before the war, with Max Reinhardt's reign 
at the Deutsche Theater, but in 1918 republicanism took over 
completely. Some playwrights were committed revolutionaries, like 
Friedrich Wolf and Ernst Toller, who worked for Erwin Piscator's 
'Proletarian Theatre', for which George Grosz designed scenery. 
Bertholt Brecht, whose play Drums in the Night was first staged in 



WAITING FOR HITLER 113 

Berlin in 1922, when he was twenty-four, wrote political allegories. 
He was attracted to Communism by its violence, as he was to 
American gangsterism, and his friend Arnolt Bronnen to fascism; 
Brecht designed his own 'uniform', the first of the Leftist outfits - 
leather cap, steel-rimmed glasses, leather coat. When The 
Threepenny Opera, which he wrote with the composer Kurt Weill, 
was put on in 1928 it set an all-time record for an opera by receiving 
over 4,000 performances throughout Europe in a single year. 1 ^ But 
the bulk of the Berlin successes were written by liberal sophisticates, 
more notable for being 'daring', pessimistic, problematical, above all 
'disturbing', than directly political: men like Georg Kaiser, Carl 
Sternheim, Arthur Schnitzler, Walter Hasenclever, Ferdinand Bruck- 
ner and Ferenc Molnar. 20 Sometimes the 'cultural Right' went for a 
particular play, as when it tried to disrupt the first night of Der 
frohliche Weinberg by Carl Zuckmayer (who also wrote the script 
for The Blue Angel). But it was really the theatre as a whole to which 
conservatives objected, for there were no right-wing or nationalist 
plays whatever put on in Berlin. After watching a Gerhart Haupt- 
mann play, a German prefect of police summed up the reaction of 
Kw/tar-Germany: 'The whole trend ought to be liquidated.' 21 

Berlin was also the world-capital in the related fields of opera and 
film. It was crowded with first-class directors, impresarios, conduc- 
tors and producers: Reinhardt, Leopold Jessner, Max Ophuls, Victor 
Barnowsky, Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter, Leo Blech, Joseph von 
Sternberg {The Blue Angel), Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder {Emil and 
the Detectives), Fritz Lang {Metropolis). In designing and making 
scenery and costumes, lighting-effects, the standards of orchestral 
playing and choral singing, in sheer attention to detail, Berlin had no 
rivals anywhere. When Wozzeck, a new opera written by Arnold 
Schoenberg's gifted pupil Alban Berg, received its premiere at the 
Berlin State Opera in 1925, the conductor Erich Kleiber insisted on 
no less than 130 rehearsals. 22 The 1929 Berlin Music Festival 
featured Richard Strauss, Bruno Walter, Furtwangler, George Szell, 
Klemperer, Toscanini, Gigli, Casals, Cortot and Thibaud. 23 Against 
this background of talent, craftsmanship and expertise, Germany was 
able to develop the world's leading film industry, producing more 
films in the 1920s than the rest of Europe put together; 646 in the 
year 1922 alone. 24 

Even more remarkable was Germany's success in the visual arts. In 
1918 Walter Gropius became director of the Weimar Arts and Crafts 
School and began to put into practice his theory of Gesamtkunst- 
werk, or total work of art, a term first used by Wagner but applied 
here, on the analogy of a medieval cathedral, to the integrated use of 
painting, architecture, furniture, glass and metal work, sculpture, 



114 WAITING FOR HITLER 

jewellery and fabrics. The notion sprang from the Gothic revival but 
the atmosphere at the Bauhaus was dictated by the functional use of 
the latest materials and construction techniques. As one of the 
teachers, Lothar Schreyer, put it, 'We felt that we were literally 
building a pew world.' It attracted many fine talents: Klee, Kan- 
dinsky, Mies van der Rohe, Oskar Schlemmer, Hannes Meyer; 
Bartok, Hindemith, Stravinsky were among the visiting artists. 25 

Indeed, it was the institutionalization of modernism which ap- 
peared so novel in Weimar and gave it its peculiar strength. Over the 
whole range of the arts, Weimar was less hostile to modernism than 
any other society or political system. The leading German museums 
began to buy modern paintings and sculpture, just as the opera 
houses patronized atonality. Otto Dix was made an art-professor in 
Berlin, Klee in Diisseldorf, Kokoschka in Dresden. Equally important 
in making modernism acceptable was the work of the art theorists 
and historians, like Carl Einstein, W.R.Worringer and Max Dvorak, 
who placed Abstraction and Expressionism in the context of the 
European art tradition. As a result, Berlin rivalled and even sur- 
passed Paris as an exhibition centre for modern painting. The gallery 
run by Herwath Walden and his wife Else Lasker-Schuler, who also 
published the magazine Der Sturm, was more enterprising than any 
on the Left Bank, showing Leger, Chagall, Klee, Kurt Schwitters, 
Moholy-Nagy and Campendonck. The Neue Sachlichkeit, or New 
Realism, which displaced the dying Expressionism in 1923, attracted 
more interest than the Paris movements. 26 

There was, in fact, a modernistic cultural paramountcy in Weimar 
Germany. This in itself was highly provocative to the Easterners. 
They called it Kulturbolschewismus. Throughout the war the Ger- 
man ultra-patriotic press had warned that defeat would bring the 
triumph of Western 'decadent' art, literature and philosophy, as 
though Lloyd George and Clemenceau could not wait to get to Berlin 
to ram Cubism down German throats. Now it had actually hap- 
pened! Weimar was the great battleground in which modernism and 
traditionalism fought for supremacy in Europe and the world, 
because in Weimar the new had the institutions, or some of them, on 
its side. The law, too: the Weimar censorship law, though still strict, 
was probably the least repressive in Europe. Films like The Blue 
Angel could not be shown in Paris. Stage and night-club shows in 
Berlin were the least inhibited of any major capital. Plays, novels and 
even paintings touched on such themes as homosexuality, sado- 
masochism, transvestism and incest; and it was in Germany that 
Freud's writings were most fully absorbed by the intelligentsia and 
penetrated the widest range of artistic expression. 

The Left intelligentsia often sought deliberately to incite 'right- 



WAITING FOR HITLER 115 

thinking' Germany to fury. They had been smothered so long 
beneath the conventional wisdom of army, church, court and 
academia; now it was the turn of the outsiders who had, in a curious 
and quite unprecedented way, become the insiders of Weimar 
society. In the Weltbiihne, the smartest and most telling of the new 
journals, sexual freedom and pacifism were exalted, the army, the 
state, the university, the Church and, above all, the comfortable, 
industrious middle classes, were savaged and ridiculed. It featured 
the writings of Kurt Tucholsky, a satirist whom many compared to 
Heine, and whose acid pen jabbed more frequently and successfully 
beneath the skin of the Easterners than any other writer — the verbal 
equivalent of George Grosz's fearsome caricatures. He wrote: 'There 
is no secret of the German Army I would not hand over readily to a 
foreign power.' 27 Tucholsky was wonderfully gifted. He intended to 
give pain, to arouse hatred and fury. He succeeded. 

This cultural trench warfare, waged without reference to any 
Geneva Convention, merciless in its spite, animosity and cruelty, was 
calculated to arouse the atavism of the Easterners. Their approach to 
the public realm was paranoid. The paranoia had to some extent 
been deliberately manufactured by Bismarck. But long before 1914 it 
had become instinctive and habitual, with the Reich the object of 
world-wide conspiracies, political, economic, military and cultural. 
The catastrophe of the war, far from exorcizing the fantasies, seemed 
to confirm them. And now here was Germany, noble, helpless and 
suffering, stricken in defeat and jeeringly tormented by cosmopolitan 
riff-raff who appeared to control all access to the platforms of the 
arts and, by secret conspiracy, were systematically replacing German 
Kultur by their own, accursed Zivilisation. The grievance was 
increasingly resented throughout the 1920s and strikingly summed 
up in a book called Kurfiirstendamm written by Friedrich Hussong, 
and published a few weeks after the Nazis came to power: 

A miracle has taken place. They are no longer here .... They claimed they 
were the German Geist, German culture, the German present and future. 
They represented Germany to the world, they spoke in its name .... 
Everything else was mistaken, inferior, regrettable kitsch, odious philistin- 
ism .... They always sat in the front row. They awarded knighthoods of the 
spirit and of Europeanism. What they did not permit did not exist .... They 
'made' themselves and others. Whoever served them was sure to succeed. 
He appeared on their stages, wrote in their journals, was advertised all over 
the world; his commodity was recommended whether it was cheese or 
relativity, powder or Zeittheater, patent medicines or human rights, demo- 
cracy or bolshevism, propaganda for abortion or against the legal system, 
rotten Negro music or dancing in the nude. In brief, there never was a more 



116 WAITING FOR HITLER 

impudent dictatorship than that of the democratic intelligentsia and the 
Zwilisations-literaten. u 

Of course underlying and reinforcing the paranoia was the belief 
that Weimar culture was inspired and controlled by Jews. Indeed, 
was not the entire regime a Judenrepublik} There was very little basis 
for this last doxology, resting as it did on the contradictory theories 
that Jews dominated both Bolshevism and the international capitalist 
network. The Jews, it is true, had been prominent in the first 
Communist movements. But in Russia they lost ground steadily once 
the Bolsheviks came to power, and by 1925 the regime was already 
anti-Semitic. In Germany also the Jews, though instrumental in 
creating the Communist Party (kpd), were quickly weeded out once 
it was organized as a mass party. By the 1932 elections, when it put 
up 500 candidates, not one was Jewish. 29 Nor, at the other end of the 
spectrum, were the Jews particularly important in German finance 
and industry. The belief rested on the mysterious connection between 
Bismarck and his financial adviser, Gerson von Bleichroder, the Jew 
who organized the Rothschilds and other banking houses to provide 
the finance for Germany's wars. 30 But in the 1920s Jews were rarely 
involved in government finance. Jewish businessmen kept out of 
politics. Big business was represented by Alfred Hugenberg and the 
German Nationalist People's Party, which was anti-Semitic. Jews 
were very active at the foundation of Weimar, but after 1920 one of 
the few Jews to hold high office was Walther Rathenau and he was 
murdered two years later. 

In culture however it was a different matter. There is nothing more 
galling than a cultural tyranny, real or imaginary, and in Weimar 
culture 'they' could plausibly be identified with the Jews. The most 
hated of them, Tucholsky, was a Jew. So were other important critics 
and opinion formers, like Maximilian Harden, Theodor Wolff, 
Theodor Lessing, Ernst Bloch and Felix Salten. Nearly all the best 
film-directors were Jewish, and about half the most successful 
playwrights, such as Sternheim and Schnitzler. The Jews were 
dominant in light entertainment and still more in theatre criticism, a 
very sore point among the Easterners. There were many brilliant and 
much publicized Jewish performers: Elizabeth Bergner, Erna Sack, 
Peter Lorre, Richard Tauber, Conrad Veidt and Fritz Kortner, for 
instance. Jews owned important newspapers, such as Frankfurt's 
Zeitung, the Berliner Tageblatt and the Vossische Zeitung. They ran 
the most influential art galleries. They were particularly strong in 
publishing, which (next to big city department stores) was probably 
the area of commerce in which Jews came closest to predominance. 
The best liberal publishers, such as Malik Verlag, Kurt Wolff, the 



WAITING FOR HITLER 117 

Cassirers, Georg Bondi, Erich Reiss and S.Fischer, were owned or run 
by Jews. There were a number of prominent and highly successful 
Jewish novelists: Hermann Broch, Alfred Doblin, Franz Werfel, 
Arnold Zweig, Vicki Baum, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank, 
Alfred Neumann and Ernst Weiss, as well as Franz Kafka, whom the 
intelligentsia rated alongside Proust and Joyce and who was an 
object of peculiar detestation among the Easterners. In every depart- 
ment of the arts, be it architecture, sculpture, painting or music, 
where change had been most sudden and repugnant to conservative 
tastes, Jews had been active in the transformation, though rarely in 
control. The one exception, perhaps, was music, where Schoenberg 
was accused of 'assassinating' the German tradition; but even here, 
his far more successful and innovatory pupil, Berg, was an Aryan 
Catholic. However, it is undoubtedly true to say that Weimar culture 
would have been quite different, and infinitely poorer, without its 
Jewish element, and there was certainly enough evidence to make a 
theory of Jewish cultural conspiracy seem plausible. 31 

This was the principal reason why anti-Semitism made such 
astonishing headway in Weimar Germany. Until the Republic, 
anti-Semitism was not a disease to which Germany was thought to be 
especially prone. Russia was the land of the pogrom; Paris was the 
city of the anti-Semitic intelligentsia. Anti-Semitism seems to have 
made its appearance in Germany in the 1870s and 1880s, at a time 
when the determinist type of social philosopher was using Darwin's 
principle of Natural Selection to evolve 'laws' to explain the colossal 
changes brought about by industrialism, the rise of megalopolis and 
the alienation of huge, rootless proletariats. Christianity was content 
with a solitary hate-figure to explain evil: Satan. But modern secular 
faiths needed human devils, and whole categories of them. The 
enemy, to be plausible, had to be an entire class or race. 

Marx's invention of the 'bourgeoisie' was the most comprehensive 
of these hate-theories and it has continued to provide a foundation 
for all paranoid revolutionary movements, whether fascist- 
nationalist or Communist-internationalist. Modern theoretical anti- 
Semitism was a derivative of Marxism, involving a selection (for 
reasons of national, political or economic convenience) of a particu- 
lar section of the bourgeoisie as the subject of attack. It was a more 
obviously emotional matter than analysis purely by class, which is 
why Lenin used the slogan that 'Anti-Semitism is the socialism 
of fools'. But in terms of rationality there was little to choose 
between the two. Lenin was saying, in effect, that it was the entire 
bourgeoisie, not just Jewry, which was to blame for the ills of 
mankind. And it is significant that all Marxist regimes, based as they 
are on paranoid explanations of human behaviour, degenerate 



118 WAITING FOR HITLER 

sooner or later into anti-Semitism. The new anti-Semitism, in short, 
was part of the sinister drift away from the apportionment of 
individual responsibility towards the notion of collective guilt — the 
revival, in modern guise, of one of the most primitive and barbarous, 
even bestial, of instincts. It is very curious that, when the new 
anti-Semitism made its appearance in Germany, among those who 
attacked it was Nietzsche, always on the lookout for secular, 
pseudo-rational substitutes for the genuine religious impulse. He 
denounced 'these latest speculators in idealism, the anti-Semites . . . 
who endeavour to stir up all the bovine elements of the nation by a 
misuse of that cheapest of propaganda tricks, a moral attitude.' 32 

But if modern anti-Semitism was by no means a specifically German 
phenomenon, there were powerful forces which favoured its growth 
there. The modern German nation was, in one sense, the creation of 
Prussian militarism. In another, it was the national expression of the 
German romantic movement, with its stress upon the Volk, its 
mythology and its natural setting in the German landscape, especially 
its dark, mysterious forests. The German Volk movement dated from 
Napoleonic times and was burning 'alien' and 'foreign' books, which 
corrupted ' Volk culture', as early as 1817. Indeed it was from the Volk 
movement that Marx took his concept of 'alienation' in industrial 
capitalism. A Volk had a soul, which was derived from its natural 
habitat. As the historical novelist Otto Gemlin put it, in an article in Die 
Tat, organ of the Vo/^-romantic movement, 'For each people and each 
race, the countryside becomes its own peculiar landscape'. 33 If the 
landscape was destroyed, or the Volk divorced from it, the soul dies. 
The Jews were not a Volk because they had lost their soul: they lacked 
'rootedness'. This contrast was worked out with great ingenuity by a 
Bavarian professor of antiquities, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, in a series of 
volumes called Land und Leute {Places and People), published in the 
1850s and 1860s. 34 The true basis of the Volk was the peasant. There 
could of course be workers, but they had to be 'artisans', organized in 
local guilds. The proletariat, on the other hand, was the creation of the 
Jews. Having no landscape of their own, they destroyed that of others, 
causing millions of people to be uprooted and herded into giant cities, 
the nearest they possessed to a 'landscape' of their own. 'The 
dominance of the big city', wrote Riehl, 'will be the equivalent to the 
dominance of the proletariat' ; moreover, the big cities would link hands 
across the world, forming a 'world bourgeois' and a 'world proletariat' 
conspiring to destroy everything that had a soul, was 'natural', 
especially the German landscape and its peasantry. 35 

The Volk movement spawned a crop of anti-Semitic 'peasant' 
novels, of which the most notorious was Herman Lons's Der 
Wehrwolf (1910), set in the Thirty Years' War, and showing the 



WAITING FOR HITLER 119 

peasants turning on their oppressors from the towns like wolves: 
'What meaning does civilization have? A thin veneer beneath which 
nature courses, waiting until a crack appears and it can burst into the 
open.' 'Cities are the tomb of Germanism.' 'Berlin is the domain of 
the Jews.' Jews functioned among the peasants as money-lenders, 
cattle-dealers and middlemen, and the first organized political anti- 
Semitism surfaced in the peasant parties and the Bund der Land- 
wirte, or Farmers' Union. Hitler was an avid reader of 'peasant 
novels', especially the works of Dieter Eckhart, who adapted Peer 
Gynt into German, and of Wilhelm von Polenz, who also identified 
the Jews with the cruelty and alienation of modern industrial society. 

German anti-Semitism, in fact, was to a large extent a 'back to the 
countryside' movement. There were special Volk schools, which 
stressed open-air life. 'Mountain theatres', shaped from natural 
amphitheatres, were built in the Harz Mountains and elsewhere, for 
dramatized 'Volk rites' and other spectacles, an activity the Nazis 
later adopted on a huge scale and with great panache. The first youth 
movements, especially the highly successful Wandervogel, strum- 
ming guitars and hiking through the countryside, took on an 
anti-Semitic coloration, especially when they invaded the schools 
and universities. The 'garden city' movement in Germany was led by 
a violent anti-Semite, Theodor Fritsch, who published the Antisem- 
itic Catechism, which went through forty editions, 1887-1936, and 
who was referred to by the Nazis as Der Altmeister, the master- 
teacher. Even the sunbathing movement, under the impulse of Aryan 
and Nordic symbols, acquired an anti-Semitic flavour. 36 Indeed in 
1920s Germany there were two distinct types of nudism: 'Jewish' 
nudism, symbolized by the black dancer Josephine Baker, which was 
heterosexual, commercial, cosmopolitan, erotic and immoral; and 
anti-Semitic nudism, which was German, Volkisch, Nordic, non- 
sexual (sometimes homosexual), pure and virtuous. 37 

It is, indeed, impossible to list all the varieties of ingredients which, 
from the 1880s and 1890s onwards, were stirred into the poisonous 
brew of German anti-Semitism. Unlike Marxism, which was essen- 
tially a quasi-religious movement, German anti-Semitism was a 
cultural and artistic phenomenon, a form of romanticism. It was 
Eugen Diederichs, the publisher of Die Tat from 1912, who coined 
the phrase 'the new romanticism', the answer to Jewish Expression- 
ism. He published Der Wehrwolf, and at his house in Jena, sur- 
rounded by intellectuals from the Youth Movement, he wore 
zebra-striped trousers and a turban and launched the saying 'Demo- 
cracy is a civilization, while aristocracy equals culture.' He also 
contrived to transform Nietzsche into an anti-Semitic hero. Other 
audacious acts of literary theft were perpetrated. Tacitus' Germania 



120 WAITING FOR HITLER 

was turned into a seminal Volkisch text; Darwin's works were 
tortured into a 'scientific' justification for race 'laws', just as Marx 
had plundered them for class 'laws'. But there were plenty of genuine 
mentors too. Paul de Lagarde preached a Germanistic religion 
stripped of Christianity because it had been Judaized by St Paul, 'the 
Rabbi'. Julius Langbehn taught that assimilated Jews were 'a pest 
and a cholera', who poisoned the artistic creativity of the Volk: they 
should be exterminated, or reduced to slavery along with other 
'lower' races. 38 Both Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Eugen 
Diihring stressed the necessary 'barbarism' or Gothic element in 
German self-defence against Jewish decadence and the importance of 
the 'purity' and idealism of the Nordic pantheon. Chamberlain, 
whom Hitler was to visit on his deathbed to kiss his hands in 1927, 
argued that God flourished in the German and the Devil in the 
Jewish race, the polarities of Good and Evil. The Teutons had 
inherited Greek aristocratic ideals and Roman love of justice and 
added their own heroism and fortitude. Thus it was their role to fight 
and destroy the only other race, the Jews, which had an equal purity 
and will to power. So the Jew was not a figure of low comedy but a 
mortal, implacable enemy: the Germans should wrest all the power 
of modern technology and industry from the Jews, in order to 
destroy them totally. 39 Some of the German racial theorists were 
Marxists, like Ludwig Woltmann, who transformed the Marxist 
class-struggle into a world race-struggle and advocated the arousal of 
the masses by oratory and propaganda to mobilize the Germans into 
the conquests needed to ensure their survival and proliferation as a 
race: 'The German race has been selected to dominate the earth.' 

By the 1920s, in brief, any political leader in Germany who wished 
to make anti-Semitism an agent in his 'will to power' could assemble 
his campaign from an enormous selection of slogans, ideas and 
fantasies, which had accumulated over more than half a century. The 
Versailles Treaty itself gave the controversy new life by driving into 
Germany a great wave of frightened Jews from Russia, Poland and 
Germany's surrendered territories. Thus it became an urgent 'prob- 
lem', demanding 'solutions'. They were not wanting either. There 
were proposals for double-taxation for Jews; isolation or apartheid; 
a return to the ghetto system; special laws, with hanging for Jews 
who broke them; an absolute prohibition of inter-marriage between 
Aryan Germans and Jews. A 1918 best-seller was Artur Dinter's Die 
Siinde wider das Blut {Sins Against the Blood), describing how rich 
Jews violated the racial purity of an Aryan woman. Calls for the 
extermination of the Jews became frequent and popular, and anti- 
Semitic pamphlets circulated in millions. There were many violent 
incidents but when, in 1919, the Bavarian police asked for advice on 



WAITING FOR HITLER 121 

how to cope with anti-Semitism, Berlin replied there was no remedy 
since 'it has its roots in the difference of race which divides the 
Israelitic tribe from our Volk\ 40 

The Jews tried everything to combat the poison. Some brought up 
their children to be artisans or farmers. They enlisted in the army. 
They attempted ultra-assimilation. A Jewish poet, Ernst Lissauer, 
wrote the notorious 'Hate England' hymn. They went to the other 
extreme and tried Zionism. Or they formled militant Jewish organiza- 
tions, student leagues, duelling clubs. But each policy raised more 
difficulties than it removed, for anti-Semitism was protean, hydra- 
headed and impervious to logic or evidence. As Jakob Wassermann 
put it: 'Vain to seek obscurity. They say: the coward, he is creeping 
into hiding, driven by his evil conscience. Vain to go among them 
and offer them one's hand. They say: why does he take such liberties 
with his Jewish pushfulness? Vain to keep faith with them as a 
comrade in arms or a fellow-citizen. They say: he is Proteus, he can 
assume any shape or form. Vain to help them strip off the chains of 
slavery. They say: no doubt he found it profitable. Vain to counter- 
act the poison.' 41 Mortitz Goldstein argued that it was useless to 
expose the baselessness of anti-Semitic 'evidence': 'What would be 
gained? The knowledge that their hatred is genuine. When all 
calumnies have been refuted, all distortions rectified, all false notions 
about us rejected, antipathy will remain as something irrefutable.' 42 

Germany's defeat in 1918 was bound to unleash a quest for 
scapegoats, alien treachery in the midst of the Volk. Even without 
collateral evidence, the Jews, the embodiment of Westernizing 'civili- 
zation', were automatically cast for the role. But there was evidence 
as well! The influx of Jews in the immediate post-war period was a 
fresh dilution of the Volk, presaging a further assault on its martyred 
culture. And Weimar itself, did it not provide daily proof, in 
parliament, on the stage, in the new cinemas, in the bookshops, in 
the magazines and newspapers and art galleries, everywhere an 
ordinary, bewildered German turned, that this cosmopolitan, cor- 
rupting and ubiquitous conspiracy was taking over the Reich? What 
possible doubt could there be that a crisis was at hand, demanding 
extreme solutions? 

It was at this point that the notion of a violent resolution of the 
conflict between culture and civilization began to take a real grip on 
the minds of some Germans. Here, once again, the fatal act of Lenin, 
in beginning the cycle of political violence in 1917, made its morbid 
contribution. Anti-Semitism had always presented itself as defensive. 
Now, its proposals to use violence, even on a gigantic scale, could be 
justified as defensive. For it was generally believed, not only in 
Germany but throughout Central and Western Europe, that Bolshev- 



122 WAITING FOR HITLER 

ism was Jewish-inspired and led, and that Jews were in control of 
Communist Parties, and directed Red revolutions and risings wherever 
they occurred. Trotsky, the most ferocious of the Bolsheviks, who 
actually commanded the Petrograd putsch, was undoubtedly a Jew; so 
were a few other Russian leaders. Jews had been prominent in the 
Spartacist rising in Berlin, in the Munich Soviet government, and in the 
abortive risings in other German cities. Imagination rushed in where 
facts were hard to get. Thus, Lenin's real name was Issachar 
Zederblum. The Hungarian Red Revolution was directed not by Bela 
Kun but by a Jew called Cohn. Lenin's Red Terror was a priceless gift to 
the anti-Semitic extremists, particularly since most of its countless 
victims were peasants and the most rabid and outspoken of the Cheka 
terrorizers was the Latvian Jew Latsis. Munich now became the 
anti-Semitic capital of Germany, because it had endured the Bolshevist- 
Jewish terror of Kurt Eisner and his gang. The Munchener Beobachter, 
from which the Nazi Volkische Beobachter later evolved, specialized in 
Red atrocity stories, such as Kun or Cohn's crucifixion of priests, his use 
of a 'mobile guillotine' and so on. And many of the news items reported 
from Russia were, of course, perfectly true. They formed a solid plinth 
on which a flaming monument of fantasy could be set up. Hitler was 
soon to make highly effective use of the Red Terror fear, insisting, time 
and again, that the Communists had already killed 30 million people. 
The fact that he had added a nought in no way removed the reality of 
those first, terrible digits. He presented his National Socialist militancy 
as a protective response and a preemptive strike. It was 'prepared to 
oppose all terrorism on the part of the Marxists with tenfold greater 
terrorism'. 43 And in that 'greater terrorism' the Jews would be hunted 
down not as innocent victims but as actual or potential terrorists 
themselves. 

The syphilis of anti-Semitism, which was moving towards its tertiary 
stage in the Weimar epoch, was not the only weakness of the German 
body politic. The German state was a huge creature with a small and 
limited brain. The Easterners, following the example of Bismarck, 
grafted onto the Prussian military state a welfare state which provided 
workers with social insurance and health-care as of right and by law. As 
against the Western liberal notion of freedom of choice and private 
provision based on high wages, it imposed the paternalistic alternative 
of compulsory and universal security. The state was nursemaid as well 
as sergeant-major. It was a towering shadow over the lives of ordinary 
people and their relationship towards it was one of dependence and 
docility. The German industrialists strongly approved of this notion of 
the state as guardian, watching over with firm but benevolent solicitude 
the lives of its citizens. 44 The philosophy was Platonic; the result 
corporatist. The German Social Democrats did nothing to arrest this 



WAITING FOR HITLER 123 

totalitarian drift when they came briefly to power in 1918; quite the 
contrary. They reinforced it. The Weimar Republic opened windows 
but it did not encourage the citizen to venture outside the penumbra 
of state custody. 

Who was in charge of this large and masterful apparatus, now that 
the Easterners were in opposition? The answer was: nobody. The 
bureaucrats were trained on Prussian lines. They followed the rules 
and when in doubt waited for orders. The architects of the Weimar 
Republic made no attempt to change this pattern and encourage civil 
servants to develop a sense of moral autonomy. Presumably they 
feared that the officials of the new regime might be tempted to 
disobey their new parliamentary masters. At all events they were 
exhorted to regard obedience as the supreme virtue. In a famous 
lecture given in 1919, Max Weber insisted: The honour of the civil 
servant is vested in his ability to execute conscientiously the order of 
superior authorities.' Only the politician had the right and duty to 
exercise personal responsibility. 45 It would be difficult to conceive of 
worse advice to offer to German mandarins. Naturally, it was 
followed, right to the bitter end in 1945. 

The moral abdication of the bureaucrats might not have mattered 
so much if the politicians had followed the other half of Weber's 
counsel. But the parliamentarians never provided the vigorous and 
self-confident leadership needed to make Weimar a success. When in 
doubt they always fell back on Article 48, which was first used in 
August 1921 to forbid anti-republican meetings. It was as though 
they were conscious all the time that the bulk of the nation had 
reservations about Weimar, regarded its elites as lackeys of the 
Allies, Erfiillung$politiker) men pledged to fulfil a hated treaty. Often 
they gave the impression that they shared these doubts themselves. 
The Socialists set this pattern from the start. Called to office for the 
first time in 1918 they made no real attempt to change the basic 
structures of an overwhelmingly authoritarian country. The spd 
leaders were worthy, toilsome men: Ebert a saddler, Noske a basket- 
maker, Wels an upholsterer, Severing a locksmith, Scheidemann a 
printer. They were dull, unimaginative, sneered at by the Left 
intelligentsia, despised by the academics. They relinquished their grip 
on office all too easily as soon as the Centre-Right recovered its 
nerve. They lacked the will to power. 

They were, moreover, thrown off balance right at the start by the 
decision of the Far Left to follow Lenin's example and opt for 
violence against parliamentarianism in the winter of 1918-19. We 
see here, once again, the disastrous consequences which flow when 
men use the politics of force because they are too impatient for the 
politics of argument. The Left putsch drove the Social Democrats 



124 WAITING FOR HITLER 

into a fatal error. Afraid to use the regular army units, which might 
have proved mutinous, Gustav Noske asked the old High Command 
to provide him with a Freikorps of demobilized officers. They were, 
of course, produced with dispatch. The spd ministers thus gave 
legitimacy to a movement which was already spreading in the East, 
where German settler communities were fighting the Poles, and 
which was from the start violently and incorrigibly anti-Weimar. 
Soon there were no less than sixty-eight of these bodies, sometimes 
called Bunds or Ordens, with burgeoning social and political aims 
and a taste for street-fighting. One, the Bund Wehrwolf, fought the 
French - and the Socialists - in the Ruhr. Another, the ) ungdeutscher 
Orden, had 130,000 members by 1925. 46 It was from such an 
Orden, run by Karl Harrer, that the Nazis emerged, Hitler turning it 
into a mass-party, with the sa or Brownshirts as a reminder of its 
Freikorps origins. 47 

Almost inevitably, the abortive Left risings, leading to the legalizing 
of the Freikorps and the Right's recovery of confidence, produced in 
turn an army putsch. It came in March 1920, under Wolfgang Kapp, 
an old friend of Tirpitz and co-founder with him of the Fatherland 
Party in 1917. About half the army supported Kapp but the Right 
politicians and the civil servants refused to join him, and after four 
days he fled to Sweden. Unfortunately, the Far Left had again opted 
for violence instead of backing the new republican institutions. In the 
Ruhr they raised a 'Red Army' of 50,000 workers, the only time in the 
whole history of Weimar that the Marxists were able to put a sizeable 
military force into the field. The emergence of this body gave the army 
command an uncovenanted opportunity to retrieve its reputation as 
the custodian of law and order. In April it marched into the Ruhr and 
reconquered it from the Marxists, after dreadful brutalities on both 
sides. As a result, control of the army passed from the hands of the one 
reliably republican general, Walther Reinhardt, into those of a Junker 
reactionary, General Hans von Seeckt, who was dedicated to the 
destruction of the Versailles Treaty. Seeckt immediately set about 
strengthening the 'Russian connection', evading the arms-limitation 
clauses of the Treaty by constructing secret arms factories in Russia, a 
process accelerated by the signing of the Rapallo Treaty in 1922. He 
also purged the army of its republican elements, cashiering the ncos 
and privates who had opposed the Kapp putsch for 'breaking 
discipline'. 48 He turned the army from a politically neutral instrument 
into the matrix of a new, anti-republican state, which would 
implement the old programme of the Easterners. Thus the army 
slipped from Weimar's control and moved into the opposition. When 
President Ebert asked Seeckt in 1923 where the army stood, he 
replied: 'The Reichswehr stands behind me.' 49 



WAITING FOR HITLER 125 

The resurgence of the Right was soon reflected in politics. In the 
June 1920 elections the Social Democrat vote collapsed, the old 
Weimar coalition lost power, and thereafter the men who had 
created the Republic no longer controlled it. More serious was the 
erosion of the rule of law. The judiciary, which had never liked the 
Republic, decided like the army to go into opposition. The perpetra- 
tors of the Kapp putsch were never brought to book in the courts. 
Moreover, the events of spring 1920 sharply increased a tendency 
already observable the previous year for judges to treat political 
violence, which had now become endemic in Germany, on a selective 
political basis. They reasoned that, since violence had originated 
with the Left, a violent response by the Right was in a sense designed 
to protect public order, and therefore justified. Thanks to Lenin's 
terror, this view was widely shared in Germany, so that juries tended 
to back the judges. It was the same argument that allowed the 
presentation of anti-Semitism as 'defensive'. But of course it played 
straight into the hands of the right-wing thugs of the Freikorps and 
Bunds and Orden, and helped the transformation of Germany from 
an exceptionally law-abiding into an exceptionally violent society. 
Statistics compiled in 1922 over a four-year period (1919-22) show 
that there were 354 murders committed by the Right and twenty-two 
by the Left. Those responsible for every one of the left-wing murders 
were brought to court; ten were executed and twenty-eight others 
received sentences averaging fifteen years. Of the right-wing mur- 
ders, 326 were never solved; fifty killers confessed, but of these more 
than half were acquitted despite confessions; and twenty-four 
received sentences averaging four months. 50 

The Right, in short, could practise violence with little fear of legal 
retribution. Judges and juries felt they were participating in the battle 
between German culture and alien civilization: it was right to 
recognize that violence might be a legitimate response to cultural 
provocation. Thus when the great liberal journalist Maximilian 
Harden, who was also a Jew, was nearly beaten to death by two 
thugs in 1922, the would-be killers got only a nominal sentence. The 
defence argued that Harden provoked the attack by his 'unpatriotic 
articles', and the jury found 'mitigating circumstances'. 

Why did juries, representing ordinary middle-class people in 
Germany, tend to side with the Easterners against the Westerners? 
One chief reason was what they were taught in the schools, which 
itself reflected the political tone of the universities. The tragedy of 
modern Germany is an object-lesson in the dangers of allowing 
academic life to become politicized and professors to proclaim their 
'commitment'. Whether the bias is to the Left or Right the results are 
equally disastrous for in either case the wells of truth are poisoned. 



126 WAITING FOR HITLER 

The universities and especially the professoriate were overwhelm- 
ingly on the side of Kultur. The jurists and the teachers of German 
literature and language were stridently nationalist. The historians 
were the worst of the lot. Heinrich von Treitschke had written of 
Germany's appointment with destiny and warned the Jews not to 
get in the way of the 'young nation'. His hugely influential History 
of Germany in the Nineteenth Century, a Wilhelmine classic, went 
into another big popular edition in 1920. Contemporary historians 
like Erich Marcks, Georg von Below and Dietrich Schafer still 
celebrated the achievements of Bismarck (the anniversaries of Sedan 
and the founding of the empire were both public universities' 
holidays) and the lessons they drew from the Great War centred 
around Germany's lack of 'relentlessness'. They provided academic 
backing for the 'stab-in-the-back' myth. The academic community 
as a whole was a forcing-house for nationalist mythology. Instead 
of encouraging self-criticism and scepticism, the professors called 
for 'spiritual revivals' and peddled panaceas. 51 

By sheer bad luck, the most widely read and influential book in 
1920s Germany was The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler, 
a foolish and pedantic schoolteacher. He conceived his book in 
1911 as a warning against undue German optimism. He wrote it 
during the war in anticipation of a German victory. Its first volume 
actually appeared in 1918, when defeat gave it an astonishing 
relevance and topicality. Thus it became a best-seller. The essence 
of the book was social Darwinism. He defined eight historic cul- 
tures and argued that the 'laws of morphology' applied to them. 
The last, the culture of the West, was already showing symptoms of 
decay, such as democracy, plutocracy and technology, indicating 
that' 'civilization' was taking over from 'culture'. It seemed to 
explain why Germany had been defeated. It also heralded a coming 
age of cruel war in which would arise new Caesars, and democrats 
and humanitarians would have to be replaced by new elites of 
steel-hardened heroes who would look not for personal gain but 
for service to the community. 52 He followed it up in 1920 with a 
sensational essay, Prussianism and Socialism, which called for a 
classless, national socialism, in which the entire nation worked 
together under a dictator. It was exactly the sort of argument 
Mussolini was beginning to put forward in Italy. 

Neatly complementing Spengler's analysis was the work of two 
other important Easterners. Carl Schmitt, Germany's leading legal 
philosopher, who poured out a flood of books and articles during 
these years, constantly stressed the argument that order could only 
be restored when the demands of the state were given preference 
over the quest for an illusory 'freedom'. The Reich would not be 



WAITING FOR HITLER 127 

secure until Weimar was remodelled as an authoritarian state around 
the principle embodied in Article 48. 53 The point was restated in a 
historical perspective by the cultural historian Arthur Moeller van 
den Bruck in a brilliant book published in 1923. The Germans, he 
argued, were the leading European creators. Their first Reich, the 
medieval empire, had formed Europe. Their second creation, Bis- 
marck's, was artificial because it had admitted the corruption of 
liberalism: that, of course, was why it had collapsed under test. 
Weimar was a mere interlude of chaos. Now the Germans had 
another opportunity: by purging society of liberalism and capitalism, 
they could build the third and final state which would embody all 
Germany's values and endure for a thousand years. He entitled this 
remarkable exercise in historical prophecy The Third Reich, 54 

Spurred on by their professors, the German student body, which 
averaged about 100,000 during the Weimar period, gave an enthusias- 
tic reception to these Easterner philosophies. The notion that the 
student body is in some constitutional way a depository of humanita- 
rian idealism will not survive a study of the Weimar period. Next to 
the ex-servicemen, the students provided the chief manpower res- 
ervoir of the violent extremists, especially of the Right. Student 
politics were dominated by the right-wing Hochschulring movement 
throughout the 1920s until it was replaced by the Nazis. 55 The Right 
extremists proceeded by converting half a dozen students on a 
campus, turning them into full-time activists, paid not to study. The 
activists could then swing the mass of the student body behind them. 
The Nazis did consistently better among the students than among the 
population as a whole and their electoral gains were always preceded 
by advances on the campus, students proving their best proselytizers. 
Students saw Nazism as a radical movement. They liked its egalita- 
rianism. They liked its anti-Semitism too. Indeed, the students were 
more anti-Semitic than either the working class or the bourgeoisie. 
Most German student societies had excluded Jews even before 1914. 
In 1919 the fraternities subscribed to the 'Eisenach Resolution', 
which stated that the racial objection to Jews was insuperable and 
could not be removed by baptism. The next year they deprived 
Jewish students of the 'honour' of duelling. In 1922 the authorities at 
Berlin University cancelled a memorial service in honour of the 
murdered Walther Rathenau rather than risk a violent student 
demonstration. This policy of appeasement towards student violence 
became the pattern of the 1920s, the rectors and faculties always 
capitulating to the most outrageous demands of student leaders 
rather than risk trouble. By 1929 the universities had passed almost 
wholly into the Easterner camp. 

Against this widely based array of social forces, what had the 



128 WAITING FOR HITLER 

Westerners to rely upon? Not many people were prepared to die for 
Weimar or even to speak out for it. The liberals, as one of them said, 
had 'married the Republic without loving it'. To them it simply filled 
the vacuum left by the disappearance of the monarchy and pending 
the emergence of something better. Even Max Weber, before his 
death in 1920, admitted he would have preferred a plebiscitory 
democracy under a strong man to a parliamentary one he assumed 
would be weak or corrupt or both. As the liberal Munich lawyer 
Professor Hans Nawiasky put it, the Republic was a child born in 
sorrow in whose arrival no one could take pride. 56 It could never be 
separated in people's minds from its tragic and detestable origins. 

The Left had most to lose if Weimar failed - indeed they had most 
to gain by making it work — but the Far Left, at least, could never be 
persuaded to appreciate the fact. The scars of 1919 never healed and 
the Leninist element hated the Social Democrats, whom they began 
to call 'Social Fascists' from 1923 onwards, more passionately than 
anyone to the right of them. They not only failed to recognize fascism 
as a new and highly dangerous phenomenon, but refused to draw 
any distinction between middle-class conservatives who were pre- 
pared to work within the rule of law, and political savages who were 
right outside it. The Marxists never grasped the significance of 
anti-Semitism either. Here again their minds had been numbed by 
Marx's narcotic system. Marx had accepted much of the mythology 
of anti-Semitism in that he dismissed Judaism as a reflection of the 
money-lending era of capitalism. When the revolution came it was 
doomed to disappear: there would be no such person as a 'Jew'. 57 As 
a result of this absurd line of reasoning, the Jewish Marxists - 
Trotsky, Luxemburg, Paul Axelrod, Otto Bauer, Julius Martov - felt 
obliged to reject national self-determination for Jews while advocat- 
ing it for everybody else. 58 There was a grievous perversity in this 
crass denial of nature. As the Jewish historian Simon Dubnow put it: 
'How much a Jew must hate himself who recognizes the right of 
every nationality and language to self-determination but doubts it or 
restricts it for his own people whose "self-determination" began 
3,000 years ago.' 59 Seeing the Jews as a non-problem, the Marxists 
dismissed anti-Semitism as a non-problem too. They thus entered the 
greatest ideological crisis in European history by throwing their 
brains out of the window. It was a case of intellectual disarmament 
on a unilateral basis. 

Nevertheless the destruction of the Republic was not inevitable. It 
would almost certainly have survived had not the radical Right 
produced a political genius. The central tragedy of modern world 
history is that both the Russian and the German republics, in turn, 
found in Lenin and Hitler adversaries of quite exceptional calibre, 



WAITING FOR HITLER 129 

who embodied the will to power to a degree unique in our times. Of 
course the arrival of such a figure came as no surprise to the exaltes 
of the German Right. All the disciples of Nietzsche agreed a Fiihrer 
would be necessary and would emerge, like a messiah. He was 
envisaged as the Knight from Diirer's famous print, Knight, Death 
and the Devil. Wilhelm Stapel in The Christian Statesman presented 
him as ruler, warrior and priest in one, endowed with charismatic 
qualities. 60 

The reality was rather different. Hitler was totally irreligious and 
had no interest in honour or ethics. He believed in biological 
determinism, just as Lenin believed in historical determinism. He 
thought race, not class, was the true revolutionary principle of the 
twentieth century, just as nationalism had been in the nineteenth. He 
had a similar background to Lenin. His father, too, was a minor 
bureaucrat, an Austrian customs official on the Bavarian border. 
Hitler, like Lenin, was the product of an age increasingly obsessed by 
politics. He never seriously attempted to make his living by any other 
means and he was only really at home, like Lenin, in a world where 
the pursuit of power by conspiracy, agitation and force was the chief 
object and satisfaction of existence. But in that barren and cheerless 
world he, like Lenin, was a master. He had the same intellectual 
egoism, lack of self-doubt, ruthlessness in personal relations, pre- 
ference for force as opposed to discussion and, most important, the 
ability to combine absolute fidelity to a long-term aim with skilful 
opportunism. The two men even shared a certain puritanism: Hitler, 
like Lenin (and unlike Mussolini), had little personal vanity and was 
not corrupted by the more meretricious aspects of power. 

But in one essential respect they were quite different. Whereas 
Lenin was the religious type of revolutionary, Hitler was a romantic. 
Indeed he was an artist. Liberal intellectuals were horrified, in 1939, 
when Thomas Mann, in a brilliant essay called Brother Hitler, 
compared him to the archetypal romantic artist (as described in, say, 
Henri Murger's Vie de Boheme) and asked: 'Must we not, even 
against our will, recognize in this phenomenon an aspect of the 
artist's character?' 61 Yet the comparison is valid and illuminating. It 
explains a good deal about Hitlerism which otherwise would remain 
obscure. Hitler practised painting with little skill and no success. His 
talent did not lie there. But his reactions were usually those of an 
artist both in recoil and response. Taken to his father's place of 
work, he found himself filled with 'repugnance and hatred'; it was 'a 
government cage' where 'old men sat crouched on top of one 
another, like monkeys'. 62 He grasped that he had a public mission 
when he first heard a performance of Wagner's earliest success, 
Rienzi, about a commoner who becomes people's tribune in four- 



130 WAITING FOR HITLER 

teenth-century Rome but is destroyed by jealous nobles in a burning 
capitol: 'It began at that hour', he said later. 63 He seems to have 
conceived the 'final solution' for the Jews in the fantastic setting of 
the Gothic castle at Werfenstein in Austria where an unfrocked monk, 
Jorg Lanz von Liebenfels, was working out a systematic programme 
of race-breeding and extermination 'for the extirpation of the 
animal-man and the propagation of the higher new-man', and waged 
the race-struggle 'to the hilt of the castration knife'. It is significant 
that Lanz claimed Lenin as well as Hitler among his disciples, seeing 
an analogy between the extermination of classes 'thrown into the 
dust-bin of history' and races eliminated by breeding programmes, 
two forms of social Darwinism. 64 Hitler, too, was very interested in 
class differences, very shrewd in exploiting them to his advantage. 
But class did not stand near the centre of his political dream because 
it was not a visual concept. Race was. 

Hitler appears always to have approached politics in terms of 
visual images. Like Lenin and still more like Stalin, he was an 
outstanding practitioner of the century's most radical vice: social 
engineering - the notion that human beings can be shovelled around 
like concrete. But in Hitler's case there was always an artistic 
dimension to these Satanic schemes. Planning a world empire 
radiating from Berlin, it was the colossal state structures of the 
capital which sprang first to mind and were then modelled down to 
the smallest detail. 65 When, during the war, Hitler gave directives for 
the political, demographic and economic transformation of tens of 
millions of square miles of Europe, right up to the Urals, he spoke in 
elaborate terms of the Babylonian gardens which were to adorn the 
cities of the master-race. 66 It was highly characteristic of him that he 
put an architect in charge of war production. Indeed he should have 
been an architect himself. When he spoke of his desire for the world 
to be 'changed thoroughly and in all its parts', he was thinking 
visually and in concrete terms, by extension from his lifelong wish to 
rebuild his 'home' town of Linz. All he actually contrived to put up 
was a new bridge there: but almost to the last day in the bunker he 
studied plans for the city's transformation. He periodically envisaged 
retirement, 'after the war', when, his prime mission accomplished, he 
would replan towns and supervise public building schemes. 

Hitler's artistic approach was absolutely central to his success. 
Lenin's religious-type fanaticism would never have worked in Ger- 
many. The Germans were the best-educated nation in the world. To 
conquer their minds was very difficult. Their hearts, their sensibili- 
ties, were easier targets. Hitler's strength was that he shared with so 
many other Germans the devotion to national images new and old: 
misty forests breeding blond titans; smiling peasant villages under 



WAITING FOR HITLER 131 

the shadow of ancestral castles; garden cities emerging from ghetto- 
like slums; riding Valkyries, burning Valhallas, new births and 
dawns in which shining, millennian structures would rise from the 
ashes of the past and stand for centuries. Hitler had in common with 
average German taste precisely those revered images which nearly a 
century of nationalist propaganda had implanted. 

It is probably true to say that Hitler's cultural assets were the 
source of his appeal. Popular detestation of Weimar culture was an 
enormous source of political energy, which he tapped with relish. 
Lenin's notion of giving up music to concentrate on politics would 
have been incomprehensible to him. In Germany, music was politics; 
and especially music-drama. Hitler exemplifies the truth that ar- 
chitectural and theatrical skills are closely related. His romantic- 
artistic instincts led him to rediscover a truth almost as old as the 
polls itself, which certainly goes back to the Pharaohs: that the 
presentation of the charismatic leader, whether Renaissance mon- 
arch or modern democratic politician, is at least as important as the 
content. One of the reasons Hitler admired Wagner was that he 
learnt so much from him, especially from Parsifal, which became the 
model for his political spectaculars. The lesson he derived from the 
Western Front was that wars could be won or lost by propaganda: a 
thought which inspired his famous sixth chapter of Mein Kampf. The 
object of all propaganda, he wrote, was 'an encroachment upon 
man's freedom of will'. 67 This could be achieved by the 'mysterious 
magic' of Bayreuth, the 'artificial twilight of Catholic Gothic chur- 
ches', and both these effects he used; but he also plundered the tricks 
of Reinhardt and other despised Weimar producers and the cinema of 
Fritz Lang. The scenes of his oratory were designed and set with 
enviable professional skill; the attention to detail was fanatical. 
Hitler was the first to appreciate the power of amplification and the 
devilry of the searchlight: he seems to have invented son et lumiere 
and used it with devastating effect at his mass night-meetings. He 
imported political costumery and insignia from Mussolini's Italy but 
improved upon them, so that Hitlerian uniforms remain the standard 
of excellence in totalitarian sumptuary. Both Stalinism and Maoism 
imitated Hitler's staging, exceeding it in scale but not in style. 

As the star of these music-dramas Hitler rehearsed himself with 
equal professionalism. The myth of the 'mad orator' was unfounded. 
Hitler was always in total control of himself. He found the notion 
useful in dealing with foreigners, however, since people like Neville 
Chamberlain were hugely relieved when they actually met Hitler and 
found him capable of talking in a sane and reasonable manner. But 
all his 'mad' effects were carefully planned. He said in August 1920 
that his object was to use 'calm understanding' to 'whip up and incite 



132 WAITING FOR HITLER 

. . . the instinctive'. 68 He always studied the acoustics in the halls 
where he spoke. He committed his speeches to an excellent memory 
(though he had very full notes too). He practised in front of a mirror 
and got the party photographer to take him in action so he could 
study the shots. The mind reels at what he might have done with 
television and it is odd he did not push its development: Berlin- 
Witzleben put on a TV show as early as 8 March 1929. Hitler used 
oratorical gestures, then rare in Germany, which he copied from 
Ferdl Weiss, a Munich comedian who specialized in beer-hall 
audiences. He timed himself to arrive late, but not too late. In the 
early days he dealt brilliantly with hecklers and used a lot of mordant 
humour. 69 Later he aimed at the inspired prophet image, and 
severely reduced the specific political content in his speeches. Nietz- 
sche's sister Elizabeth, whom he visited in Weimar, said he struck her 
more as a spiritual than a political leader. 70 But his style was not that 
of a theologian so much as a revivalist: the American journalist 
H.R.Knickerbocker compared him to 'Billy Sunday'. 71 One observer 
wrote at the time: 'Hitler never really makes a political speech, only 
philosophical ones.' 72 In fact he did not so much outline a pro- 
gramme and make promises as demand a commitment. He saw 
politics as the mobilizing of wills. The listener surrendered his will to 
his leader, who restored it to him reinforced. As he put it: The will, 
the longing and also the power of thousands are accumulated in 
every individual. The man who enters such a meeting doubting and 
wavering leaves it inwardly reinforced: he has become a link in the 
community.' 

We touch here upon an important point. Hitler, like Lenin, had 
nothing but contempt for parliamentary democracy or any other 
aspect of liberalism. But whereas Lenin insisted that an elite or even a 
single individual represented the will of the proletariat by virtue of 
their/his gnosis, Hitler was not averse to the democratic voice 
expressing itself in a less metaphysical form. In a sense he believed in 
participatory democracy and even practised it for a time. Indeed 
Hitler had no alternative but to pursue power, to some extent, by 
democratic means. In a rare moment of frankness, Lenin once said 
that only a country like Russia could have been captured so easily as 
he took it. Germany was a different proposition. It could not be 
raped. It had to be seduced. 

It took Hitler some time to discover this fact. His political 
education is worth studying in a little detail. In pre- 19 14 Vienna he 
acquired his socialism and his anti-Semitism. The socialism he got 
from the famous Christian-Social mayor, Karl Lueger, who imitated 
and improved on Bismarck's social policy to create a miniature 
welfare state: in fifteen years he gave Vienna a superb transport, 



WAITING FOR HITLER 133 

educational and social security system, green belts and a million new 
jobs. Here the whole of Hitler's domestic policy up to 1939 was 
adumbrated: to use the huge, paternalistic state to persuade the masses 
to forgo liberty in exchange for security. Lueger was also an 
anti-Semite, but it was another Viennese politico, the Pan-Germanist 
Georg von Schonerer, who taught Hitler to place the 'solution' to 'the 
Jewish problem' in the very centre of politics: Schonerer demanded 
anti-Jewish laws and his followers wore on their watch-chains the 
insignia of a hanged Jew. 

The third element, which turned Hitler into the archetypal Easterner, 
was added during the war. Ludendorf f believed strongly in the political 
education of the troops. He indoctrinated them with the idea of a vast 
eastward expansion, which the Brest-Litovsk Treaty showed was 
possible. Hitler became an enthusiastic exponent of this vision, 
expanded it and adapted it to include in its realization the 'final 
solution' for the 'Jewish problem'. It remained the biggest single 
element in his entire programme of action, the axis of attack around 
which all else revolved. Ludendorff 's scheme for a politicized army was 
one of the many ideas which Lenin enthusiastically adopted, appoint- 
ing political commissars down to battalion level. In turn, the German 
army readopted it after the Red risings of early 1919 had been put 
down. The Political Department of the Munich district command made 
Hitler one of their first 'political instruction officers' after the Munich 
Soviet had been smashed. Ernst Roehm was one of his colleagues. These 
two men took full advantage of the genuine anti-Red fears in Munich to 
turn it into the capital of German extremism. 

In September 1919 Hitler took over a small proletarian group called 
the German Workers' Party. By April 1920, when he left the army to 
begin a full-time political career, he had transformed it into the nucleus 
of a mass party, given it a foreign policy (abrogation of Versailles, a 
Greater Germany, Eastern expansion, Jews to be excluded from 
citizenship) and reorganized its economic aims into a radical twenty- 
five-point programme: confiscation of war-profits, abolition of 
unearned incomes, state to take over trusts and share profits of 
industry, land for national needs to be expropriated without compensa- 
tion. He also added the words 'National Socialist' to its title. Though 
Hitler sometimes used the words nationalism and socialism as though 
they were interchangeable, the radical and socialist element in his 
programme always remained strong. He was never in any sense a 
bourgeois or conservative politician or an exponent or defender of 
capitalism. Nor was the Nazi Party predominantly lower middle-class. 
Modern historians have hotly debated the extent of its working-class 
appeal. 73 The truth seems to be that the active Nazis were drawn from 
the discontented of all classes except the peasants and farmers. Out of a 



134 WAITING FOR HITLER 

total of 4,800 members in 1923, 34.5 per cent were working class, 
31 per cent lower middle-class, 6.2 minor officials, 11.1 clerks, 13.6 
small businessmen and shopkeepers. 74 

Hitler's policy of creating a vanguard-elite party on a mass base 
was, of course, modelled on Lenin's experience. Indeed in important 
respects he remained a Leninist to the end, particularly in his belief 
that a highly disciplined and centralized party, culminating in an 
autocratic apex, was the only instrument capable of carrying through 
a fundamental revolution. Once in power he put in motion a 
systematic party take-over of all the organs of society exactly as 
Lenin did. And initially he planned to take power in the same way as 
Lenin in 1917, by a paramilitary putsch. He was encouraged in this 
resolve by the success of Mussolini's march on Rome in the autumn 
of 1922. A year later he thought the time had come in Germany too. 

In 1923 the German currency, long teetering on the brink of 
chaos, finally fell into it. In 1913 the German mark had been worth 
2.38 US dollars. By 1918 it had fallen to 7 cents, and by the middle 
of 1922 one US cent would buy 100 marks. The German financial 
authorities blamed the fall on the reparation clauses of the Versailles 
Treaty. In fact reparations had nothing directly to do with it. 
German public finance had been unsound since Bismarck's day, 
when he had paid for his wars by borrowing, afterwards liquidating 
the debts with the loot. The same technique was tried in 1914-18 but 
this time there was no loot and Germany emerged with a mountain 
of public debt in government bonds and a stupendous amount of 
paper money in circulation. The inflation began long before repara- 
tions were heard of and it had reached hyper-inflation levels by 1921 
when the first payments became due. The crisis was due entirely to 
the reckless manner in which the Ministry of Finance, abetted by the 
Reichsbank, allowed credit and the money supply to expand. No one 
in the financial and business establishment cared a damn for the 
'Republican mark'. They speculated and hedged against it, shipped 
capital abroad and, in the case of the industrialists, invested in fixed 
capital as fast as they could by borrowing paper money. When 
Keynes was called in to advise in the autumn of 1922 he proposed a 
sharp remedy which a later generation would term 'monetarism' - 
the government, he said, must at all costs balance the budget and 
curb money supply. This excellent advice was rejected and the 
printing presses accelerated. 75 

The final currency collapse began in January 1923 when the 
French occupied the Ruhr, the population stopped working and the 
German government accepted the financial responsibility to continue 
paying their wages. By the summer of 1923 a visiting US Congress- 
man, A.P.Andrew, recorded he got 4,000 million marks for 7 



WAITING FOR HITLER 135 

dollars; a meal for two in a restaurant cost 1,500 million, plus a 400 
million tip. By 30 November the daily issue was up to 4,000 
quintillions. The banks were charging 35 per cent interest a day on 
loans, while paying depositors only 18 per cent a year. As a result, a 
peasant woman who deposited the price of a cow and drew it out six 
months later found it was worth less than the price of a herring. 
Small depositors and holders of government bonds lost everything. 
The big gainers, apart from the government itself, were the land- 
owners, who redeemed all their mortgages, and the industrialists, 
who repaid their debts in worthless paper and became the absolute 
owners of all their fixed capital. It was one of the biggest and crudest 
transfers of wealth in history. The responsibilities were clear; the 
beneficiaries of the fraud were easily identifiable. Yet it is a depress- 
ing indication of public obtuseness in economic matters that the 
German public, and above all the losers, far from 'developing a 
proletarian consciousness' - as Marx had predicted they would in 
such a case - blamed the Versailles Treaty and 'Jewish speculators'. 

Naturally such an upheaval had political results. On 13 August 
Gustav Stresemann, the only popular Weimar politician, formed a 
'Great Coalition' from the Social Democrats to the fairly respectable 
Right. It lasted only one hundred days. A state of emergency was 
declared and power placed in the hands of the Defence Minister. 
There was talk of a 'March on Berlin'. But it was the Communists, as 
nearly always happened, who began the cycle of violence by an 
uprising in Saxony. Hitler now decided it was time to take over 
Bavaria. On 8 November his men surrounded a beer-hall where the 
local government was meeting, took its leaders into custody, formed 
them into a new dictatorial government with himself as political boss 
and Ludendorff head of the army, and then marched on the city with 
3,000 men. But the police opened fire, the march dispersed, Hitler 
was arrested and in due course sentenced to five years in Landsberg 
fortress-prison. 76 

The authorities, however, had no intention he should serve his 
term. Hitler benefited from the double-standard which favoured all 
'Easterner' criminals. 'The prisoner of Landsberg' was a popular and 
cosseted inmate. Instead of gaol garb he wore Lederhosen, a 
Bavarian peasant jacket and a green hunting hat with a feather. He 
spent up to six hours a day receiving a constant stream of visitors, 
including admiring women and cringing politicians. On his thirty- 
fifth birthday the flowers and parcels filled several rooms of the 
fortress, and his cell, according to one eyewitness, always 'looked 
like a delicatessen store'. 77 The months he spent there were just long 
enough for him to write Mein Kampf, tapping it out, as Hess's wife 
Use later testified, 'with two fingers on an ancient typewriter'. 78 



136 WAITING FOR HITLER 

While Hitler was in Landsberg a great change came over Germany. 
In the short term events moved against him. The new president of 
the Reichsbank, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, stabilized the currency, intro- 
duced a new Reichsmark, based on gold and negotiable abroad, 
stopped printing money and slashed government expenditure - did, 
in fact, what Keynes had advised eighteen months before. The 
German economy, indeed the world economy, moved into smoother 
waters. The next five years saw steady economic expansion and in 
consequence a much higher degree of political stability: they were the 
best years of Weimar's life. Hitler realized, in Landsberg, that he was 
not going to get power Lenin's way. He must become a demotic 
politician. Mein Kampf acknowledged this fact and indicated exactly 
how he would do it. But he also sensed that the year 1923 had been a 
watershed, which in the long run must favour his endeavour. For 
millions of its victims, the legacy of the Great Inflation would be an 
inextinguishable, burning hatred of Weimar and its managers, of the 
'Westernizing' establishment, of the Treaty and the Allies and those 
in Germany who had been associated with them. The German 
middle class had shifted its axis. Henceforth the Western cause was 
doomed; 'culture' would prevail over 'civilization'. Hitler noted this 
seismic reorientation in the remarkable fourth chapter of Mein 
Kampf describing the 'war for living space' fought against Russia. 
'We stop the endless German movement to the south and west', he 
wrote, 'and turn our gaze towards the land in the east. At long last 
we break off the colonial and commercial policies of the pre-War 
period and shift to the soil policy of the future.' 79 

Almost at the exact moment Hitler was writing this, a strange and 
intuitive Englishman was coming to exactly the same conclusion. On 
19 February 1924 D.H.Lawrence wrote a 'Letter from Germany'. 80 
It was, he said, 'as if the Germanic life were slowly ebbing away from 
contact with western Europe, ebbing to the deserts of the east'. On 
his last visit in 1921, Germany 'was still open to Europe. Then it still 
looked to western Europe for a reunion . . . reconciliation. Now that 
is over . . . the positivity of our civilization has broken. The 
influences that come, come invisibly out of Tartary .... Returning 
again to the fascination of the destructive East that produced Attila.' 
He continued: 

... at night you feel strange things stirring in the darkness .... There is a 
sense of danger ... a queer, bristling feeling of uncanny danger .... The 
hope in peace-and-production is broken. The old flow, the old adherence is 
ruptured. And a still older flow has set in. Back, back to the savage polarity 
of Tartary, and away from the polarity of civilized Christian Europe. This, 
it seems to me, has already happened. And it is a happening of far more 



WAITING FOR HITLER 137 

profound import than any actual event. It is the father of the next phase of 
events. 

Determined to exploit this new polarity, and in his role of populist 
politician, Hitler — who had an undoubted streak of creative 
imagination — spent his last weeks in gaol thinking out the concept of 
spectacular scenic roads built specially for cars, the future autobah- 
nen, and of a 'people's car' or Volkswagen to carry the nation along 
them. 81 He was released on 20 December 1924 and, suffering from 
Wagner-starvation, made straight for the house of the pianist Ernst 
Hanfstaengel and commanded him: 'Play the Liebestod' The next 
morning he bought a Mercedes for 26,000 marks and thereafter, 
until he became Chancellor, insisted on passing every car on the 
road. 82 



FOUR 

Legitimacy in Decadence 



While the Eastern wind was blowing again in Germany, the Anglo- 
French alliance was coming apart. On 22 September 1922 there was 
an appalling scene at the Hotel Matignon in Paris between Raymond 
Poincare, the French Prime Minister, and Lord Curzon, the British 
Foreign Secretary. Three days before, the French had pulled out their 
troops from Chanak, leaving the tiny British contingent exposed to the 
full fury of Ataturk's nationalists, and making a humiliation inevit- 
able. Curzon had come to remonstrate. 

The two men hated each other. Poincare was the spokesman of the 
French rentiers, a Forsytian lawyer, sharp, prudent, thrifty, who liked 
to quote Guizot's advice to the French, 'Enrichissez-vous!' VAvocat 
de France, they called him: he had inherited the nationalism of Thiers, 
whose biography he was writihg. His boast was incorruptibility: he 
insisted on writing all his letters by hand and when he sent an official 
messenger on private business, paid for it himself. 1 Curzon, too, wrote 
his own letters, thousands and thousands of them, sitting up late into 
the night, unable to sleep from a childhood back-injury. He, too, had a 
parsimonious streak, rigorously scrutinizing Lady Curzon's house- 
hold accounts, keeping the servants up to the mark, not above telling a 
housemaid how to dust the furniture or a footman how to pour tea. 
But Poincare brought out all his aristocratic contempt for middle-class 
vulgarity and French emotional self-indulgence. As the two men 
argued, Poincare 'lost all command of his temper and for a quarter of 
an hour shouted and raved at the top of his voice'. Lord Hardinge, the 
British Ambassador, had to help the shocked Curzon to another room, 
where he collapsed on a scarlet sofa, his hands trembling violently. 
'Charley/ he said, 'I can't bear that horrid little man. I can't bear him. I 
can't bear him.' And Lord Curzon wept. 2 

The underlying cause of the Anglo— French division was precisely a 
different estimate of the likelihood of a German military revival. Most 
of the British regarded French statesmen as paranoid on the subject of 

138 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 139 

Germany. 'I tell you,' Edouard Herriot was heard to say by Sir 
Austen Chamberlain, 'I look forward with terror to her making war 
upon us again in ten years.' 3 This French view was shared by the 
British members of the Inter-Allied Commission of Control, whose 
job was to supervise Articles 168-9 of the Versailles Treaty gov- 
erning the disarmament of Germany. Brigadier-General J.H.Morgan 
reported privately that Germany had retained more of its pre-war 
characteristics, especially its militarism, than any other state in 
Europe. 4 The French claimed that every time they checked a 
statement by the Weimar War Ministry, they found it to be untrue. 
But the reports of the Control Commission, recording brazen 
violations, were never published; were, in the view of some, delib- 
erately suppressed, to help the general cause of disarmament and 
cutting defence spending. The British Ambassador to Germany, Lord 
D'Abernon, a high-minded militant teetotaller, was passionately 
pro-German, the first of the Appeasers; he believed every word in 
Keynes's book and reported that it was impossible for Germany to 
conceal evasions of the Treaty. 5 He had nothing to say in his reports 
about holding companies set up by German firms to make weapons 
in Turkey, Finland, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Bilbao and Cadiz, and 
arrangements made by Krupps to develop tanks and guns in 
Sweden. 6 

French resentment at British indifference to the risks of a German 
revival was further fuelled on 16 April 1922 when Germany signed 
the Rapallo Treaty with Russia. One of the secret objects of this 
agreement, as the French suspected, was to extend arrangements for 
the joint manufacture of arms in Russia, and even to have German 
pilots and tank-crews trained there. It also had a sinister message to 
France's eastern ally Poland, hinting at a German-Soviet deal against 
her which finally emerged as the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939. 
Rapallo strengthened Poincare's determination to get reparations 
from Germany by force, if necessary, and it was not long after the 
break with Britain over Chanak that he sent French troops into the 
Ruhr, on 11 January 1923. Some of these troops were from French 
Africa, and it was one of Poincare's boasts that France was 'a 
country not of 40 million but of 100 million'. The French railway 
system in Africa, such as it was, had as its main purpose the rapid 
transportation of troops to the European theatre. The fact that the 
Germans had a particular hatred for the Arabs and blacks in French 
uniform was, to the French, an additional reason for sending them 
there. France's harsh line brought short-term results on 26 Septem- 
ber 1923 when the German government, in effect, capitulated to 
Poincare's demands. The fierce little lawyer, who held power (with 
one interruption) until 1929, was the dominant figure in Western 



140 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

European politics for most of the Twenties and appeared to many 
(including some of the British and Americans) to personify a French 
aggressiveness which was a greater threat to European and world 
stability than anything likely to emerge from Germany. 

In fact all Poincare's policy produced was a gigantic German 
resentment, certain to come into the open the second French power 
waned, and a strengthening of the very forces in Germany deter- 
mined on military revival. And of course the image of a fighting-cock 
France, resuming the dominant role in Europe it had occupied from 
the time of Louis xiv to Napoleon I, was an illusion. Versailles had 
not broken up Bismarck's Germany. It was inevitably the only 
superpower in Europe, now that Russia had virtually ceased - if only 
temporarily - to be a European power. Sooner or later that German 
superiority, in numbers, industrial strength, organization and 
national spirit, was bound to declare itself again. The only question 
was whether it would do so in generous or hostile fashion. 

By comparison the French were weak. Equally important, they felt 
they were even weaker than they actually were. The consciousness of 
debility, marked in the Twenties - Poincare's bluster was an attempt 
to conceal it - became obsessional in the Thirties. In the seventeenth 
century the French population had been nearly twice as big as any 
other in Europe. The next largest, significantly enough, had been that 
of Poland. 7 The French had a melancholy awareness of the decline of 
their« new Eastern ally, which they hoped to make great again to 
balance their own decline. It was engraven on French hearts that, 
even as late as 1800, they were still the most numerous race in 
Europe, Russia alone excepted. Since then they had suffered an 
alarming relative decline, reflected in scores of worried demographic 
tracts which had been appearing since the 1840s. They were over- 
taken by the Austrians in 1860, the Germans in 1870, the British in 
1900, and the Italians were to follow in 1933, making France a mere 
fifth in Europe. Between 1800, when it was 28 million, and 1940, the 
French population increased by only 50 per cent, while Germany's 
quadrupled and Britain's tripled. 8 

The Great War, which (as the French saw it) Germany had willed 
on France in order to destroy her utterly as a major power, had 
tragically increased France's demographic weakness. They had had 
1,400,000 men killed - 17.6 per cent of the army, 10.5 per cent of 
the entire active male population. Even with Alsace and Lorraine 
back in the fold, the French population had fallen in consequence, 
from 39.6 million to 39.12 million, while Britain's, for instance, had 
risen 2.5 million during the war years. Some 1.1 million Frenchmen 
had become mutiles de guerre, permanently disabled. The Germans 
had killed 673,000 peasants, seriously wounded half a million more, 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 141 

occupied ten departements with a population of 6.5 million, turned a 
quarter of them into refugees, wrecked farm-buildings, slaughtered 
livestock and removed machinery when they withdrew, as well as 
turning Frenchmen into slave-labourers in the factories of Luden- 
dorff's 'War Socialism', where death-rates were nearly as high as the 
10 per cent a year they reached under the Nazis in the Second World 
War. The French brooded on these appalling figures, which were 
made to seem even more terrible by the brilliance of their own 
war-propaganda. 9 

Those French who suffered war-damage were well compensated 
afterwards but the manner in which this was financed, despite all 
Poincare's efforts, produced a progressive inflation which, while less 
spectacular than Germany's in 1923, lasted much longer and was 
ultimately more corrosive of national morale. Between 1912 and 
1948, wholesale prices in France multiplied 105 times and the price 
of gold 174 times. Against the dollar, the franc in 1939 was only 
one-seventieth of its 1913 value. 10 For American and British tourists 
and expatriates, France between the wars was a bargain-basement 
paradise, but it was hard on the French who treated the steady 
erosion of their rentes and savings as an additional reason for having 
fewer children. Between 1906 and 1931 the number of French 
families with three or more children fell drastically and during the 
Thirties one-child families were commoner than any other. By 1936 
France had a larger proportion of people over sixty than any other 
country - 147 per thousand, compared to 129 in Britain, 119 in 
Germany, 91 in the US and 74 in Japan. 11 

France had hoped to strengthen herself by recovering Alsace and 
Lorraine, the latter with a large industrial belt. But of course the 
economy of the two provinces had been integrated with the Ruhr and 
it was badly damaged by the separation. In heavily Catholic Alsace 
the French alienated the clergy by attacking German, the language of 
religious instruction. They tended to make the same mistake as the 
Germans and behave like colonizers. In fact they had less to offer, for 
French social security was much inferior to Germany's. 12 France was 
a poor market for industry, albeit a protected one. Strict rent 
controls, imposed in 1914 and never lifted, killed France's housing 
market. Housing stock, 9.5 million before the war, was still only 9.75 
million in 1939, with nearly a third declared unfit for human 
habitation. Agriculture was appallingly backward. In the 1930s there 
were still three million horses on the farms, the same number as in 
1850. France, like Italy, was a semi-industrialized country and her 
pre-war rate of progress was not fully sustained in the 1920s, still less 
in the 1930s when industrial production never returned to the 1929 
levels. Between 1890 and 1904 France was the world's biggest car 



142 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

manufacturer. In the 1920s she still made more cars than Italy or 
Germany. But she failed to produce a cheap car for mass-sale. By the 
mid-1 930s 68 per cent of cars sold in France were second-hand and 
there were still 1,352,000 horse-carriages on the streets, exactly as 
many as in 1891. 13 

The root of the problem was low investment. Here again inflation 
was to blame. The state was a poor substitute for the private 
investor. It was the biggest employer even before 1914 and the war 
gave the state sector new impetus. Etienne Clementel, Minister of 
Commerce 1915-19, wanted a national plan and an economic union 
of Western Europe; among his proteges were Jean Monnet and other 
future 'Eurocrats'. But nothing came of these ideas at the time. The 
state bought into railways, shipping, electricity, oil and gas to keep 
things going and preserve jobs, but little money was available for 
investment. 14 French industrialists had plenty of ideas but were 
frustrated by the lack of big opportunities and spent much of their 
time feuding with each other - thus, Ernest Mercier, head of the 
electricity and petrol industries, fought a bitter war with Francois de 
Wendel, the big iron-steel boss. 15 For clever men lower down the 
ladder the lack of opportunities was even worse (for women they 
were non-existent). Between the wars real wages of engineers in 
France fell by a third. Higher education, especially on the technical 
side, was tragically inadequate, bedevilled by sectarian rows and lack 
of funds. Most of the money went to the famous but old-fashioned 
'Grandes Ecoles' in Paris: Herriot called the Poly technique, which 
produced the technocrats, 'the only theology faculty which has not 
been abolished'. A Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique did 
emerge, but on an exiguous budget. The new Paris Medical Faculty 
building, ordered in the 1920s, was not finished till the 1950s 
(France had no Health Ministry until 1922), and by 1939 it had only 
two doctors on its staff. One striking statistic sums it up: in 1927 
France spent less on higher education than on feeding cavalry 
horses. 16 

Moreover, in its own way France was as divided as Germany. 
There was no clash between civilization and culture. Quite the 
contrary. The French were agreed about civilization: they owned it. 
They were most reluctant, at Versailles, to admit English as an 
alternative official language. They regarded France as the originator, 
home and custodian of civilization — a word they themselves had 
coined in 1766. They envied, disliked and despised the Anglo- 
Saxons. Their best young novelist, Francois Mauriac, wrote in 1937: 
'I do not understand and I do not like the English except when they 
are dead.' Among the popular books of the period were Henri 
Beraud's Faut-il reduire VAngleterre en esclavaget (1935) and Robert 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 143 

Aron and Andre Dandieu's Le Cancer Americain (1931). The 
Germans, oddly enough, were more acceptable. In the 1930s, young 
novelists like Malraux and Camus read Nietzsche and young philoso- 
phers like Sartre were attracted to Heidegger. But the official model for 
France was Descartes, whose methodology dominated the school 
philosophy classes which were the most striking feature of the French 
education system. 17 They were designed to produce a highly intelligent 
national leadership. What they did produce was intellectuals; not quite 
the same thing. And the intellectuals were divided not merely in their 
views but on their function. The most influential of the philosophy 
teachers, Emile Chartier ('Alain'), preached 'commitment'. But the 
best-read tract for the times, Julien Benda's La Trahison des Clercs 
(1927), preached detachment. 18 There was something to be said for 
keeping French intellectuals above the fray: they hated each other too 
much. Marx had assumed, in the Communist Manifesto, that 
'intellectuals' were a section of the bourgeoisie which identified itself 
with the interests of the working class. This analysis appeared to be 
confirmed during the early stages of the Dreyfus case (the Jewish officer 
falsely convicted of treason), when the newly fashionable term 
'intelligentsia' was identified with the anti-clerical Left. But the long 
Dreyfus struggle itself brought into existence an entirely new category 
of right-wing French intellectuals, who declared a reluctant cease-fire in 
1914 but emerged foaming with rage in 1918 and helped the political 
Right, the next year, to win its first general election victory in a 
generation. Except in 1924-5, 1930-1 and 1936-8, the French Right 
and Centre dominated the Chambre des Deputes (and the Senate 
throughout), and the Right intellectuals held the initiative in the salons 
and on the boulevards. 

There was agreement about civilization; where the French fought 
was over culture. Was it secular or confessional, positivist or a matter of 
metaphysics? The battle was bitter and destructive, savagely dividing 
the education system, business, local government, society. The 
freemasons, the militant arm of secularity, were still increasing their 
numbers, from 40,000 in 1928 to 60,000 in 1936. 19 Their junior arm 
was composed of the despised, underpaid state primary teachers, 
pro-republican, pacifist, anti-clerical, who fought the cure in every 
village. They used a completely different set of textbooks, especially in 
history, to the Catholic 'free' schools. But the Catholics were gaining in 
the schools. Between the wars, state secondary schools dropped from 
561 to 552; Catholic ones more than doubled, from 632 in 1920 to 
1,420 in 1936. The Anciens eleves (Old Boys) associations of these 
Catholic colleges were exceptionally well organized and militant, 
thirsting to reverse the verdict of the Dreyfus years. 20 The bifurcation in 
the French schools tended to produce two distinct races of Frenchmen, 



144 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

who had different historical heroes (and villains), different political 
vocabularies, different fundamental assumptions about politics and, 
not least, two completely different images of France. 

In fact in France there were two rival types of nationalism. The 
secularists and republicans, who rejected the fatherhood of God and 
the king, had coined the term la patrie in the eighteenth century to 
denote their higher allegiance to their country. When Dr Johnson 
declared, at this time, that 'Patriotism is the last refuge of a 
scoundrel' he was denouncing a species of subversive demagoguery. 
French patriotism acquired a Jacobin flavour under the Revolution 
and this type of progressive nationalism was perpetuated by Gam- 
betta and Clemenceau. It could be just as chauvinistic and ruthless as 
any other kind — more, perhaps, since it tended to admit no higher 
law than the interest of the Republic, thought to incarnate virtue - 
but it tended to evaporate into defeatism and pacifism the moment 
France was thought to be in the control of men who did not serve the 
aims of la patrie. In particular, it regarded the regular army, which 
was overwhelmingly Catholic and partly royalist, with suspicion, 
even hostility. 

As opposed to 'patriotic France' there was 'nationalist France'. It 
was the Gallic equivalent of the division between Westerners and 
Easterners in Germany. It is a mistake to describe the inter-war 
French nationalists as fascists - though some of them became fascists 
of the most gruesome kind - because the tradition was much older. It 
went back to the emigres of the Revolutionary epoch, the cultural 
reaction to the Enlightenment of Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot, 
and it first acquired an intellectual content in the writings of Joseph 
de Maistre, whose masterpiece, Les Soirees de Saint-Peter sbourg, 
was published in 1821. He offered a combination of irrationalism, 
romanticism and a Jansenist stress on original sin. Human reason is a 
'trembling light', too weak to discipline a disorderly race: 'That 
which our miserable century calls superstition, fanaticism, intol- 
erance etc. was a necessary ingredient of French greatness.' 'Man is 
too wicked to be free.' He is 'a monstrous centaur ... the result of 
some unknown offence, some abominable miscegenation'. 21 To this 
de Maistre added the important notion of a vast conspiracy which, 
with the ostensible object of 'freeing' man, would in fact unleash the 
devil in him. 

In the two decades leading up to the Dreyfus case in the 1890s, 
conspiracy theory became the stock-in-trade of French anti-Semites 
like Edouard Drumont, whose La France juive (1886) grossly 
exaggerated the power, influence and above all the numbers of Jews 
living in France. In fact when Drumont wrote there were only about 
35,000 Jews in France. But their numbers were increasing: there 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 145 

were over 100,000 by 1920. Other 'aliens' poured in. France under 
the Third Republic, and especially between the wars, was the most 
agreeable country in the world in which to live, and in many ways 
the most tolerant of foreigners provided they did not cause trouble. 22 
Between 1889 and 1940 nearly 2,300,000 foreigners received French 
citizenship and there were, in addition, a further 2,613,000 foreign 
residents in 1931, a figure which increased rapidly as refugees from 
Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini and the Spanish war arrived. 23 The French 
were not racist in the German sense, since a certain cosmopolitanism 
was a corollary of their proprietory rights over civilization. But they 
were extraordinarily susceptible to weird racial theories, which they 
produced in abundance. Thus in 1915 Dr Edgar Berillon 'discovered' 
that Germans had intestines nine feet longer than other humans, 
which made them prone to 'polychesia' and bromidrosis (excessive 
defecation and body-smells). 24 If Paris was the world capital of 
Cartesian reason, it was also the capital of astrology, fringe-medicine 
and pseudo-scientific religiosity. There was (indeed still is) a strong 
anti-rationalist culture in France. 

Hence the success of Action Franqaise, the newspaper of the 
nationalist ultras. It began in 1899 among a small group of intellec- 
tuals who met on the Boulevard Saint-Germain at the Cafe Flore - 
which was, in 1944, to be 'liberated' by the Existentialists - and 
flourished on the talents of Charles Maurras. He publicized the idea 
of a multiple conspiracy: 'Quatres etats confederes: Juifs, Protes- 
tants, franc-masons, meteques' (aliens). This was not very different 
from the official Vatican line during the Dreyfus case, though it 
substituted 'atheists' for 'aliens'. In fact though both Maurras and 
Action Franqaise were themselves atheistic, many of their views were 
strongly approved of by the Catholic Church. Pius x, the last of the 
great reactionary popes, told Maurras' mother, 'I bless his work', 
and though he signed a Holy Office decree condemning his books he 
refused to allow it to be enforced - they were Damnabiles, non 
damnandus. 25 Vatican condemnation did come in the end, on 20 
December 1926, because Pius xi had by then experience of fascism in 
power. But there were plenty of related groups to which faithful 
Catholics could belong and the nationalist movement never lost its 
respectability among the middle and upper classes. Action Franqaise^ 
edited by Leon Daudet, was brilliantly written and widely read: that 
was why Proust, though a Jew, took it, finding it 'a cure by elevation 
of the mind'. 26 Many leading writers were close to the movement. 
They included, for instance, France's leading popular historian, 
Jacques Bainville, whose Histoire de France (1924) sold over 
300,000 copies, and whose Napoleon (1931) and La Troisieme 
Republique were also best-sellers. 



146 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

Indeed the weakness of French nationalism was that it was too 
intellectual. It lacked a leader with the will to power. At the end of 
1933, with fascism triumphant in most of Europe, the Stavisky 
scandal in France gave the ultras precisely the revelation of republi- 
can corruption which they needed to justify a coup. Some kind of 
proto-fascist state would almost certainly have come into existence 
on 6 February 1934 had Maurras given the signal for action. But he 
was then sixty-six, very deaf and by temperament a sedentary 
word-spinner: he spent the critical day writing an editorial instead. 
Precisely the gifts which made him so dangerous in stirring the 
passions of educated Frenchmen incapacitated him from leading 
them into battle. There was thus no focus around which a united 
fascist movement could gather. Instead there was a proliferation of 
groups, each with a slightly different ideology and a varying degree 
of tolerance towards violence. They presented the mirror-image of 
the despised regime des partis in the Chambre des Deputes. Bourbon 
factions like Les Camelots du Roi jostled the Bonapartist Jeunesses 
Patriotes, the atheist Etudiants d y Action Franqaise and 'pure' fascist 
groups such as the Parti Populaire Franqais, he Paisceau and the 
Phalanges Universitaires^ and more traditional movements like the 
Croix de Feu, Nazi-type adventurers, many of whom were later to 
flourish under Vichy, shopped around these mushroom growths, 
looking for the best bargain. It took an external catastrophe to bring 
them to power. 

Yet Maurras and his supporters undoubtedly made this catastro- 
phe more likely. The Third Republic had more friends in France than 
Weimar had in Germany. Maurras revealed that it had a host of 
enemies too. His favourite quotation was from the stuffy Academi- 
cian and Nobel Prizewinner Anatole France: 'La Republique n'est 
pas destructible, elle est la destruction. Elle est la dispersion, elle est 
la discontinuity, elle est la diver site, elle est le mal.' 27 The Republic, 
he wrote, was a woman, lacking 'the male principle of initiative and 
action'. 'There is only one way to improve democracy: destroy it.' 
'Democracy is evil, democracy is death.' 'Democracy is forgetting/' 
His fundamental law was 'Those people who are governed by their 
men of action and their military leaders defeat those peoples who are 
governed by their lawyers and professors.' If republicanism was 
death, how could it be worth dying for? The Versailles Treaty was 
the creation of 'a combination of Anglo-Saxon finance and Judeo- 
German finance'. The conspiracy theory could be reformulated - 
anarchism, Germans, Jews: 'The barbarians from the depths, the 
barbarians from the East, our Demos flanked by its two friends, the 
German and the Jew.' 28 The ultra-nationalists, though jealous of 
French interests as they conceived them, were thus unwilling either to 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 147 

preserve the Europe of Versailles or to curb fascist aggression. 
Bainville's diaries show that he welcomed the fascist successes in 
Italy and Germany. 29 Maurras applauded the invasion of Ethiopia 
by Mussolini as the struggle of civilization against barbarism. 30 
'What can you do for Poland?' he asked his readers, a cry echoed by 
Marcel Deat's devastating 'Mourir pour Dantzig?' 

In effect, then, both the strains of nationalism in France, the 
Jacobin and the anti-republican, had reservations about the sacrifices 
they would be prepared to make. It was not a case of my country 
right or wrong, or my country Left or Right, but a case of whose 
country — mine or theirs? The division within France was already 
apparent by the early 1920s and the infirmity of will it produced 
soon affected actual policy. France's post-war defence posture was 
based on absolute military supremacy west of the Rhine, containing 
Germany on one side, and a military alliance of new states, to 
contain her on the other. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugo- 
slavia all had complicated military arrangements with France down 
to the supply of weapons and the training of technicians. Poincare's 
occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 saw the western arm of the policy in 
action. But it did such damage to French interests in Britain and 
America that it appeared to many French politicians to be unrepeat- 
able; and the 1924 American solution to the reparations mess, the 
Dawes Plan, removed much of the excuse for a further resort to 
force. The Germans now proposed that the Franco-German frontier 
should be guaranteed, and Britain backed their request. The French 
replied that, in that case, Britain must also agree to guarantee the 
frontiers of Germany in the east with France's allies, Poland and 
Czechoslovakia. But the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Cham- 
berlain, refused, writing to the head of the Foreign Office, Sir Eyre 
Crowe, (16 February 1925) that Britain could not possibly guarantee 
the Polish Corridor 'for which no British government ever will or 
ever can risk the bones of a British grenadier'. 31 No mourir pour 
Dantzig there, either! 

Hence the Treaty of Locarno (1925), while effectively denying 
France the right to contain Germany by force, failed to underwrite 
her system of defensive alliances either. All it did was to demilitarize 
the Rhineland and give Britain and France the right to intervene by 
force if Germany sought to restore her full sovereignty there. This, 
however, was bluff. Though Chamberlain boasted to the 1926 
Imperial Conference that 'the true defence of our country ... is now 
no longer the Channel . . . but upon the Rhine', the British Chiefs of 
Staff privately pointed out that they did not possess the military 
means to back up the guarantee. 32 Two years later the Chief of the 
Imperial General Staff produced a cabinet memorandum pointing 



148 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

out that Germany's total strength, including reserves, was not the 
100,000 army allowed by Versailles but a force of 2 million. 33 The 
French War Office made the same kind of estimate. By 1928 
Poincare had dropped the 'forward' notion of a strategic frontier on 
the Rhine and had reverted to a purely defensive policy: experts were 
already working on the project to be known as the Maginot Line. 

What, then, of Poincare's 'country of 100 million', the imperial 
vision which H.G.Wells termed 'the development of "Black 
France"'? 34 Could the empire be invoked to redress the balance of 
France's weakness in Europe? Maurice Barres, the intellectual who 
helped to put together the right-wing coalition which swept to 
victory in the 1919 elections, wrote: 'One is almost tempted to thank 
the Germans for opening the eyes of the world to colonial questions.' 
The 1919 parliament was known as the 'Chambre bleu horizon\ 
after the colour of the army uniforms and its imperialist aspirations. 
Albert Sarraut, the Minister for the Colonies, produced a grandiose 
plan in April 1921 to turn France d'Outre-mer into the economic 
underpinning of la Mere-patrie. 35 But to realize this vision there were 
one, or possibly two, prerequisites. The first and most important was 
money for investment. The French had hoped to get it, under the 
Sykes-Picot secret agreement, from the spoils of war: a 'Greater 
Syria' including the Mosul oilfields. But in the scramble after the end 
of the war she was denied this by Britain and her Hashemite Arab 
proteges. All France got was the Lebanon, where she was the 
traditional protector of the Christian Maronite community, and 
western Syria, where there was no oil and a lot of ferocious Arab 
nationalists. She would have been better off with just the Lebanon. In 
Syria the mandate was a total failure, provoking full-scale rebellion, 
put down at enormous military expense, and culminating in 1925 
with the French High Commissioner shelling Damascus with heavy 
artillery. 36 The Middle East carve-up remained a festering source of 
discord between France and her chief ally, Britain, leading to actual 
fighting between them in 1940-1. France never made a franc profit 
out of the area. 

As a result, there was no money for Sarraut's plan. France's black 
African colonies had been acquired after 1870 for prestige not 
economic reasons, to keep the army employed and to paint the map 
blue. A law of 1900 said that each colony must pay for its own 
upkeep. Federations were organized in West (1904) and Equatorial 
(1910) Africa, but the combined population of both these vast areas 
was less than that of Britain's Nigeria. To make economic sense, 
everyone agreed, they had to be linked to France's North African 
territories. In 1923 the Quai d'Orsay and the Ministries of War and 
Colonies agreed that the building of a Trans-Sahara railway was 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 149 

absolutely 'indispensable'. But there was no money. Even a technical 
survey was not made until 1928. The railway was never built. More 
money in fact did go into France's overseas territories; investments 
increased fourfold between 1914—40, the empire's share of total 
French investment rising from 9 to 45 per cent. But nearly all of this 
went to France's Arab territories, Algeria getting the lion's share. In 
1937 foreign trade of the Franco-Arab lands was over 15 milliard 
francs, four times that of West and Equatorial Africa. 37 

The second prerequisite was some kind of devolution of power, so 
that the inhabitants of the 'country of 100 million' enjoyed equal 
rights. But there was no chance of this. In 1919 at the Paris Treaty 
talks, Ho Chi Minh presented, on behalf of the Annamites of 
Indo-China, an eight-point programme; not, indeed, of self- 
determination but of civil rights, as enjoyed by metropolitan France 
and expatriates. He got nowhere. Indo-China had one of the worst 
forced-labour systems in the world and its oppressive system of 
native taxation included the old gabelle or salt-tax. As Ho Chi Minh 
put it, France had brought to Indo-China not progress but medieval- 
ism, which the gabelle symbolized: 'Taxes, forced labour, exploita- 
tion,' he said in 1924, 'that is the summing up of your civilization.' 38 
There were as many (5,000) French officials in Indo-China as in the 
whole of British India, with fifteen times the population, and they 
worked closely with the French colon planters. Neither would 
tolerate devolution or reforms. When in 1927 a progressive French 
governor-general, Alexandre Varenne, tried to end the corvee, they 
ganged up to get him recalled. In 1930, in Indo-China alone, there 
were nearly 700 summary executions. If Gandhi had tried his passive 
resistance there, Ho Chi Minh wrote, 'he would long since have 
ascended into heaven'. 39 

In North Africa it was no better, in some ways worse. Algeria was 
in theory run like metropolitan France but in fact it had separate 
electoral colleges for French and Arabs. This wrecked Clemenceau's 
post-war reforms in 1919 and indeed all subsequent ones. The 
French settlers sent deputies to the parliament in Paris and this gave 
them a leverage unknown in the British Empire. In 1936 the colon 
deputies killed a Popular Front bill which would have given full 
citizenship to 20,000 Muslims. Marshal Lyautey, the great French 
Governor-General of Morocco, described the colons as 'every bit as 
bad as the Boches, imbued with the same belief in inferior races 
whose destiny is to be exploited'. 40 In Morocco he did his best to 
keep them out. But this was difficult. In Morocco a French farmer 
could enjoy the same living standards as one in the American 
Mid-West. All Europeans there had real incomes a third above that 
of France, and eight times higher than the Muslims. Moreover, 



150 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

Lyautey's benevolent despotism, which was designed to protect the 
Muslims from French corruption, in fact exposed them to native 
corruption at its worst. He ruled through caids who bought their 
tax-inspectorates and judgeships, getting into debt thereby and being 
obliged to squeeze their subjects to pay the interest. The system 
degenerated swiftly after Lyautey's death in 1934. The greatest of the 
caids, the notorious El Glawi, Pasha of Marrakesh, ran a 
mountain-and-desert empire of rackets and monopolies, including 
control of Marrakesh's 27,000 prostitutes who catered for the needs 
of the entire Western Sahara. 41 On the front that mattered most, 
education, little progress was made. There were far too many French 
officials: 15,000 of them, three times as many as the Indian 
administration, all anxious to perpetuate and if possible hereditarize 
their jobs. In 1940, accordingly, there were still only 3 per cent of 
Moroccans who went to school, and even in 1958 only 1,500 
received a secondary education. In 1952 there were only twenty-five 
Moroccan doctors, fourteen of them from the Jewish community. 

It was not that the French had colour prejudice. Paris always 
welcomed evolues. In 1919 the old-established 'Four Communes' of 
West Africa sent to the Chambre a black deputy, Blaise Diagne. Two 
years later Rene Maran's Batouala, giving the black man's view of 
colonialism, won the Prix Goncourt. But the book was banned in all 
France's African territories. Clever blacks learned to write superb 
French; but once they got to Paris they tended to stay there. In the 
1930s, Leopold Senghor, later President of Senegal, felt so at home in 
right-wing Catholic circles he became a monarchist. 42 There seemed 
no future for him in Africa. By 1936 only 2,000 blacks had French 
citizenship. Apart from war veterans and government clerks, the 
great majority of black Africans were under the indigenat — summary 
justice, collective fines, above all forced labour. Houphouet-Boigny, 
later President of the Ivory Coast, described the work-gangs as 
'skeletons covered with sores'. The Governor of French Equatorial 
Africa, Antonelli, admitted that the building of the Congo-Ocean 
railway in 1926 would 'require 10,000 deaths'; in fact more died 
during its construction. 43 Black Africans voted with their feet, 
running into nearby British colonies to escape the round-ups. 

Some Frenchmen with long experience of colonial affairs saw 
portents. Lyautey warned in 1920: The time has come to make a 
radical change of course in native policy and Muslim participation in 
public affairs.' 44 Sarraut himself argued that the European 'civil war' 
of 1914—18 had weakened the position of the whites. 'In the minds 
of other races,' he wrote in 1931, 'the war has dealt a terrible blow to 
the standing of a civilization which Europeans claimed with pride to 
be superior, yet in whose name Europeans spent more than four 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 151 

years savagely killing each other.' With Japan in mind he added: 'It 
has long been a commonplace to contrast European greatness with 
Asian decadence. The contrast now seems to be reversed.' 45 Yet 
nothing effective was done to broaden the base of French rule. When 
Leon Blum's Popular Front government introduced its reform plan to 
give 25,000 Algerians citizenship, the leader of the Algerian 
moderates, Ferhat Abbas, exulted 'La France, c'est moiV Maurice 
Viollette, a liberal Governor-General of Algeria and later, as a 
Deputy, one of the sponsors of the reform, warned the Chambre: 
'When the Muslims protest, you are indignant. When they approve, 
you are suspicious. When they keep quiet, you are fearful. Messieurs, 
these men have no political nation. They do not even demand their 
religious nation. All they ask is to be admitted into yours. If. you 
refuse this, beware lest they do not soon create one for themselves.' 46 
But the reform was killed. 

The truth is colonialism contained far too many unresolved 
contradictions to be a source of strength. Sometimes it was seen, as 
indeed it partly was, as the expression of European rule. Thus in the 
Thirties, Sarraut, who was terrified of increasing Communist subver- 
sion in Africa, proposed a united European front, to include the 
Italians and even the Germans, who would get their colonies back. 
But as war approached the French again saw their empire as a means 
to fight their European enemies, resurrecting the slogan '110 million 
strong, France can stand up to Germany!' In September 1939, 
Clemenceau's former secretary, Georges Mandel, once an anti- 
colonialist but now Minister for the Colonies, boasted he would raise 
2 million black and Arab troops. The two lines of thought were in 
the long run mutually exclusive. If Europe used non-whites to fight 
its civil wars, it could not combine to uphold continental race- 
superiority. 

But this was only one example of the confusions which, from first 
to last - and persisting to this day - surrounded the whole subject of 
imperialism and the colonial empires. What purpose did they serve? 
Cui bono? Who benefited, who suffered? To use Lenin's phrase, who 
was doing what to whom? There was never any agreement. Lord 
Shelburne, the eighteenth-century statesman who deliberated most 
deeply on the question, laid down the policy that 'England prefers 
trade without domination where possible, but accepts trade with 
domination when necessary.' 47 Classical economists like Adam 
Smith, Bentham and Ricardo saw colonies as a vicious excuse to 
exercise monopoly, and therefore as contrary to the general eco- 
nomic interest. 48 Edward Gibbon Wakefield, in his View of the Art 
of Colonization (1849), thought the object was to provide living- 
space for overcrowded European populations. This was likewise the 



152 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

view of the greatest colonizer of all, Cecil Rhodes - without it, the 
unemployed would destroy social order: 'The Empire ... is a bread 
and butter question: if you want to avoid civil war, you must become 
imperialists.' 49 On the other hand, protectionists like Joe Chamber- 
lain argued that colonies existed to provide safe markets for exports, 
a return to pre-industrialist mercantilism. 

It was Robert Torrens in The Colonization of South Australia 
(1835), who first put forward the view that colonies should be seen 
primarily as a place to invest capital. The notion of surplus capital 
was taken up by John Stuart Mill: 'Colonization in the present state 
of the world is the best affair of business in which the capital of an 
old and wealthy country can engage.' 50 This was also the view of 
practical French colonizers, like Jules Ferry, and their theorists, like 
Paul Leroy-Beaulieu; though the latter's book, De la Colonization 
(1874), provided categories: colonie de peuplement (emigration and 
capital combined), colonie d y exploitation (capital export only) and 
colonies mixtes. The German theorist, Gustav Schmoller, argued that 
large-scale emigration from Europe was inevitable and that coloniza- 
tion, as opposed to transatlantic settlement, was far preferable as it 
did not involve capital flying from outside the control of the 
mother-country. All these writers and practitioners saw the process 
as deliberate and systematic, and above all rational. Most of them 
saw it as benevolent and benefiting all concerned, including the 
native peoples. Indeed Lord Lugard, the creator of British West 
Africa, felt Europe had not merely an interest but a moral mandate to 
make its financial resources available to the whole world. 

In 1902 however the capital-export argument was turned into a 
conspiracy theory by J.A.Hobson, a Hampstead intellectual, classi- 
cal schoolmaster and Manchester Guardian journalist. Hobson's 
ideas were to have an important twentieth-century reverberance. In 
1889 he had developed a theory of under-consumption: industry 
produced too much, the rich could not consume it all, the poor could 
not afford it, and therefore capital had to be exported. Keynes later 
acknowledged that Hobson's theory had a decisive influence on his 
General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), and 
Hobson's solutions — steeply progressive taxation, vast welfare 
services and nationalization — became the conventional wisdom of 
West European social democrats. But Hobson was also an anti- 
Semite, and in the 1890s he was so angered by the 'scramble' for 
Africa, the forcible extraction of concessions from China and, above 
all, by the events leading up to the Boer War, that he produced a wild 
book, Imperialism (1902), in which the process was presented as a 
concerted and deliberate act of wickedness by 'finance-capital', often 
Jewish. Imperialism was the direct consequence of under- 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 153 

consumption and the need to export capital to secure higher returns. In 
two crucial chapters, 'The Parasites' and 'The Economic Taproot of 
Imperialism', he presented this conspiracy theory in highly moralistic 
and emotional terms, arguing that the only people to gain anything 
from empires were the 'finance-capitalists': the natives suffered, the 
colonizing nations as a whole suffered and, just as the Boer War was a 
plot to seize control of the Rand gold mines, so the practice of 
imperialism and particularly competitive imperialism would tend to 
produce war. 51 

The actual idea of imperialism had only entered the socio-economic 
vocabulary about 1900. Hobson's book, which defined it as 'the use of 
the machinery of government by private interests, mainly capitalists, to 
secure for them economic gains outside the country', 52 instantly made 
the evil conspiracy aspect immensely attractive to Marxists and other 
determinists. 53 The Austrian economists, Otto Bauer and Rudolf 
Hilferding, argued in 1910 that imperialism made war absolutely 
inevitable. In 1916 Lenin put the capstone on this shaky edifice by 
producing his Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which 
fitted the concept neatly into the basic structure of Marxist theory. 
Hitherto, colonial empires had been approached in an empirical spirit. 
Colonies were judged on their merits. Colonial powers were benevolent 
or exploitative or a mixture of both. The process was seen as having 
advantages and drawbacks for all the parties concerned and, above all, 
as complicated and changing. Now it was all reduced to slogans, made 
simple, in both economic and moral terms, and certified, everywhere 
and always, as intrinsically evil. The process whereby this crude and 
implausible theory became the conventional wisdom of most of the 
world, over the half-century which followed the Versailles Treaty, is 
one of the central developments of modern times, second only in 
importance to the spread of political violence. 

The actual historical and economic reality did not fit any of the 
theories, the Hobson-Lenin one perhaps least of all. If empires were 
created because of over-saving and under-consumption, if they 
represented the final stage of capitalism, how did one explain the 
empires of antiquity? Joseph Schumpeter, whose Zur Soziologie des 
Imperialisms {On the Sociology of Imperialism) appeared in 
Germany in 1919, was closer to the truth when he argued that modern 
imperialism was 'atavistic'. Capitalism, he pointed out, usually 
flourished on peace and free-trade, rather than war and protectionism. 
Colonies often represented 'an objectless disposition ... to unlimited 
frontier expansion'. They seemed to be acquired at a certain critical 
stage of national and social development, reflecting the real or imagined 
interests of the ruling class. 54 But that was too glib also. As a matter of 
fact, the rise of the Japanese Empire (as we shall see) came closest to the 



154 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

model of a deliberately willed development by an all-powerful ruling 
establishment. But the Japanese model was scarcely ever considered 
by the European theorists. And in any case Japanese expansion was 
often dictated by assertive military commanders on the spot, who 
exceeded or even disobeyed the orders of the ruling group. That was 
the French pattern too. Algeria was acquired as a result of army 
insubordination; Indo-China had been entered by overweening naval 
commanders; it was the marines who got France involved in West 
Africa. 55 In one sense the French Empire could be looked upon as a 
gigantic system of outdoor relief for army officers. It was designed to 
give them something to do. What they actually did bore little relation 
to what most of the ruling establishment wanted or decided. The 
French cabinet was never consulted about Fashoda, the protectorate 
over Morocco, or the 1911 crisis. Parliament never really controlled 
the empire at any stage of its existence. Jules Ferry probably came 
close to the real truth when he described the imperial scramble as 'an 
immense steeplechase towards the unknown'. 56 It was said that 
Bismarck encouraged France to lead the steeplechase in order to 
forget his annexation of Alsace and Lorraine. If so, he was much 
mistaken. Outside the army, few Frenchmen cared about black 
Africa. As Deroulede put it: T have lost two sisters - you offer me 
twenty chambermaids.' 57 

There were a great many other anomalies which did not fit into 
Hobson-Lenin. Why, in Latin America, did the phase of capitalist 
investment follow, rather than precede or accompany, Spanish 
colonialism? Why, in this vast area, were the capitalists in league 
with the political liberators? Then again, some of the 'exploited' or 
colonized countries were themselves residual empires. China was the 
creation of a whole series of imperial dynasties, without benefit of 
'finance-capital'. India was a product of Mughal imperialism. Tur- 
key had been expanded from Ottoman Anatolia. Egypt was an old 
imperial power which, after its breakaway from Turkey, sought to be 
one again in the Sudan. There were half a dozen native empires south 
of the Sahara run by groups and movements such as the Ashanti, 
Fulani, Bornu, Al-Haji Umar, Futa Toro. Ethiopia was an empire 
competing with the European empires in the Horn of Africa, before 
succumbing to one of them in 1935. Burma was a kind of empire. 
Persia, like China, was an imperial survivor from antiquity. Colon- 
ialism itself created empires of this anomalous type. The Congo (later 
Zaire) was put together by the Berlin Conference of 1884-5, and 
survived decolonization without benefit of any of the factors which 
theory said created empires. So did Indonesia, a product of Dutch 
tidy-mindedness, assembled from scores of quite different territories. 
Conspiracy theory shed no light on any of these cases. 58 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 155 

What is decisive, however, is that the theory broke down at its very 
core - the need for colonies to provide high-return settlement areas 
for capital. Indeed, the closer the actual facts are studied, the clearer 
it becomes that any notion of 'finance-capital' desperately looking 
for colonies as places to invest its huge surpluses of capital is 
preposterous. There was never any such thing as 'surplus' capital. 
Investment capital was always hard to come by, but especially in the 
colonies. The tropics did not yield big returns until the very end of 
the colonial era. There were a few big success stories. In West Africa, 
Lever Brothers made huge investments in communications, social 
services and plantations which by the 1950s employed 40,000 
Africans: the company owned 350,000 hectares and actively worked 
60,000. 59 There was also heavy investment and occasional high 
profits (but also some large-scale failures) in Malaya, whose rubber 
and tin made it probably the richest colony between the wars. 
Capital did not follow the flag. The British were at least as likely to 
put their money in independent Latin-American states as in crown 
colonies. They often lost it too. Argentina, which attracted more 
British money than any other 'developing' territory, taught all 
investors a fearful lesson during its 1890-1 financial crisis. Taking 
the nineteenth century as a whole, British investors in Argentina 
showed a net loss. 60 The Germans and Italians were keener than 
anyone to possess colonies but were most reluctant to sink any 
money in them. The French preferred Russia - or the Dutch East 
Indies - to their 'twenty chambermaids'. The British, too, favoured 
Java and Sumatra over their innumerable African territories. 61 Con- 
spiracy theory demands the existence of a small number of very 
clever people making a highly rational appreciation and co- 
ordinating their efforts. In fact the number of investors, in France 
and Britain alone, was very large and their behaviour emotional, 
inconsistent, ill-informed and prejudiced. The City of London was 
incapable of planning anything, let alone a world-wide conspiracy; it 
simply followed what it imagined (often wrongly) to be its short- 
term interests, on a day-to-day basis. 62 The most consistent single 
characteristic of European investors throughout the colonial period 
was ignorance, based on laziness. 

If investors had no agreed and concerted, let alone conspiratorial 
aim, the colonial administrators were not much clearer. In the 
nineteenth century, in the spirit of Macaulay's educational reforms in 
India, the object of colonial rule was commonly thought to be to 
produce imitation Europeans. Between the wars this vision faded 
rapidly, leaving only confusion. The so-called 'Dual Mandate' policy 
put forward by Lord Lugard in the 1920s, not so different to 
Lyautey's aims in Morocco, sought to preserve native patterns of 



156 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

administration, and to give paramountcy to their interests. The 
British task, Lugard wrote, was 'to promote the commercial and 
industrial progress of Africa without too careful a scrutiny of the 
material gains to ourselves'. 63 This element of altruism gradually 
became stronger but it coexisted with other aims: military strategy, 
emigration, defending settler interests, national prestige, national 
economic policy (including tariffs), which varied according to the 
nature of the colony, and the colonial system, and were often 
inconsistent with native interests and indeed with each other. There 
was no typical colony. Many colonial territories were not, in legal 
terms, colonies at all, but protectorates, mandates, Trust territories, 
federations of kingdoms and principalities, or quasi-sovereignties 
like Egypt and the states of the Persian Gulf (including Persia itself). 
There were about a score of different prototypes. Some colonies, 
especially in West Africa, contained two or more quite different legal 
entities, representing successive archaeological layers of Western 
penetration. In these circumstances pursuing a consistent colonial 
policy, with clear long-term aims, was impossible. No empire did so. 

Hence there can be no such thing as a balance-sheet of colonialism 
between the wars, or at any other stage. Broadly speaking, the policy 
was to provide the basic infrastructure of external defence, internal 
security, basic roads and public health, and leave the rest to private 
initiative. Government's aim was to be efficient, impartial, uncorrupt 
and non-interventionist. Sometimes the government found itself 
obliged to run the economy, as Italy did in Somalia and Libya, with 
conspicuous lack of success. 64 It usually had to maintain a broader 
public sector than at home. Thus Britain, for instance, promoted the 
modernization and expansion of agriculture and ran public health 
services in all her crown colonies, and operated state railways in 
every African territory south of the Sahara (except Rhodesia and 
Nyasaland). But all this points to a scarcity, not a surplus, of capital. 
Government did these things from a sense of duty, not desire; they 
added to the debit side of the ledger. 

Colonial governments did little to promote industry but they did 
not deliberately restrict it either. Usually there was little incentive to 
invest, shortage of skilled labour and lack of good local markets 
being the main obstacles. Where conditions were suitable, as in the 
Belgian Congo, industry appeared between the wars, though the 
money came chiefly not from Belgium but from foreign sources and 
foreign-owned subsidiaries — another blow to the conspiracy theory. 
Dakar in French West Africa was a growth point for exactly the same 
reason. The notion that colonialism, as such, prevented local indus- 
try from developing, breaks down on the simple fact that the 
free-trading British, Belgians and Dutch, on the one hand, pursued 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 157 

diametrically opposed policies to the protectionist French, Spanish, 
Italian, Portuguese and Americans on the other. 

From 1923 onwards, and especially after 1932, the British broke 
their own rules about free trade in order to promote Indian industry. 
It was the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, who persuaded J.N.Tata, the Parsee 
cotton magnate, to set up an Indian iron and steel industry, for which 
Britain provided protective tariffs. By 1945 India produced 1.15 
million tons annually and Indian producers virtually monopolized 
the market. Again, in cotton and jute, where conditions for the 
industry were attractive, the Indians could and did produce the 
capital themselves, and Britain provided protection. By the time of 
independence, India had a large industrial sector, with Indian firms 
handling 83 per cent of banking, 60 per cent of exports-imports and 
supplying 60 per cent of consumer goods. 65 But it is very doubtful 
that creating local industries behind a tariff barrier worked to the 
advantage of the general population of a colony. By and large, the 
inhabitants of the free-trading empires enjoyed higher living stan- 
dards than the others, as one would expect. India and Pakistan 
maintained ultra-protectionist policies after independence, with 
protection levels of 313 and 271 per cent respectively, and that is one 
reason why their living standards have risen so much more slowly 
than in the market economies of Eastern Asia. 66 

On the whole, colonial powers served the interests of local 
inhabitants best when they allowed market forces to prevail over 
restrictive policies, however well intentioned. It usually meant mov- 
ing from subsistence agriculture to large-scale production of cash- 
crops for export. This so-called 'distortion' of colonial economies to 
serve the purposes of the mother country or world markets is the 
basis of the charge that these territories were simply 'exploited'. It is 
argued that colonies became poorer than before, that their 'natural' 
economies were destroyed, and that they entered into a diseased 
phase termed 'underdevelopment'. 67 Unfortunately the statistical 
evidence to prove or refute this theory simply does not exist. Mungo 
Park's Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799) does not give 
the impression of a rural Arcadia where the pursuit of wealth was 
eschewed: quite the contrary. The independent chiefs were not only 
imperialists, in their own small way, but exceptionally acquisitive. 
They moved into cash-crop agriculture wherever they could contrive 
to find a market. Indeed there was no alternative, once population 
increases made subsistence farming a dead-end. 

The notion that industrialization, as opposed to primary produc- 
tion, is the sole road to high living standards is belied by the 
experience of former colonies like Australia, New Zealand, much of 
Canada and the US Midwest, where exports of meat, wool, wheat, 



158 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

dairy products and minerals have produced the most prosperous 
countries in the world. It is significant, perhaps, that during the 
post-colonial period none of the newly independent states with 
well-established plantation economies has attempted to replace them 
by other forms of farming. Quite the reverse in fact: all have sought 
to improve their export-earning potential, usually in order to finance 
industrial development - which was exactly what most colonial 
governments were seeking to do in the later phases of the era. There 
were rarely big and never easy profits to be made out of large-scale 
tropical agriculture. An analysis of export prices of coffee, cocoa, 
ground-nuts, cotton, palm oil, rice, gum arabic, kernels and kapok in 
the French West African territories during the last phase of colonial 
rule (1953) shows that profits were small and determined largely by 
the transport system. 68 The argument that the advanced economies 
organized a progressive deterioration in the terms of trade to depress 
primary prices does not square with the statistical evidence and is 
simply another aspect of conspiracy theory. 

The worst aspects of inter-war colonialism were forced labour and 
land apportionment on a racial basis. Their origin was as follows. 
African land could be made productive, and a take-off from sub- 
sistence agriculture achieved, only if adequate labour, working 
European-style regular hours, was made available. In pre-colonial 
Africa the answer had been slavery. The more progressive colonial 
powers, Britain and to a lesser extent France, were determined to 
abolish it. The British preferred to push Africans into the labour 
market by taxation. Or they imported labour under contract. This 
was the easy way out. Running a world-wide empire where labour as 
well as goods could travel freely, they induced Indians to work in 
Burma, Malaya, the Pacific, Ceylon and in South, Central and East 
Africa, even in Central and South America; and Chinese to work in 
South-East Asia, the Pacific, South Africa and Australia. They also 
brought about big internal movements in Africa, just as the Dutch, in 
Indonesia, induced Javanese to work in the other islands. 69 The 
effect was to create a large number of intractable race and communal 
problems (or, in the case of Indonesia, Javanese imperialism) which 
are still with us. The Dutch also adopted the so-called 'culture 
system' which forced the inhabitants to produce by demanding 
payment in kind, the state being the chief plantation owner and 
agent. 70 The culture system was adopted by Leopold n, the creator 
of the Belgian Congo, and became the basis of the economy there, 
and the Belgians also put pressure on the chiefs to provide Volun- 
teers' who signed long indentures. The French and Portuguese went 
the whole hog with unpaid corvees (forced labour) as a substitute for 
taxation. The worst cases of oppression occurred in Portuguese 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 159 

Africa and the Congo. They had largely been ended by 1914, 
following exposure by British journalists and consular officials. But 
forced labour in some forms continued right up to the late 1940s. 71 
Its scale was small, however. Indeed, until comparatively recently 
the vast majority of Africans remained quite outside the wage 
economy. As late as the 1950s, out of 170 million Africans south of 
the Sahara, only 8 million worked for wages at any one time in the 
year. 72 Where wages were high the Africans worked willingly: the 
Rand goldfield never had any trouble getting labour, from its origin 
up to this day. Elsewhere it was mostly the same old story: low 
returns, low investments, low productivity, low wages. No one who 
actually worked in Africa, white or black, ever subscribed to 
fantasies about surplus capital. That existed only in Hampstead and 
Left Bank cafes. 

The biggest mistake made by the colonial powers — and it had 
political and moral as well as economic consequences — was to 
refuse to allow the market system to operate in land. Here they 
followed the procedures first worked out in the British colonies in 
America in the seventeenth century, elaborated to develop the 
American Midwest and West (to the destruction of the indigenous 
Indians) and refined, on a purely racial basis, in South Africa. It 
involved human engineering, and was therefore destructive of the 
individualistic principle which lies at the heart of the Judaeo— 
Christian ethic. In South Africa, by 1931, some 1.8 million Eu- 
ropeans had 'reserves' of 440,000 square miles, while 6 million 
Africans were allotted only 34,000 square miles. In Southern 
Rhodesia, the Land Apportionment Act of 1930 gave Europeans, 
already in possession of 30 million acres, the right to buy a further 
34 million acres of crown lands, while Africans, with reserves of 21 
million acres, had access only to 7 million more. In Northern 
Rhodesia the whites already had exclusive possession of 9 million 
acres. In Kenya this deliberate distortion of the free land market 
was particularly disgraceful since in 1923 the Duke of Devonshire, 
as Colonial Secretary, had laid down the 'Devonshire Declaration': 
'Primarily Kenya is an African territory . . . the interests of the 
African natives must be paramount.' Despite this, in a deliberate 
exercise in social engineering, the White Highlands was cleared of 
its Kikuyu inhabitants to make way for white farmers. In the 1930s, 
there were in Kenya 53,000 square miles of African reserves, 
16,700 reserved for Europeans and 99,000 of crown lands, which 
the government could apportion according to arbitrary political 
criteria. The system was indefensible. Indeed it was only defended 
on the grounds that drawing racial lines was essential to good 
farming. The argument was false in itself (as subsequent events in 



160 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

Kenya have demonstrated) and it contradicted the general free- 
market principles on which the British Empire had been created. 

Of course in pressing for the social engineering inherent in the 
race-determined apportionment of land, the settlers were making a 
crude response to what to them was an overwhelming fact: the 
unequal development of human societies. It is a problem fundamen- 
tal to the species, which already existed in marked form at the time of 
the Iron Age. The archetype European capitalist empires, which were 
effectively confined to the years 1870-1945, constituted an unco- 
ordinated and spasmodic, often contradictory, series of attempts to 
solve the problem presented by the existence of advanced and 
backward societies in a shrinking world, where contacts between 
them were inevitable, not least because populations were rising 
almost everywhere - and expectations too. 

The system, if it can be called that, was slow to get itself organized: 
even the French did not have a Colonial Ministry until 1894, 
Germany till 1906, Italy 1907, Belgium 1910, Portugal 1911. 73 Its 
'classical age' between the wars was already a kind of twilight. Its 
existence was too brief to achieve results on its own terms. Develop- 
ing human and natural resources is a slow, laborious and often 
bloody business, as the whole of history teaches. Men like Rhodes, 
Ferry, Lugard, Lyautey and Sarraut shared an unjustified optimism 
that the process could be speeded up and made relatively painless. 
Exactly the same illusions were shared by their successors as 
independent rulers: Sukarno, Nasser, Nkrumah, Nehru and scores of 
others, as we shall see. But most of the poor countries remained in 
the same position relative to the rich in the 1980s as they were in the 
1870s, when the great age of colonialism started. 

This leads us to a very important point. Colonialism was a highly 
visual phenomenon. It abounded in flags, exotic uniforms, splendid 
ceremonies, Durbars, sunset-guns, trade exhibitions at Olympia and 
the Grand Palais, postage stamps and, above all, coloured maps. It 
was, in essence, a cartographic entity, to be perceived most clearly 
and powerfully from the pages of an atlas. Seen from maps, 
colonialism appeared to have changed the world. Seen on the 
ground, it appeared a more meretricious phenomenon, which could 
and did change little. It came easily; it went easily. Few died either to 
make it or break it. It both accelerated and retarded, though 
marginally in both cases, the emergence of a world economic system, 
which would have come into existence at approximately the same 
speed if the Europeans had never annexed a single hectare of Asia or 
Africa. 'Colonialism' covered such a varied multiplicity of human 
arrangements that it is doubtful whether it describes anything 
specific at all. 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 161 

Colonialism was important not for what it was but for what it was 
not. It bred grandiose illusions and unjustified grievances. The first 
had a major impact on events up to 1945; the second thereafter. If the 
French Empire seemed to transform a declining and exhausted France 
into a vigorous Samson of a hundred million, Britain's Common- 
wealth appeared to make her a superpower - a notion that Hitler, for 
instance, carried with him to his bunker. Again, it was the visual 
aspect which determined such perceptions. In the 1920s, the great 
military roads, public buildings and European quarters which Lyautey 
had commanded for Morocco were taking shape: formidable, dur- 
able, austerely magnificent, as indeed they still are. Simultaneously, 
Sir Edwin Lutyens's government quarters in Delhi, the finest of all the 
twentieth century's large-scale conceptions, was being completed. 
Significantly, both had been conceived in Edwardian times; both were 
made flesh only after the first of Europe's civil wars had already 
undermined the empires they adorned. Architecture is both the most 
concrete and the most emblematic of the arts. Public buildings speak: 
sometimes in false tones. Lutyens's splendid domes and cupolas used 
two voices. To most of the British, to most foreigners, to most Indians 
above all, they announced durability; but to the military and 
economic experts they increasingly whispered doubt. 

A case in point was the imperial currency system. From 1912 Britain 
divided her empire into regional currency areas, regulated by a British 
Currency Board according to the Colonial Sterling Exchange Stan- 
dard; from 1920 colonies had to hold 100 per cent cover (in bullion or 
gilt-edge bonds) in Britain for their fiduciary issue. It produced a great 
many complaints among the nationalists, especially in India. In fact it 
was a sensible system which gave most of the Commonwealth the very 
real blessing of monetary stability. It also worked very fairly until after 
1939, when the exigencies of British wartime finance and her rapid 
decline into total insolvency rfendered the whole system oppressive. 74 
There is a vital moral here. Britain could be just to her colonial subjects 
so long as she was a comparatively wealthy nation. A rich power could 
run a prosperous and well-conducted empire. Poor nations, like Spain 
and Portugal, could not afford justice or forgo exploitation. But it 
follows from this, as many British statesmen had insisted throughout 
the nineteenth century, that colonies were not a source of strength but 
of weakness. They were a luxury, maintained for prestige and paid for 
by diverting real resources. The concept of a colonial superpower was 
largely fraudulent. As a military and economic colossus, the British 
Empire was made of lath and plaster, paint and gilding. 

Hence the curious sense, both of heartlessness and of extravagance, 
but also of fragility and impermanence, which the between-the-wars 
empire evoked in the beholder. Malcolm Muggeridge, at Simla in the 



162 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

early 1920s, noted that only the Viceroy and two other officials were 
allowed cars, and that the roads were so steep that all the rickshaw 
coolies died young of heart-failure. Watching a fat man being pulled 
along he heard someone say, 'Look, there's one man pulling another 
along. And they say there's a God!' 75 In 1930 in Kenya, Evelyn Waugh 
came across 'a lovely American called Kiki', whom a rich British 
settler at Lake Navaisha in the White Highlands had given 'two or 
three miles of lake-front as a Christmas present'. 76 Yet Leo Amery, the 
most ambitious of the inter-war Colonial Secretaries, found his plan to 
have a separate Dominions section thwarted because the Treasury 
would not spend an extra £800 a year in salaries. 77 When Lord 
Reading was made Viceroy in 1921, the political manoeuvrings which 
surrounded the appointment made it clear that, in the eyes of the 
British government, the need to keep Sir Gordon Hewart, a good 
debater, on the Front Bench as Attorney-General, was much more 
important than who ruled India. 78 Three years later, the great 
imperialist editor of the Observer, J.L.Garvin, 'thought it quite 
possible that within five years we might lose India and with it — 
Goodbye to the British Empire'. 79 The same elegiac thought occurred 
to a young British police officer in Burma who was called upon, at 
exactly that time, to shoot an elephant to impress 'the natives': 'It was 
at that moment', George Orwell wrote, 'that I first grasped the 
hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East. Here 
was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed 
native crowd — seemingly the leading actor in the piece. But in reality I 
was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those 
yellow faces behind.' 80 

Running an empire was in great part a simple matter of determina- 
tion. Years later, in 1 962, Sir Roy Welensky, premier of the Rhodesian 
Federation, was to say 'Britain has lost the will to government in 
Africa'. It was not yet lost in the 1920s and 1930s, or not wholly lost. 
But it was being eroded. The Great War had shaken the self- 
confidence of the British ruling class. Losses from the United Kingdom 
were not so enormous: 702,410 dead. They were comparable with 
Italy's, which bounded with vitality in the 1920s. But of course Italy's 
population was still rising fast. Moreover it was widely believed that the 
products of Oxford and Cambridge and the public schools had been 
particularly heavily hit. Some 37,452 British officers had been killed 
on the Western Front, 2,438 killed, wounded or missing on the first 
day (1 July 1916) of the Battle of the Somme alone. 81 From this arose 
the myth of the 'lost generation', in which slaughtered paladins like 
Raymond Asquith, Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke, many of them 
in sober fact misfits or failures, were presented as irreplaceable. 82 The 
myth was partly literary in creation. The war poets were numerous 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 163 

and of high quality: Wilfred Owen, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried 
Sassoon, Herbert Read, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Maurice 
Baring, Richard Aldington, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Gibson and 
many others; in the final years of the war they became obsessed 
with death, futility and waste. 83 Their poems haunted the early 
1920s; later came the prose: R.C.Sherriff's play Journey's End, 
Blunden's Undertones of War, Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox- 
Hunting Man, all in 1928; Aldington's Death of a Hero the 
following year. It was a literature which, while not exactly defeatist, 
was unheroic and underlined the cost of defending national great- 
ness. 

In the minds of the upper class, moreover, the loss of life, which 
they exaggerated, was directly linked to the crisis of the old landed 
system of traditional gentry agriculture, which had been in deep 
trouble since the arrival of transatlantic grain in the 1870s and was 
now on its last legs. Pre-war legislation had been designed to 
protect tenant-farmers against landlords. Lloyd George, who hated 
the landed aristocracy, capped the system with his Agriculture Act 
(1920), which brought in secure tenancy; and a further act in 1923 
destroyed restrictive tenancy agreements and legalized 'freedom of 
cropping'. The result was the break-up of thousands of estates, big 
and small. 'England is changing hands', wrote The Times, 19 May 
1920. 'From 1910 onwards,' H.J.Massingham claimed, 'a vindic- 
tive, demagogic and purely urban legislation has crippled [the 
landlord], good, bad or indifferent, responsible or irresponsible.' 84 
In February 1922 the Quarterly Circular of the Central Landown- 
ers' Association estimated that 700,000 acres of agricultural land 
was changing hands every year. The previous year a single firm of 
auctioneers had disposed of land equal in area to the average 
English county. The former Liberal cabinet minister, C.F.G. 
Masterman, in a much-read book published in 1923, complained: 
'In the useless slaughter of the Guards on the Somme, or of the 
Rifle Brigade in Hooge Wood, half the great families of England, 
heirs of large estates and wealth, perished without a cry .... 
There is taking place the greatest change which has ever occurred in 
the history of the land of England since the days of the Norman 
Conquest.' 85 The price of land continued to fall, agricultural debt 
increased and millions of acres went out of production. The Daily 
Express cartoonist, Strube, featured a lanky and famished wastrel 
labelled 'Idle Acres'. J.Robertson Scott, editor of The Countryman, 
gave a striking picture of rural desolation in a series of articles in 
Massingham's Nation, which became a lugubrious best-seller under 
the ironic title England's Green and Pleasant Land (1925). In 
Norfolk in 1932, the writer-farmer Henry Williamson noted, 'a 



164 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

farm of nearly a square mile, with a goodish Elizabethan house and 
ten or a dozen cottages, sold for a thousand pounds'. 86 It is hard to 
exaggerate the effect of this untreated and ubiquitous decay at the 
heart of England's ancient system of governance. 

The evidence of industrial decay was omnipresent too. After a 
brief post-war recovery, the fundamental weakness of Britain's 
traditional export industries - coal, cotton and textiles, shipbuilding, 
engineering - all of which had old equipment, old animosities and 
old work-practices, combining to produce low productivity, was 
reflected in chronically high unemployment. This was attributed in 
great part to the decision of Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the 
Exchequer to return Britain to the gold standard in 1925. Keynes 
argued fiercely against it as a form of 'contemporary mercantilism'. 
We were 'shackling ourselves to gold'. Churchill replied we were 
'shackling ourselves to reality', which was true, the reality of 
Britain's antiquated industrial economy. 87 The effects of the move 
balanced out: higher export prices, cheaper imported food and raw 
materials. As Churchill said, it was primarily a political move, 
designed to restore Britain's financial prestige to its pre-war level. It 
was necessarily deflationary and so had the unforeseen effect of 
making it easier for the government to defeat the General Strike, the 
ultimate weapon of the Sorelians, talked about since 1902, which 
finally took place in May 1926. There had been dress-rehearsals in 
1920 and 1922, from which the Tory Party had profited more than 
the union leaders. When it became inevitable, Stanley Baldwin 
craftily manoeuvred the leaders of the transport, railway and mining 
unions into fighting the battle at the end instead of the beginning of 
winter. It collapsed ignominiously after a week. 'It was as though a 
beast long fabled for its ferocity had emerged for an hour, scented 
danger and slunk back to its lair.' 88 Neither going back to gold nor 
the breaking of the general strike weapon had any effect on the 
unemployment figures which (given as a percentage of the labour 
force) remained on a grievous plateau even before the end of the 
Twenties boom. From 1921—9 they were as follows: 17.0; 14.3; 
11.7; 10.3; 11.3; 12.5; 9.7; 10.8; 10.4. 89 

For the workers, then, the problem was not one of a 'missing 
generation'. No gaps were observable in their ranks. There were not 
too few of them; too many, rather. Yet their plight helped to increase 
the erosion of will among the ruling establishment by radicalizing the 
Anglican clergy. The Church of England had had a bad war. It had 
blown an uncertain patriotic trumpet. It had been exposed by the 
Catholic clergy as amateurish in its trench-ministry. It had done no 
better in the munitions factories. 90 It had lost ground during a 
supreme moment; and it was uneasily aware of the fact. During the 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 165 

Twenties its more eager spirits developed a new evangelism of peace 
and 'compassion'. Some went very far to the Left. Conrad Noel, 
vicar of the spectacular fourteenth-century church of Thaxted in 
Essex, refused to display the Union Jack inside it on the grounds that 
it was 'an emblem of the British Empire with all the cruel exploita- 
tion for which it stood'. He put up the Red Flag, for which he quoted 
biblical authority: 'He hath made of one blood all nations.' Every 
Sunday posses of right-wing undergraduates would come over from 
Cambridge to tear it down, and would be resisted by 'Lansbury 
Lambs', a force of radical ex-policemen who had been sacked for 
striking in 1919. 91 This battle of the flags convulsed establishment 
England, a shocking new form of entertainment. 

More significant was William Temple, Bishop of Manchester from 
1920 and later Archbishop of York and Canterbury, by far the most 
influential Christian clergyman in interwar Britain. He was the first 
of the Anglo-Saxon clergy to opt for progressive politics as a 
substitute for an evangelism of dogma, and was thus part of that 
huge movement which, as Nietzsche had foreseen, was transforming 
religious energy into secular Utopianism. Temple was a jovial, Oliver 
Hardy figure, with an appetite not merely for carbohydrates but for 
social martyrdom. In 1918 he joined the Labour Party and an- 
nounced the fact. In the Twenties he created copec, the Conference 
on Christian Politics, Economics and Citizenship, prototype of many 
such bodies from that day to this. At its 1924 meeting in Birmingham 
he announced: 'With the steadily growing sense that Machiavellian 
statecraft is bankrupt, there is an increasing readiness to give heed to 
the claims of Jesus Christ that He is the Way, the Truth and the 
Life.' 92 His actual interventions in social politics were ineffectual. 
Thus, the General Strike took him by surprise and caught him at 
Aix-les-Bains trying to cure his gout and reduce his obesity. Puffing 
home, he directed an intervention by churchmen which, by persuad- 
ing the miners' leaders they had the whole of Christendom behind 
them, had the effect of prolonging the coal strike from July to 
December 1926, by which time the colliers and their families were 
destitute and starving. 93 Nothing daunted, Temple soldiered on in 
the progressive cause. To George Bernard Shaw a socialist bishop in 
person was, he gleefully exclaimed, 'a realized impossibility'. In fact 
Temple was a portent of many more to come; and it was a sign of the 
times that his views assisted, rather than impeded, his stately 
progress to the throne of St Augustine. 

Temple's philosophy enshrined the belief, so characteristic of the 
twentieth century, that Christian morality was reflected in the 
pursuit of secular economic 'solutions'. The Christian notion of guilt, 
embodied in the unease of comfortable, well-fed Anglican digni- 



166 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

taries, powerfully reinforced the feeling of obligation which the 
possessing classes and the better-off nations were beginning to 
entertain towards the deprived, at home and abroad. Economics was 
not about wealth-creation, it was about duty and righteousness. 
Naturally Temple found eager allies on the agnostic side of the 
progressive spectrum. Keynes wrote him a remarkable letter, which 
hotly denied that economics was a morally neutral science: '. . . eco- 
nomics, more properly called political economy, is a side of ethics.' 94 
That was what the prelate wished to hear and the Fellow of King's 
was anxious to teach. 

As such Keynes spoke for the insidious anti-establishment which in 
the 1920s emerged from the privacy of Cambridge and Bloomsbury 
to effect a gradual but cumulatively decisive reversal in the way the 
British ruling class behaved. Hitherto, the axioms of British public 
policy at home, and of British imperialism abroad, had reflected the 
moral climate of Balliol College, Oxford, under the Mastership of 
Benjamin Jowett. Its tone was judicial: Britain's role in the world was 
to dispense civilized justice, enforced if necessary in the firmest 
possible manner. It was epitomized in the person of Lord Curzon, 
fastidious, witty, urbane and immensely cultured but adamant in the 
upholding of British interests, which he equated with morality as 
such. 'The British government', he minuted to the cabinet in 1923, 'is 
never untrue to its word, and is never disloyal to its colleagues or its 
allies, never does anything underhand or mean . . . that is the real 
basis of the moral authority which the British Empire has long 
exerted.' 95 Naturally, when need arose, that moral authority had to 
be stiffened by tanks and aeroplanes and warships operating from 
the string of bases Britain maintained throughout the world. 

At Cambridge a rather different tradition had developed. While 
Oxford sent its stars to parliament, where they became ministers and 
performed on the public stage, Cambridge developed private groups 
and worked by influence and suggestion. In 1820 a Literary Society 
had been formed, of twelve members known as the Apostles, which 
propagated the early heterodoxies of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Its 
recruits, collectively chosen and secretly elected - not even the mere 
existence of the society was ever acknowledged - were of high calibre 
but teachers and critics rather than major creators: the one massive 
talent, Alfred Tennyson, quickly slipped away in 1830. 96 The 
Apostles' world-picture was diffident, retiring, unaggressive, agnos- 
tic, highly critical of pretensions and grandiose schemes, humani- 
tarian and above all more concerned with personal than with public 
duties. It cultivated introspection; it revered friendship. It was 
homosexual in tone though not often in practice. Tennyson captured 
its mood in his poem 'The Lotus Eaters'. 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 167 

In 1902 the Apostles elected a young Trinity undergraduate called 
Lytton Strachey. His father had been a general in India for thirty 
years - Curzon's world, in fact — but his intellectual and moral 
formation was that of his mother, an agnostic stalwart of the 
Women's Progressive Movement, and a free-thinking French republi- 
can schoolmistress called Marie Silvestre. 97 Two years before being 
elected to the Apostles he had formed, with Leonard Woolf and Clive 
Bell, a 'Midnight Society' which later devolved into the Bloomsbury 
Group. Both the Apostles and Bloomsbury, one secret and informal, 
the other informal and admitting a few women, revolved for the next 
thirty years round Strachey. Initially, however, he was not the 
philosopher of the sect. That was the role of G.E.Moore, a Trinity 
don and fellow- Apostle whose major work, Principia Ethica, was 
published the autumn after Strachey's election. Its last two chapters, 
'Ethics in Relation to Conduct' and 'The Ideal', were, by implication, 
a frontal assault on the Judaeo— Christian doctrine of personal 
accountability to an absolute moral code and the concept of public 
duty, substituting for it a non-responsible form of hedonism based 
on personal relationships. 'By far the most valuable things which we 
know or can imagine', Moore wrote, 'are certain states of conscious- 
ness which may be roughly described as the pleasures of human 
intercourse and the enjoyment of personal objects. No one, probably, 
who has asked himself the question, has ever doubted that personal 
affection and the appreciation of what is beautiful in Art and Nature 
are good in themselves.' 98 

Strachey, who was a propagandist of genius rather than a creator, 
pounced on this discreet volume with the same enthusiasm Lenin 
showed for Hobson's Imperialism, published the year before. It was 
just the argument he wanted and could preach. To his fellow- Apostle 
Keynes he wrote urgently of 'the business of introducing the world to 
Moorism'. The book was the ideology not of odious Victorian duty, 
but of friendship; and, as he confided to Keynes, with whom he was 
already competing for the affections of handsome young men, of a 
very special kind of friendship: 'We can't be content with telling the 
truth - we must tell the whole truth: and the whole truth is the 
Devil .... It's madness for us to dream of making dowagers under- 
stand that feelings are good, when we say in the same breath that the 
best ones are sodomitical . . . our time will come about a hundred 
years hence.' 99 Not only did friendship have higher claims than 
conventional morality, it was ethically superior to any wider loyalty. 
The point was to be made by Strachey's fellow-Apostle, 
E.M.Forster: 'If I had to choose between betraying my country and 
betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my 
country.' 100 



168 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

Moore's doctrine, outwardly so un-political, almost quietist, was 
in practice an excellent formula for an intellectual take-over. It 
provided ethical justification not merely for a society of mutual 
admirers, as the Apostles had been in the past, but for the formation 
of a more positive and programmatic freemasonry, a mafia almost. 
The Apostles system gave it access to some of the best brains 
Cambridge could provide: Bertrand Russell, Roger Fry, Ludwig 
Wittgenstein, for instance. A network of links by friendship and 
marriage produced convivial metropolitan centres — 21 Fitzroy 
Square, 38 Brunswick Square, 10 Great Ormond Street, 3 Gower 
Street, 46 Gordon Square, 52 Tavistock Square - as well as 
hospitable Trinity and King's, and such rural hostelries as Lady 
Ottoline Morrell's Garsington, publicized in Crome Yellow. Apostles 
(or their relations) held strategic positions: Strachey's uncle con- 
trolled the Spectator, Leonard Woolf the literary pages of the 
Nation, Desmond MacCarthy (and later Raymond Mortimer) those 
of the New Statesman. 101 There were several friendly publishing 
houses. 

Not for nothing was Strachey the son of a general. He had a genius 
for narcissistic elitism and ran the coterie with an iron, though 
seemingly languid, hand. From the Apostles he grasped the principle 
of group power: the ability not merely to exclude but to be seen to 
exclude. He perfected the art of unapproachability and rejection: a 
Bloomsbury mandarin could wither with a glance or a tone of voice. 
Within his magic circle exclusiveness became a kind of mutual 
life-support system. He and Woolf called it 'the Method'. 102 

Strachey, moreover, did not have to wait 'a hundred years' before 
his time came. The war brought his moment, for it allowed him to 
publicize his counter-establishment philosophy in the form of avoid- 
ing national service. His method of doing so was subtle and 
characteristic. With other Bloomsberries, he belonged to the No- 
Conscription Fellowship and the National Council against Conscrip- 
tion. He did not play an active part in their campaign, which might 
have been legally dangerous, and which he left to more energetic 
souls like Russell. 103 But he made a sensational appearance before a 
tribunal in Hampstead Town Hall in March 1916, fortified by 
special vitamin-food and Swedish exercise and flanked by his three 
adoring sisters. 'Tell me, Mr Strachey,' he was asked by the 
chairman, 'what would you do if you saw a German soldier 
attempting to rape your sister?' 'I should try to come between them.' 
The joke was much relished; the high, squeaky voice universally 
imitated; no one had transfixed a courtroom in quite that way since 
the days of Oscar Wilde. In fact Strachey did not in the end stand on 
his pacifist principles at all but obtained exemption thanks to 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 169 

'sheaves of doctors' certificates and an inventory of his medical 
symptoms'. 104 He spent the entire war writing his quartet of 
biographical essays, Eminent Victorians, which, by holding up 
Thomas Arnold, Florence Nightingale, Cardinal Manning and Gen- 
eral Gordon to ridicule and contempt, was, in effect, a wholesale 
condemnation of precisely those virtues and principles the men in the 
trenches were dying to uphold. He finished it in December 1917, just 
as the calamitous battle of Passchendaele ended in a sea of blood and 
mud. It was published the following year to immediate acclaim and 
lasting influence. Few books in history have ever been better timed. 

Later, Cyril Connolly was to call Eminent Victorians 'the first 
book of the Twenties ... he struck a note of ridicule which the whole 
war-weary generation wanted to hear .... It appeared to the post- 
war young people like the light at the end of a tunnel.' The sharper 
members of the old guard instantly saw it for what it was - 
'downright wicked in its heart', wrote Rudyard Kipling in a private 
letter. 105 Everyone else loved it, often for that very reason. Even 
among the soft underbelly of the establishment there was a self- 
indulgent welcome. H.H.Asquith, once the star of Jowett's Balliol, 
now rosy-plump and bibulous, ousted from the premiership by Lloyd 
George for lack of energy, gave the book what Strachey termed 'a 
most noble and high-flown puff in the course of his Romanes 
Lecture. It appeared as Ludendorff's last offensive tore through the 
British Fifth Army; new editions poured out long after the Germans 
had begun their final retreat, and it proved itself far more destructive 
of the old British values than any legion of enemies. It was the 
instrument by which Strachey was able to 'introduce the world to 
Moorism', becoming in the process the most influential writer of the 
Twenties. As Keynes's biographer Roy Harrod later wrote: 'The 
veneration which his young admirers accorded [Strachey] almost 
matched that due to a saint.' 106 Strachey became the ruling mandarin 
of the age and the Bloomsberries his court - for, as has been well 
observed, 'their unworldliness was in fact a disguise for a thorough- 
going involvement with the world of fashion'. 107 

Yet their power was not directly exerted on public policy, as a rule. 
Keynes said that Strachey regarded politics as no more than 'a fairly 
adequate substitute for bridge'. Even Keynes never sought govern- 
ment office. They moved behind the scenes or in print and sought to 
create intellectual climates rather than shape specific policies. 
Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace rammed home the 
message of Eminent Victorians just as it made brilliant use of 
Strachey 's new literary techniques. In 1924 E.M.Forster published A 
Passage to India, a wonderfully insidious assault on the principle of 
the Raj, neatly turning upside down the belief in British superiority 



170 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

and maturity which was the prime justification of the Indian Empire. 
Two years later Forster's Apostolic mentor, Goldsworthy Lowes 
Dickinson, who invented the term 'A League of Nations' and 
founded the League of Nations Union, published his The Inter- 
national Anarchy 1904-14, a grotesquely misleading account of the 
origins of the Great War, which superbly reinforced the political 
moral of Keynes's tract. 108 The foreign policy of Bloomsbury was 
that Britain and Germany were on exactly the same moral plane up 
to 1918 and that, since then, Britain had been at a moral disadvant- 
age, on account of an iniquitous peace, a continuing imperialism and 
armaments which, in themselves, were the direct cause of war. To a 
great mass of educated opinion in Britain this slowly became the 
prevailing wisdom. 

In a deeper sense, too, Bloomsbury represented an aspect of the 
nation now becoming predominant. Like the shattered ranks of the 
old gentry, like the idle acres, like the dole-queues, Bloomsbury 
lacked the energizing principle. It is curious how often in photo- 
graphs Strachey is shown, supine and comatose, in a low-slung 
deckchair. Frank Swinnerton recorded that, at their first meeting, 
'He drooped if he stood upright, and sagged if he sat down. He 
seemed entirely without vitality.' 109 He 'dragged his daddy longlegs 
from room to room', wrote Wyndham Lewis, 'like a drug-doped 
stork.' Strachey himself admitted to his brother: 'We're all far too 
weak physically to be any use at all.' 110 Few Bloomsberries married; 
and even those not addicted to what was termed 'the higher sodomy' 
lacked the philoprogenitive urge. The circle was outraged when 
Keynes, for reasons which are still mysterious, married the bouncing 
Russian dancer Lydia Lopokova. 

What is perhaps even more striking is the low productivity of 
Bloomsbury, so curiously akin to Britain's exhausted industries. 
Strachey himself produced only seven books, two of them collected 
articles. MacCarthy's expected major work never materialized: there 
were volumes of pieces but no original book. Raymond Mortimer 
followed exactly the same pattern. Forster, known as the Taupe (the 
Mole), was another low-voltage writer: five novels only (apart from 
his homosexual fiction, Maurice, published posthumously). He was 
made a Fellow of King's in 1946 and thereafter he wrote nothing, 
pursuing a mole-like existence for a quarter of a century, emerging 
only to collect honorary degrees. Another member of the group, the 
philosopher J.E.McTaggart, was able to work only two or three 
hours a day and spent the rest of his time devouring light novels at 
the rate of nearly thirty a week. He 'walked with a strange, crab-like 
gait, keeping his backside to the wall'. 111 Lowes Dickinson, too, was 
an etiolated, lethargic figure in a Chinese mandarin's cap. Virginia 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 171 

Woolf wrote of him, 'What a thin whistle of hot air Goldie lets out 
through his front teeth!' 112 Above all, Moore himself became 
virtually sterile after he had delivered his Principia. All that followed 
was a popular version, a collection of essays, a set of lecture notes — 
then silence for forty years. 'I'm afraid I have nothing to say,' he 
wrote to Woolf, 'which is worth saying; or, if I have, I can't express 
it.' 113 He terminated an Apostolic paper with this characteristic 
Bloomsbury maxim: 'Among all the good habits which we are to 
form we should certainly not neglect the habit of indecision.' 114 

Significantly, of all the Cambridge Apostles of that generation, the 
one wholly vital and exuberantly creative figure, Bertrand Russell, 
was never really part of the Bloomsbury Group. Though he shared its 
pacifism, atheism, anti-imperialism and general progressive notions, 
he despised its torpid dampness; it, in turn, rejected him. He thought 
Strachey had perverted Moore's Principia to condone homosexual- 
ity. In any case he felt it was an inferior essay. 'You don't like me, do 
you Moore?' he asked. Moore replied, after long and conscientious 
thought: 'No'. 115 It was notable that Russell, unlike Strachey, 
actually fought for pacifism in the Great War and went to jail for it. 
He read Eminent Victorians in Brixton prison and laughed 'so loud 
that the officer came to my cell, saying I must remember that prison 
is a place of punishment'. But his considered verdict was that the 
book was superficial, 'imbued with the sentimentality of a stuffy 
girls' school'. 116 With his four marriages, his insatiable womanizing, 
his fifty-six books, over one of the widest selection of topics ever 
covered by a single writer, his incurable zest for active experience, 
Russell was of sterner stuff than Bloomsbury. Nor did he share its 
weakness for totalitarianism. On Armistice night, Bloomsbury had 
joined forces with the new firmament of the Sitwells and what 
Wyndham Lewis termed their 'Gilded Bolshevism'. They were cele- 
brating not so much the victory of the Allies as Lenin's wisdom in 
signing a separate peace to 'create and fashion a new God', as Osbert 
Sitwell put it. At the Adelphi, Strachey was to be seen actually 
dancing, 'jigging with the amiable debility of someone waking from a 
trance' - under the ferocious scowl of D.H.Lawrence. 117 Russell 
would have none of it. He went to Russia himself in 1920, saw 
Lenin, and pronounced his regime 'a close tyrannical bureaucracy, 
with a spy system more elaborate and terrible than the Tsar's and an 
aristocracy as insolent and unfeeling'. 118 A year later he was in 
China. Surveying the total administrative and political chaos there, 
he wrote to a friend: 'Imagine . . . Lytton sent to govern the Empire &: 
you will have some idea how China has been governed for 2000 
years.' 119 

Curiously enough, it was Russell's activities and supposedly 



172 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

subversive remarks which the Foreign Office found alarming. No 
one in authority thought to take an interest in the Apostles, which 
was already producing such extremists as E.M.Forster's mentor, 
Nathaniel Wedd, Fellow of King's, described by Lionel Trilling as 'a 
cynical, aggressive, Mephistophelian character who affected red ties 
and blasphemy'. 120 During the Thirties the Apostles were to produce 
at least three Soviet agents: Guy Burgess, Anthony Blunt and Leo 
Long . In the innocence of the time, however, it was Russell's 
public antinomianism — worthy of Oxford in its openness - which 
fascinated Whitehall. Even his conversations on board ship were 
monitored, and at one time it was considered whether to invoke the 
War Powers Order-in-Council (not yet repealed) to get him arrested 
and deported from Shanghai. 121 

These symptoms of paranoia in the Foreign Office reflected a quite 
genuine concern, among those who knew the facts and thought 
seriously about Britain's future security. There was an awful lot of 
empire to defend, and very little with which to defend it. That was 
one reason why the Foreign Office hated the League, with its further 
universal commitments. Successive Tory Foreign Secretaries denied 
Robert Cecil, Minister for League Affairs, a room in the Foreign 
Office, and when this was conceded by the Labour government of 
1924, officials prevented him from seeing important cables. 122 Sen- 
ior British policy-makers were uneasily conscious that keeping the 
Empire together as a formidable entity was, at bottom, bluff and 
demanded skilful juggling. They believed they could do it - they were 
not yet defeatist — but greatly resented any 'sabotage' by 'our side'. 
Hence their resentment at people like Russell and Cecil, who came 
from old governing families (the first the grandson, the second the 
son, of Prime Ministers) and therefore ought to know better. 123 

What particularly worried British planners was the rapid absolute, 
and still more relative, decline in the strength of the Royal Navy from 
its position of overwhelming might at the end of 1918. Britain had 
always skimped her army. But from the days of Queen Anne she had 
maintained the world's largest navy, whatever the cost, as a pre- 
requisite to keeping her empire. For most of the nineteenth century 
she had insisted on a 'two-power standard', that is, a navy equal or 
superior to those of any two other powers combined. In the end that 
had proved beyond her means, but she had endeavoured to mitigate 
any declension from the two-power standard by diplomatic arrange- 
ments. Hence, in 1902, she had finally abandoned her 'splendid 
isolation' by signing a treaty of alliance with Japan, the chief object 
of which was to allow her to concentrate more of her naval forces in 
European waters. The Japanese navy had been largely created with 
British help and advice. For Britain, with her immense Asian 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 173 

possessions and interests, and limited means to protect them, Japan 
was a very important ally. During the war, her large navy had 
escorted the Australian and New Zealand forces to the war-zone: 
indeed, the Australian Prime Minister, W.M.Hughes, thought that if 
Japan had 'elected to fight on the side of Germany, we should most 
certainly have been defeated'. 124 

America's entry into the war, however, introduced a fearful 
complication. America and Japan viewed each other with increasing 
hostility. California operated race-laws aimed at Japanese immi- 
grants and from 1906—8 the mass-migration from Japan had been 
halted. So the Japanese turned to China and sought in 1915 to turn it 
into a protectorate. The Americans endeavoured to halt that too: 
they regarded themselves as the true protectors of China. At Ver- 
sailles, Wilson angered the Japanese by refusing to write a condem- 
nation of racism into the Covenant of the League. 125 Thereafter 
America tended to give the Pacific priority in her naval policy. As a 
result, she put the sharp question to Britain: whom do you want as 
your friends, us or the Japanese? 

For Britain the dilemma was acute. America was an uncertain ally. 
Indeed, strictly speaking she was not an ally at all. Of course there 
were ties of blood. But even by 1900 the proportion of white 
Americans of Anglo-Saxon stock had fallen to a third: the German- 
Americans, with 18,400,000 out of 67 million, were almost as 
numerous. 126 America's original decision to build a big ocean navy 
appeared to have been aimed at Britain more than any other power. 
As late as 1931, in fact, the United States had a war plan aimed at the 
British Empire, 'Navy Basic Plan Red (wpl-22), dated 15 February 
1931'. 127 On the other hand, there was a whole network of 
institutions on both sides of the Atlantic binding the two nations 
together, and an identity of views and interests which constituted the 
fundamental fact in the foreign policies of both. 

The Anglo-Japanese Treaty came up for renewal in 1922. The 
Americans wanted it scrapped. The British cabinet was divided. 
Curzon thought Japan a 'restless and aggressive power . . . like the 
Germans in mentality'; 'not at all an altruistic power'. Lloyd George 
thought the Japanese had 'no conscience'. Yet both men were clear 
the alliance should be renewed; so were the Foreign Office and the 
Chiefs of Staff. So were the Dutch and the French, thinking of their 
own colonies. At the 1921 Commonwealth Conference, the Aust- 
ralians and the New Zealanders came out strongly in favour of 
renewal. In short, all the powers involved in the area - except 
America - and all those involved in British foreign and military 
policy formation, were adamant that the Anglo-Japanese alliance 
was a stabilizing, a 'taming' factor, and ought to be maintained. 128 



174 LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 

But Smuts of South Africa was against, for racial reasons. So was 
Mackenzie King of Canada, a Liberal who depended on the anti- 
British vote in Quebec and who was advised by the Anglophobe 
O.D.Skelton, permanent head of the Canadian Ministry of External 
Affairs. 129 This seems to have tipped the balance. Instead of renew- 
ing the Treaty, an American proposal to call a conference in 
Washington to limit navies was adopted. Hughes of Australia was 
outraged: 'You propose to substitute for the Anglo-Japanese alliance 
and the overwhelming power of the British navy a Washington 
conference?' It was worse than that. At the Conference itself in 1922 
the Americans proposed a naval 'holiday', massive scrappings, no 
capital ships over 35,000 tons (which meant the end of Britain's 
superships) and a 5:5:3 capital ship ratio for Britain, the USA and 
Japan. When Admiral Beatty, the First Sea Lord, first heard the 
details, an eyewitness said he lurched forward in his chair 'like a 
bulldog, sleeping on a sunny doorstep, who has been poked in the 
stomach by the impudent foot of an itinerant soap-canvasser'. 130 
The Japanese hated the proposals too, which they regarded as an 
Anglo-Saxon ganging up against them. Yet the scheme went through. 
The pressure for disarmament at almost any cost and the related fear 
of driving America still further from Europe proved too strong. 
Japan, in turn, demanded and got concessions which made matters 
worse. She insisted that Britain and America agree to build no main 
fleet bases north of Singapore or west of Hawaii. This made it 
impossible, in effect, for America's fleet to come to the rapid support 
of the British, French or Dutch possessions if they were attacked. But 
even more important, the fact that Japan felt she had to demand such 
concessions symbolized, so far as Britain was concerned, her transi- 
tion from active friend into potential enemy. 

This was not grasped at the time. One of those who failed to do so 
was Winston Churchill: indeed, though alert to danger in India, he 
was always blind to perils further east. In August 1919, as War 
Secretary, he had been instrumental in drawing up the 'Ten Year 
Rule', under which defence planning was conducted on the assump- 
tion there would be no major war for at least ten years. In the 
Twenties this was made a 'rolling' guideline, and it was not in fact 
scrapped till 1932. As Chancellor of the Exchequer he put on the 
pressure to curb naval spending, and especially to extend the 5:5:3 
ratio to cruisers, the basic naval life-support system of the empire: 
'We cannot have a lot of silly little cruisers', he told the Assistant 
Cabinet Secretary, Tom Jones, 'which would be of no use 
anyway.' 131 In fact at the 1927 naval conference the Admiralty 
fought off this attack. But in 1930, with Labour in power again, the 
point was conceded — indeed, extended to destroyers and submarines 



LEGITIMACY IN DECADENCE 175 

too. By the early 1930s, Britain was a weaker naval power, in relative 
terms, than at any time since the darkest days of Charles n. Nor 
could she look to her empire. India was a source not of strength but 
of weakness, absorbing a regular 60,000 men from Britain's tiny 
army. The rich dominions were even more parsimonious than Britain 
under the stern stewardship of Churchill. Their forces were tiny and 
hopelessly ill-equipped. The 1925—6 Defence White Paper showed 
that while Britain spent annually only 51s. per capita on her armed 
forces, Australia spent only half as much, 25s, New Zealand 12s lid 
and Canada a mere 5 s lOd. By the early 1930s, these three 'have' 
powers, with so much to defend against men with lean and hungry 
looks, had carried out a programme of virtually total unilateral 
disarmament. Australia had only three cruisers and three destroyers, 
and an air force of seventy planes. New Zealand had two cruisers 
and virtually no air force. Canada had four destroyers and an army 
of 3,600. It had only one military aircraft - on loan from the raf. 132 
Britain was not much more provident so far as the Far East was 
concerned. The building of a modern naval base in Singapore had 
been postponed, at Churchill's urging, for five years. 

History shows us the truly amazing extent to which intelligent, 
well-informed and resolute men, in the pursuit of economy or in an 
altruistic passion for disarmament, will delude themselves about 
realities. On 15 December 1924 Churchill wrote a remarkable letter 
to the Prime Minister, scouting any possibility of menace from 
Japan. For page after page it went on, using every device of statistics 
and rhetoric, to convince Baldwin - already sufficiently pacific and 
complacent by nature — of the utter impossibility of war with Japan: 
*I do not believe there is the slightest chance of it in our lifetime. The 
Japanese are our allies. The Pacific is dominated by the Washington 
Agreement .... Japan is at the other end of the world. She cannot 
menace our vital security in any way. She has no reason whatever to 
come into collision with us.' Invade Australia? 'That I am certain will 
never happen in any period, even the most remote which we or our 
children need foresee . . . war with Japan is not a possibility which 
any reasonable government need take into account.' 133 



FIVE 



An Infernal Theocracy, 
a Celestial Chaos 



While Winston Churchill was assuring the comatose Baldwin that 
Japan meant no harm, its economy was growing at a faster rate than 
any other nation, its population was rising by a million a year and its 
ruler was a god-king who was also insane. The old Emperor Meiji, 
under whom Japan had entered the modern world, had chosen his 
women carefully for their health as well as their beauty, and each 
evening would drop a silk handkerchief in front of the one who was 
to occupy his bed that night. But most of the children thus begotten 
were sickly nonetheless and no doctor was ever allowed to touch 
their divine persons. His heir Yoshihito, who reigned in theory until 
1926, was clearly unbalanced. Though his regnal name, Taisho, 
signified 'Great Righteousness', he oscillated between storms of rage, 
in which he would lash at those around him with his riding-crop, and 
spasms of terror, dreading assassination. He sported a ferocious 
waxed moustache, in imitation of his idol, the Kaiser Wilhelm n, but 
he fell off his horse on parade, and when inspecting his soldiers 
sometimes struck and sometimes embraced them. On his last appear- 
ance before the Diet, he had rolled up his speech and, using it as a 
telescope, peered owlishly at the bobbing and bowing parliamenta- 
rians. After that he had been eased out in favour of his son Hirohito, 
known as Showa ('Enlightened Peace'), a timid creature interested in 
marine biology. He too feared assassins, as did all prominent male 
members of the family. The statesman Prince Ito had prudently 
married a sturdy tea-house girl who protected him from murderous 
samurai by stuffing him into the rubbish hole of his house and 
squatting on top (but they got him in the end). 1 

No western scholar who studies modern Japan can resist the 
feeling that it was a victim of the holistic principle whereby political 
events and moral tendencies have their consequences throughout the 

176 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 177 

world. Japan became infected with the relativism of the West, which 
induced a sinister hypertrophy of its own behavioural weaknesses and 
so cast itself into the very pit of twentieth-century horror. At the 
beginning of modern times Japan was a very remote country, in some 
respects closer to the society of ancient Egypt than to that of post- 
Renaissance Europe. The Emperor, or Tenno, was believed to be 
ara-hito-gami, 'human, a person of the living present who rules over 
the land and its people and, at the same time, is a god'. 2 The first 
Tenno had begun his reign in 660 bc, at the time of the Egyptian 
twenty-fifth dynasty, and the line had continued, sometimes by the 
use of adoption, for two and a half millennia. It was by far the oldest 
ruling house in the world, carrying with it, imprisoned in its dynastic 
amber, strange archaic continuities. In the sixteenth century Francis 
Xavier, the 'apostle of the Indies', had considered the Japanese he 
met to be ideal Christian converts by virtue of their tenacity and 
fortitude. But the internal disputes of the missionaries had led Japan 
to reject Christianity. In the second quarter of the seventeenth 
century it sealed itself off from the European world. It failed 
completely to absorb the notions of individual moral responsibility 
which were the gift of the Judaic and Christian tradition and retained 
strong vestiges of the collective accountability so characteristic of the 
antique world. In the 1850s, the West forced its way into this 
self-possessed society. A decade later, a large portion of the Japanese 
ruling class, fearing colonization or the fate of China, took a 
collective decision to carry out a revolution from above, adopt such 
western practices as were needful to independent survival, and turn 
itself into a powerful 'modern' nation. The so-called Meiji Restora- 
tion of 3 January 1868, which abolished the Shogunate or rule by 
palace major-domo and made the Emperor the actual sovereign, was 
pushed through with the deliberate object of making Japan 
fukoku-kyohei, 'rich country, strong army'. 

It is important to grasp that this decision by Japan to enter the 
modern world contained, from the start, an element of menace and 
was dictated as much by xenophobia as by admiration. The Japanese 
had always been adept at imitative absorption, but at a purely 
utilitarian level which, from a cultural viewpoint, was superficial. 
From her great innovatory neighbour, China, Japan had taken 
ceremonial, music, Confucian classics, Taoist sayings, types of 
Buddhist speculation, Tantric mysteries, Sung painting, Chinese 
verse-making and calendar-making. From the West, Japan now 
proceeded to take technology, medicine, administrative and business 
procedures, plus the dress thought appropriate for these new prac- 
tices. But the social structure and ethical framework of Chinese 
civilization were largely rejected; and, while Japan displayed pragma- 



178 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

tic voracity in swallowing Western means, it showed little interest in 
Western ends: the ideals of classical antiquity or Renaissance 
humanism exercised little influence. 3 

Indeed it is notable that Japan was attracted by modern novelty, 
not by ancient truth. In a sense the Japanese had always been 
modern-minded people: 'modern since pre-history'. 4 They took 
aboard gimmickry and baubles, the technical and the meretricious, 
rather as a society woman adopts passing fashions. But their cultural 
matrix remained quite unaffected: the most characteristic cultural 
creations of Japan have no Chinese antecedents. Similarly, the 
Western importations from the mid-nineteenth century onwards left 
the social grammar of Japan quite untouched. 5 

Nor did Japan's long isolation imply serenity. Quite the contrary. 
Japan had none of China's passivity and fatalistic decay. They were 
very different countries; wholly different peoples. The point has 
often been made that the Chinese live in the realm of space, the 
Japanese in time. China had developed, in the great northern plain 
where her civilization had its roots, a majestic, ordered cosmology, 
and was content to await its slow evolutions. It saw life in terms of 
repetitive cycles, like most oriental cultures. Japan was a collection of 
spidery, spinal islands, rather like ancient Greece, and was almost 
Western in its consciousness of linear development, hurrying from 
point to point with all deliberate speed. Japan had a concept of time 
and its urgency almost unique in non- Western cultures and con- 
sistent with a social stress of dynamism. 6 There was something 
restless, too, in Japan's climate, as changeable and unpredictable as 
Britain's, but far more violent. The islands are strung out from the 
sub-tropics to the sub-arctic; oriental monsoons and western cyc- 
lones play upon them simultaneously. As the German scholar Kurt 
Singer put it, 'Relentlessly this archipelago is rocked with seismic 
shocks, invaded by storms, showered and pelted with rain, encircled 
by clouds and mists .... It is not space that rules this form of 
existence, but time, duration, spontaneous change, continuity of 
movement.' The rapid succession of climatic extremes helps to 
explain, some Japanese believe, the violent oscillations in national 
conduct. 7 

These national attributes, and the fact that the industrialization of 
Japan was imposed from above as the result of deliberate decisions 
by its elites, help to explain the astonishing rapidity of Japan's 
progress. The movement was not a spontaneous reaction to market 
forces but an extraordinary national consensus, carried forward 
without any apparent dissenting voices. It thus had more in common 
with the state capitalism of pre- 19 14 Russia than the liberal capital- 
ism of the West, though the class conflicts which tore Tsarist Russia 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 179 

were absent. Under the Tenno and his court, the gumbatsu, or 
military chiefs, and the zaibatsu, or businessmen, worked in close 
harmony, in accordance with the 'rich country-strong army' pro- 
gramme. Within two generations huge industrial groups had 
emerged, Mitsui, Mitsubishi, Yasuda, Sumitomo, all closely linked to 
the Meiji government and the armed forces by subsidies and con- 
tracts. The 1914-18 war, which deprived Japan of traditional 
suppliers from Europe, and opened up new markets to her, acceler- 
ated her development towards self-sufficiency and industrial matur- 
ity. Steam tonnage rose from 1.5 to over 3 million tons. The index of 
manufacturing production, from an average of 160 in 1915-19, 
jumped to 313 in 1925-9, and in foreign trade the index (100 in 
1913) moved to 126 in 1919 and 199 in 1929, with exports rising 
from 127 to 205 during the 1920s. By 1930 Japan had a population 
of 64 million, exactly twice what it had been at the beginning of the 
revolution-from-above in 1868, and it was already a major industrial 
power. 8 

Comparing Japan's revolutionary development with that of, say, 
Turkey — also imposed from above from 1908 onwards - it is easy to 
see the advantages of being an island kingdom, with natural fron- 
tiers, a homogeneous racial, religious and linguistic composition and, 
not least, a strong and ancient tradition of unity towards outsiders, 
none of which Turkey possessed. 9 Japan also had an important 
economic advantage which was often overlooked at the time (and 
since) : a highly developed intermediate technology, with hundreds of 
thousands of skilled craftsmen and a tradition of workshop disci- 
pline going back many centuries. 

Yet Japan had some fundamental weaknesses too, reflecting its 
archaism. Until 1945 it had no system of fixed law. It had maxims, 
behavioural codes, concepts of justice expressed in ideograms - 
exactly as in ancient Egypt. But it had no proper penal code; no 
system of statutory law; no judge-controlled code of common law 
either. The relationship between authority and those subject to it was 
hidden, often on important points. The constitution itself was 
uncertain. It did not impose a definite system of rights and duties. 
Prince Ito, who drew up the Meiji constitution, wrote a commentary 
on what it meant; but this book was a matter of dispute, and often 
out of official favour. The law was not sovereign. How could it be in 
a theocracy? But then — was Japan a theocracy? Ito thought it had 
been in the past, but no longer was; others took a different view. The 
matter was left ambiguous, as were many other legal and constitu- 
tional matters in Japan, until 1946, when the Emperor publicly 
announced that he was not a god. There was something vague and 
makeshift about the whole system of order in Japan. Honour, for 



180 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

instance, was more important than hierarchy. It might sometimes be 
right to ignore the law (such as it was) and disobey a superior. But no 
one could quite tell until the occasion arose. Then a consensus would 
develop and the collective conscience would judge. Hence activist 
minorities, especially in the armed forces, were often able to defy 
their commanders, even the Emperor, and receive the endorsement of 
public opinion. 10 

This absence of absolute lines between right and wrong, legality 
and illegality, law and disorder, made Japan peculiarly vulnerable to 
the relativism bred in the West after the First World War. But the 
weakness went back further. When in 1868 Japan turned to Europe 
for pragmatic guidance it looked for norms of international beha- 
viour as well as technology. What did it find? Bismarckian Realpoli- 
tik. Thereafter came the scramble for Africa, the arms-race, the 
ferocity of Ludendorff's war-machine and the cult of power through 
violence, culminating in Lenin's triumphant putsch. 

The Japanese observed that European behaviour, however atro- 
cious, was always internally justified by reference to some set of 
beliefs. Hence, to fortify themselves in a stern, competitive world, 
they refurbished their own ideologies, in accordance with what they 
perceived to be European principles of utility. This involved, in 
effect, inventing a state religion and a ruling morality, known as 
Shinto and bushido. Hitherto, in religious matters the Japanese had 
been syncretistic: they took elements of imported cults and used 
them for particular purposes — Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, 
even Christianity — without regard for logic or consistency. It is true 
that Shinto was first mentioned in Japanese annals as early as the 
reign of Yomei Tenno (585-587 ad). It signified god in a pagan 
sense, going back to ancestral sun-gods and sun-goddesses, the 
primitive worship of ancestors and the idea of divine rulers. As such 
it was far less sophisticated than Buddhism and the other imperial 
religions of the Orient and it was only one of many elements in 
Japanese religious culture. But it was specifically and wholly 
Japanese, and therefore capable of being married to national aspira- 
tions. Hence with the Meiji Revolution a conscious decision was 
taken to turn it into a state religion. In 1875 it was officially 
separated from Buddhism and codified. In 1900 Shinto shrines were 
placed under the Ministry of the Interior. Regular emperor-worship 
was established, especially in the armed forces, and from the 1920s 
onwards a national code of ethics, kokumin dotoku, was taught in 
all the schools. With each Japanese military victory or imperial 
advance (the defeat of Russia in 1904—5 was a case in point) the state 
religion was consolidated and elaborated, and it is significant that 
the process culminated in 1941, when Japan joined the Second 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 181 

World War and instituted private, popular and public religious 
ceremonies for the entire nation. Shinto, in brief, was transformed 
from a primitive, obsolescent and minority cult into an endorsement 
of a modern, totalitarian state, and so by a peculiarly odious irony, 
religion, which should have served to resist the secular horrors of the 
age, was used to sanctify them. 

Nor was this all. Shinto, as the religion of expansionist national- 
ism, was deliberately underpinned by a refurbished and militarized 
version of the old code of knightly chivalry, bushido. In the early 
years of the century, bushido was defined by a Samurai professor, Dr 
Inazo Nitobe, as 'to be contented with one's position in life, to accept 
the natal irreversible status and to cultivate oneself within that 
allotted station, to be loyal to the master of the family, to value one's 
ancestors, to train oneself in the military arts by cultivation and by 
discipline of one's mind and body'. 11 But until the twentieth century 
there were few references of any kind to bushido. Some doubted its 
very existence. Professor Hall Chamberlain, in an essay The Inven- 
tion of a New Religion, published in 1912, wrote: 'Bushido, as an 
institution or a code of rules, has never existed. The accounts given 
of it have been fabricated out of whole cloth, chiefly for foreign 
consumption .... Bushido was unknown until a decade or so ago.' 12 
It may have been a series of religious exercises, accessible to very few. 
At all events in the 1920s it was popularized as a code of military 
honour, identified with extreme nationalism and militarism, and 
became the justification for the most grotesque practices, first the 
murder of individuals, later mass-cruelty and slaughter. The 'knights 
of bushido' were the militant leadership of totalitarian Shintoism, the 
equivalent, in this oriental setting, of the 'vanguard elites' of Lenin 
and Mussolini, the blackshirts and brownshirts and Chekists of 
Europe. They embodied the 'commanding moral force of [this] 
country . . . the totality of the moral instincts of the Japanese race', 
according to Nitobe. 13 Here was a concept, superficially moralistic 
in tone, wholly relativistic in fact, which was dangerously akin to 
what Lenin termed 'the revolutionary conscience' and Hitler the 
'higher morality of the party'. 

This new metaphysic of militarism and violence, which certainly as 
an organized entity had no precedent in Japanese history, was 
supposed to be accompanied by the systematic development of 
Western political institutions. In 1876 the samurai were disbanded as 
a class, losing their stipends and the right to bear swords; the last 
feudal revolt was put down the next year. Western-style parties and 
newspapers were introduced in the 1870s, a new British-style 
peerage, with barons, viscounts and marquises, was ordained in 
1884 and a cabinet-system the following year. For the first Diet in 



182 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

1890 only 400,000 out of 40 million had the vote. In 1918, the 'three 
yen tax qualification' raised it to 3.5 million out of 60 million. In 
1925 Japan got the Manhood Suffrage Act, which gave the vote to all 
men over twenty-five, raising the suffrage to 13 million. 

But authoritarian institutions advanced pari passu with demo- 
cracy. There was a highly restrictive press law in 1875. Police 
supervision of political parties was established in 1880. The constitu- 
tion of 1889 was deliberately restrictive, to produce, wrote its author 
Prince Ito, 'a compact solidity of organization and the efficiency of 
its administrative activity'. 14 The Diet was balanced by a powerful 
House of Peers and the cabinet by the institution of the genro, a 
group of former prime ministers and statesmen who gave advice 
directly to the Tenno. Perhaps most important of all was a regula- 
tion, drawn up in 1894 and confirmed in 1911, that the ministers of 
the army and the navy must be serving officers, nominated by the 
respective staffs. This meant not only that army and navy were 
independent of political control (the chiefs of staff had direct access 
to the Tenno) but that each service could in effect veto a civilian 
cabinet by refusing to nominate its own minister. This power was 
frequently used and was always in the background. Hence the 
government was really only responsible for civil matters, the army 
and navy conducting their own affairs, which frequently and from 
the 1920s increasingly impinged on foreign policy. Since army and 
navy were not under civil control, and officers in the field did not 
necessarily feel obliged in honour to obey their nominal superiors in 
Tokyo, there were times when Japan came closer to military anarchy 
than any other kind of system. 

The trouble was that Japan only slowly developed the kind of civic 
consciousness which in Europe was the product of town life and 
bourgeois notions of rights. The town itself was an import. Even 
Tokyo was, and until very recently remained, an enormous collection 
of villages. Its citizens had rural not urban reflexes and attachments. 
Though feudalism was killed by the Meiji Revolution, it survived in a 
bastard version. Everyone, from the highest downwards, felt safe 
only as part of a clan or batsu. It was and is habitual for the Japanese 
to extend patterns of family behaviour to wider situations. The term 
habatsu, 'permanent faction', was applied to each new activity as it 
came into existence: schools of painting, or wrestling, or flower- 
arranging; then, after 1868, to industrial firms; and after 1890 to 
politics. The Japanese term oyabun-kobun, meaning parent-child or 
boss-follower relationship, became the cement of this bastard feu- 
dalism in politics, a man rendering service or loyalty in return for a 
share of any spoils going. Indeed the Japanese did not clearly 
distinguish between family and non-family groupings, since the 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 183 

perpetuation of the family line by adoption was regarded as much 
more important than the perpetuation of the blood line. 15 Ozaki 
Yukio, the most durable of Japanese politicians, who took part in the 
first general election of 1890 and lived to sit in the first post-1945 
Diet, wrote in 1918 that in Japan 'political parties, which should be 
based and dissolved solely on principles and political views, are 
really affairs of personal connections and sentiments, the relations 
between the leader and the members of a party being similar to those 
which subsisted between a feudal lord and his liegemen'. 16 Mass- 
parties of the Left, based on universal economic interests, might have 
changed this pattern. But the Peace Preservation law of 1925, the 
same year that Japan got male suffrage, gave the police such 
formidable power to combat Marxist subversion as effectively to 
inhibit their development. No left-wing party ever scored more than 
500,000 votes until after 1945. 

As a result, Japanese political parties were legal mafias which 
inspired little respect and offered no moral alternative to the 
traditional institutions refurbished in totalitarian form. Bribery was 
ubiquitous since elections were costly (25,000 dollars per seat in the 
inter-war period) and the pay small. Corruption ranged from the sale 
of peerages to land speculation in Osaka's new brothel quarter. Of 
the two main parties, Seiyukai was financed by Manchurian railway 
interests, Kenseikai by Mitsubishi, in both cases illegally. Three of 
the most prominent political leaders, Hara (the first commoner to 
become Prime Minister), Yamamoto and Tanaka, were guilty of 
blatant corruption. 17 Politicians did not cut attractive figures com- 
pared with the bushido militarists. They fought frequently, but only 
in unseemly scrimmages in the Diet, sometimes with the assistance of 
hired ruffians. As one British eye-witness put it in 1928: 'Flushed 
gentlemen, clad without in frockcoats but warmed within by too- 
copious draughts of sake, roared and bellowed, and arguments 
frequently culminated in a rush for the rostrum, whence the speaker 
of the moment would be dragged in the midst of a free fight.' 18 

Moreover, if bastard feudalism persisted in the Diet, it flourished 
also outside it, in the form of secret societies which constituted an 
alternative form of political activity: non-democratic, unconstitu- 
tional, using direct action and employing weapons instead of argu- 
ments. Once the samurai lost their stipends they had either to find 
work or band together and offer themselves to the highest bidder. In 
1881 a group of them formed the Genyosha, the first of the secret 
societies, which soon entered politics indirectly by providing thugs to 
rig Diet elections or murder rival candidates. In 1901 a Genyosha 
man, Mitsuru Toyama, founded the notorious Kokuryukai or Black 
Dragon, the prototype of many violent, ultra-nationalist sects. The 



184 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

real expansion of gang-politics, however, occurred after the end of 
the 1914—18 war, which seems to have ushered in an era of political 
violence almost everywhere. 

Whether the Japanese took their cue from Weimar Germany and 
Mussolini's Italy is not clear. Certainly, like the European fascists, 
they used Leninist violence as an excuse for counter-violence. What 
was disturbing was the overlap between these societies and constitu- 
tional politics and, most sinister, the military. Thus, the Dai Nihon 
Kokusuikai, the Japan National Essence Society - using concepts 
from the totalitarianized forms of Shinto and bushido - which was 
founded in 1919, included among its members three future Prime 
Ministers and several generals. This was comparatively respectable. 
Others were mere gangs of ruffians. Some were radical in exactly the 
same way as the revolutionary syndicalists in Italy or the early Nazis 
in Germany. Thus, the Yuzonsha, founded by Kita Ikki in 1919, 
proposed a National Socialist plan of nationalization of industry and 
break-up of the great estates to prepare Japan for 'the leadership of 
Asia', her expansion being at the expense of Britain ('the millionaire') 
and Russia ('the great landowner'), Japan placing itself at the head of 
'the proletariat of nations'. Other radical societies included the 
agrarian nationalists, who wished to destroy industry completely, 
and the Ketsumedian, led by Inoue Nissho, dedicated to the assassi- 
nation of industrialists and financiers. 19 

Virtually all these societies practised assassination, or showed an 
extraordinary tolerance of it. One might say that though the notion 
of the feudal revolt died in the 1870s, assassination was its continu- 
ance by other means. The samurai might no longer impose their 
will as a class; but groups of them reserved the right to register their 
political objections not through the ballot, beneath them, but 
through the sword and dagger and, after it became popular in the 
1920s, the Thomson sub-machine-gun. The samurai had in fact 
always used hired coolie-gangsters to terrorize their peasants. Now 
their modernized kais, or gangs, were hired out to the gumbatsu or 
zaibatsu to enforce their will on ministers. Even more disturbing was 
the fact that, by 1894, the kais were working in conjunction with the 
Kempei-Tai, the Special Police to Guard Security of the state. These 
men reported directly to Imperial Headquarters, not the government, 
could hold prisoners for 121 days without formal charge or warrant 
and were authorized to employ torture to extract confessions. Men 
were frequently arrested by the Kempei-Tai after secret denuncia- 
tions by the kais. 10 

The kais indeed played a protean role in Japanese society, some- 
times upholding state security, sometimes enforcing protection rack- 
ets in, for instance, the new film industry, where their sanguinary 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 185 

gangland battles, fought with two-handed swords, formed an orien- 
tal descant to such episodes as the St Valentine's Day massacre in 
contemporary Chicago. 21 Mitsuru Toyama, the most notorious 
gang-leader, founder of the Black Dragon, occupied a curiously 
ambivalent role in Japanese society. Born in 1855, he had the 
manners and affectations of a gentleman and a knight of bushido. 
According to the New York Times correspondent, Hugh Byas, he 
looked 'like one of the Cheeryble Brothers, exuding benignity, and 
made great play of the fact that his creed would not allow him to kill 
a mosquito'. Killing politicians was another matter. He not merely 
organized assassination but protected other known murderers in his 
house, which the police dared not enter. They included Rash Behari 
Bose, wanted by the British for the attempted assassination of Lord 
Hardinge, the Viceroy, in 1912. When he finally died in his nineties, 
full of years and wickedness, the Tokyo Times published a special 
supplement in his honour. 22 That was characteristic of Japanese 
tolerance towards even the most flagrant and vicious law-breaking 
which claimed credentials of honour. The very victims themselves 
helped to perpetuate the system. Thus the great liberal statesman 
Ozaki Yukio, though constantly threatened with death himself, 
wrote a poem which contained the defeatist lines: 'Praise be to men 
who may attempt my life/If their motive is to die for their country'. 23 
Hence political assassination was not necessarily severely punished 
in Japan; sometimes not punished at all. And, even more important, 
it was not morally reprobated by society. As a result it became 
increasingly common. Of the original Meiji Restoration government, 
one was murdered, another driven to hara-kiri; and Prince Ito, 
architect of the constitution, was murdered, despite the efforts of his 
tea-garden wife. Of Taisho Tenno's Prime Ministers during the years 
1912-26, Count Okuma, Viscount Takahashi and Mr Hara were 
assassinated; and under Hirohito, 1926—45, three more Prime Minis- 
ters died, Mr Hamaguchi, Mr Inukai and Admiral Saito, plus a dozen 
cabinet ministers. 24 Some politicians accepted the risks of their 
profession more stoically than others. But fear of being murdered 
undoubtedly deterred ministers from pushing through reforming 
legislation. When the writer David James asked Prime Minister Hara 
in 1920 why he did not repeal the police regulation which provided 
six months' imprisonment for incitement to strike, Hara replied, 'I 
have no intention of committing hara-kiri just now.' When Hara was 
stabbed to death the next year at Toyko's Shimbashi station, his 
'offence' was that, as a mere civilian, he had taken over the Naval 
Office while the Minister, Admiral Kato, was at the Washington 
Naval Conference. 25 The Tenno himself was not immune from 
charges of lack of patriotism. There was an attempt on Hirohito's life 



186 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

in 1923, and this naturally timid man was undoubtedly dissuaded 
from giving civilian Prime Ministers the support they had a right to 
expect under the constitution, by fear of his own officers. 

The position deteriorated after 1924-5, when army reforms 
introduced a new type of officer, drawn from the ranks of minor 
officials, shopkeepers and small landowners. These men had little 
respect for traditional authority - or their own high commanders - 
and they were imbued with Leninist and fascist notions of political 
violence, and above all by the new totalitarian version of bushido. 
While quite capable of threatening Hirohito with death, they spoke 
of his 'restoration' to power: what they wanted was military 
dictatorship under nominal imperial rule. Their key word was 
kokutai or 'national policy', and any politician guilty of the slightest 
disloyalty to kokutai was as good as dead. 26 Most of them came 
from rural areas, where living standards were falling during the 
Twenties and young girls had to go out to work just for their food as 
no wages could be paid. Their army brothers burned with zeal and 
hatred and their violence enjoyed wide public support. 27 

Under these circumstances, civilian party government gradually 
collapsed, and elections became meaningless. In 1927 and again in 
1928 Prime Ministers were forced out of office by the army. In 1930, 
the Prime Minister, Hamaguchi Yuko, having got a mandate to cut 
the armed forces, was gunned down immediately he tried to do so. 
His successor was forced out over the same issue. The next Prime 
Minister, Inukai Ki, who again tried to stand up to the Services, was 
murdered in May 1932 by a group of army and naval officers. They 
planned, in fact, to kill him together with Charlie Chaplin, who was 
on a visit to Tokyo and due to take tea with the Prime Minister. The 
naval ringleader of the plot told the judge: 'Chaplin is a popular 
figure in the United States and the darling of the capitalist class. We 
believed that killing him would cause a war with America.' When the 
murderers came up for trial, their counsel argued that, as their 
honour and future were at stake, assassination was a form of 
self-defence. He presented the judge with 110,000 letters, many 
written in blood, begging for clemency. In Niigata, nine young men 
chopped off their little fingers, as evidence of sincerity, and sent them 
to the War Minister pickled in a jar of alcohol. 28 The lenient 
sentences passed at this trial, and at many others, recalled the farcical 
court cases involving right-wing murderers in early Weimar Ger- 
many. 29 

The breakdown of constitutional government in Japan could not 
be regarded as an internal affair since it was inextricably bound up 
with foreign policy aims. Most Japanese regarded territorial expan- 
sion as an essential element of entry into the modern world. Did not 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 187 

every other industrial power have an empire? It was as necessary as 
steel-mills or iron-clads. In Japan's case there were additional and 
compelling reasons: the poverty of the country, its almost total lack of 
natural resources and the rapid, irresistible increase in population. In 
1894-5, Japan struck at China, taking Korea, Formosa (Taiwan) and 
Port Arthur. She was forced to surrender the last by the tripartite 
intervention of Russia, Germany and France. Her response was to 
double the size of her army and make herself self-sufficient in 
armaments, which she had achieved by 1904. Immediately she issued 
an ultimatum to Russia, took Port Arthur and won the devastating 
naval battle of Tsushima in May 1905, assuring herself commercial 
supremacy in Manchuria, and taking the Sakhalin (Karafuto) islands 
as part of the settlement. In 1914 she entered the war solely to possess 
herself of Germany's ports and property in China, and the following 
year she presented a series of demands to the Chinese government (the 
Twenty-one Demands') which in effect made her the preponderant 
colonial and commercial power in the region. The paramountcy was 
confirmed by the Versailles Treaty, which gave her Shantung and a 
whole string of Pacific islands as mandates. 

Japan now faced a dilemma. She was determined to expand, but 
under what colours? Her Meiji Revolution was at heart an anti- 
colonial move, to preserve herself. Her original intention, in seizing 
Korea, was to deny it to the European powers and set herself up as 
commercial, political and military head of an 'East Asian League', a 
defensive alliance which would modernize East Asia and prevent 
further Western penetration. Japan would thus have become the first 
anti-colonialist great power, a role occupied by Russia after 1945, and 
in the process win herself (as Russia has) a family of dependent allies 
and satellites. The difficulty was that China, whose co-operation was 
essential, never showed the slightest desire to provide it, regarding 
Japan as a junior sovereignty and a ferocious predator, in some, ways 
to be feared more, because nearer, than any European power. Japan 
never wholly abandoned this line, however. It was reflected in her 
demand for a racial equality clause in the League covenant, in her 
pious insistence that all her activities on the Chinese mainland were in 
the interests of the Chinese themselves, and during the 1941-5 war in 
her creation of puppet governments in the territories she occupied, 
bound together in the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere. These 
were not wholly fictions; but they could not become wholly, or even 
mainly, facts either, so long as Japan was obliged to fight and conquer 
China in order to make her a 'partner'. 30 

That avenue closed, was Japan to be a colonial power like the rest? 
That was the view of the Japanese Foreign Office, the Hirohito court, 
the liberal political establishment. But that meant having an ally, 



188 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

above all Britain, biggest and most respectable of the established 
empires. Britain was anxious for stability, and means could doubtless 
be found to provide Japan with sufficient interests and possessions to 
bind her, too, to a stable system. And so long as Britain was Japan's 
ally, the latter had a prime interest in preserving her own internal 
respectability, constitutional propriety and the rule of law, all of 
which Britain had taught her. 

That was why the destruction of the Anglo— Japanese alliance by 
the USA and Canada in 1921-2 was so fatal to peace in the Far East. 
The notion that it could be replaced by the Washington Naval 
Treaty, and the further Nine Power treaty of February 1922 (also 
signed by Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal), which 
guaranteed China's integrity, was a fantasy. For the second 
agreement provided no enforcement provision, even in theory, and 
the first made enforcement in practice out of the question. The net 
result was to put Japan in the role of potential predator and cast her 
out of the charmed circle of respectable 'have' powers. Britain's 
influence with Japan disappeared, and America, emerging as China's 
protector, assumed the shape of Japan's irreconcilable enemy. 31 
Internally, the consequence was to shift power in Japan away from 
the Foreign Office, whose foreign friends had let them down, and in 
favour of the military, especially the younger officers imbued with 
fanatic zeal to go it alone, something which was in any event implicit 
in totalitarian Shinto. 

There were, however, more prosaic reasons pushing in favour of 
national desperation. Japan could not feed herself. In 1868, with a 
population of 32 million, consuming each year an average of just 
under 4 bushels of rice a head, Japan got by with 6 million acres 
under cultivation, each yielding 20 bushels. By 1940, with prodigi- 
ous effort and skill, she had pushed up the yield per acre to 40 
bushels, and by taking in every inch of marginal land had increased 
the area under rice to 8 million acres. But in the meantime average 
consumption had risen to 5| bushels a year - not a great deal - and 
the population to 73 million, so Japan was short of 65 million 
bushels of rice a year. Agricultural productivity had already levelled 
off in the early 1920s and there then was no way of raising it further. 
So between the pre-war period 1910-14, and the end of the 1920s, 
rice imports tripled. 32 These had to be paid for by Japan's predomi- 
nantly textile exports, already meeting cut-throat competition and 
tariffs. 

Emigration was not really an option for the Japanese. They had 
been restricted by treaty from entering the United States as long ago 
as 1894, the first national group to be so controlled. By 1920 there 
were 100,000 Japanese in the USA (mainly in California) and a 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 189 

further 100,000 in Hawaii: four years later American terror at the 
'yellow peril' led to legislation precluding Japanese from receiving 
American citizenship, which under the new immigration law automati- 
cally excluded them even from entering the country. Australian 
immigration law was equally restrictive and pointedly aimed at Japan. 
The attitude of the American and Australian governments (which of 
course reflected overwhelming public feeling) caused particular 
bitterness among the Japanese trading community, who had European 
status in Asia. By the mid- 1920s even some of the 'respectable' 
politicians were beginning to feel there was no peaceful way out of the 
dilemma. In his book Addresses to Young Men, Hashimoto Kingoro 
wrote: 

. . . there are only three ways left to Japan to escape from the pressure of surplus 
population . . . emigration, advance into world markets, and expansion of 
territory. The first door, emigration, has been barred to us by the anti-Japanese 
immigration policies of other countries. The second door ... is being pushed 
shut by tariff barriers and the abrogation of commercial treaties. What should 
Japan do when two of the three doors have been closed against her? 33 

The same point was made far more forcefully in the propaganda 
disseminated by the kais and the army and navy slush-funds. It became 
the theme of Sadao Araki, who by 1926 was the leader of the young 
officer groups and evangelist of Kodo, 'the imperial way', the new 
militant form of expansionist Shinto. Why, he asked, must Japan, with 
well over 60 million mouths to feed, be content with 142,270 square 
miles (much of it barren)? Australia and Canada, with 6.5 million 
people each, had 3 million and 3.5 million square miles respectively; 
America had 3 million square miles, France a colonial empire of 3.8 
million, Britain (even without the Dominions and India) had 2.2 
million, Belgium 900,000 square miles, Portugal 800,000. America, he 
pointed out, in addition to her huge home territories, had 700,000 
square miles of colonies. Wherein lay the natural justice of these huge 
discrepancies? It was not as though the Japanese were greedy. They 
lived off fish and rice, and not much of either. They were ingeniously 
economic in their use of all materials. By the mid-1 920s they were close 
to the limits of their resources and a decade later they were right up 
against them. Behind the romantic atavism of the military gangs, their 
posturings and murderous rodomontades, lay a huge and perfectly 
genuine sense of national grievance shared by virtually every Japanese, 
many millions of whom — unlike the Germans — were actually hungry. 

Yet the irony is that Japan, at any rate in the first instance, did not seek 
to redress the balance of right by falling on the rich Western powers, 
whose race policies added insult to inequity, but by imposing yet 
another layer of oppression on what Lord Curzon called 'the great 



190 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

helpless, hopeless and inert mass of China'. Of course here again the 
European powers had set the example. They proffered all kinds of 
reasons for the imposition of dictated treaties on China and their 
occupation of her river-ports, but their only real justification was 
superior force. Sometimes they made the point explicitly. In 1900 the 
Kaiser's message instructing German troops to relieve the Peking 
legations had read: 'Give no quarter. Take no prisoners. Fight in 
such a manner that for 1,000 years no Chinaman shall dare look 
askance upon a German.' 35 The other powers behaved similarly, 
usually without the rhetoric. If the rule of force was the law of 
nations in China, why should Japan alone be refused the right to 
follow it? Japan could not accept that the Great War had ended the 
era of colonialism. For her, it was just beginning. China was Japan's 
manifest destiny. Her leading banker Hirozo Mori wrote: 'Expan- 
sion towards the continent is the destiny of the Japanese people, 
decreed by Heaven, which neither the world nor we the Japanese 
ourselves can check or alter.' 36 

But there was another reason for attacking China, which went to 
the roots of the Japanese dynamic impulse. 'They are peculiarly 
sensitive', wrote Kurt Singer, 'to the smell of decay, however well 
screened; and they will strike at any enemy whose core appears to 
betray a lack of firmness .... Their readiness, in the face of apparent 
odds, to attack wherever they can smell decomposition makes them 
appear as true successors of the Huns, Avars, Mongols and other 
"scourges of God".' 37 This shark-like instinct to savage the stricken 
had been proved sound in their assault upon Tsarist Russia. It was to 
be the source of their extraordinary gamble for Asian and Pacific 
paramountcy in 1941. Now, in the 1920s, it was to lead them 
irresistibly to China, where the stench of social and national gan- 
grene was unmistakable. 

China's plight was the result of the optimistic belief, common to 
intellectuals of the Left, that revolutions solve more problems than 
they raise. In the nineteenth century the great powers had sought to 
enter and modernize China; or, as the Chinese thought, plunder it. 
They had imposed 'unequal treaties' which the Manchu dynasty had 
little alternative but to accept. The imperial system of government, 
which had lasted for three millennia, could be seen in two ways. It 
represented the principle of unity, not easily replaced in a vast 
country with little natural focus of unity, for its people spoke many 
different languages (though, thanks to the imperial civil service, 
educated men shared a common script of ideograms). It could also be 
seen as the principle of weakness which made foreign penetration 
possible. Incapable of reforming or modernizing itself, it had allowed 
to happen what the Japanese ruling class had successfully prevented. 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 191 

If China, too, could not have a revolution from above, then let it 
have a revolution from below. 

That was the view of the radical intellectuals, whose leader was the 
Western-educated Sun Yat-sen. Like Lenin he had spent much of his 
life in exile. In 1896 he had been kidnapped by the staff of the 
Imperial Chinese Legation in London. They planned to ship him 
back as a lunatic in a specially chartered steamer, and once in Peking 
he would have been tortured to death, the punishment reserved for 
plotting against the Dragon Throne. But from his top-floor cell in the 
Legation at the corner of Portland Place and Weymouth Street, Sun 
had thrown out messages wrapped around half-crowns. One had 
been picked up by a black porter, who took it to the police; and 
soon after the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, got Sun freed. 38 He 
eventually returned to China. At exactly the same time as Lenin was 
promoting his 'vanguard elite' theory to justify middle-class intellec- 
tuals pushing a largely non-existent proletariat into revolution and 
Mussolini's mentors were experimenting with 'revolutionary syndi- 
calism', Sun founded a secret society, the Hsing Chung Hui. It was 
based partly on European, partly on Japanese models, and its object, 
like Lenin's, was to overthrow the imperial autocracy by force. It 
exploited famines and rice-harvest failures, assassinated provincial 
officials, occasionally captured cities, or engaged in more general 
revolts in 1904 and 1906. Its opportunity came when the death of 
the Dowager-Empress Tzu Hsi in 1908 left the throne to a 
two-year-old, Pu Yi. A national assembly was convoked. There was a 
possibility of creating a constitutional monarchy which would have 
introduced the democratic principle while conserving the unifying 
principle of monarchy, shorn of its abuses. But Dr Sun would have 
none of it. On 29 December 1911 he set up a Republic in Nanking, 
with himself as president, and six weeks later the Manchus, the last 
of China's dynasties, abdicated. 

Thus the principle of legitimacy was destroyed, leaving a vacuum, 
which could only be filled by force. The point was noted by a young 
peasant, Mao Tse-tung, who had been seventeen in 1910 when he 
heard in his Hunan village the news of the Empress's death, two 
years after it occurred. When the revolution came he cut off his 
pigtail and joined the army, discovering in the process that, in China, 
it was necessary to have an army to achieve anything; an aperqu he 
never forgot. 39 The owlish Dr Sun came to the same conclusion 
rather later, and when he did so handed over the presidency to the 
last commander of the imperial troops, General Yuan Shih-kai. 
General Yuan would almost certainly have made himself emperor, 
and founded a new dynasty — as had many Chinese strong-men in the 
past. But in 1916 he died, the cause of monarchy was lost, and China 



192 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

embarked on what Charles de Gaulle was later to call les delices de 
Vanarchie. 

The object of overthrowing the monarchy was to restore China's 
possessions according to the 1840 frontiers, unify the country and 
curb the foreigner. It did the opposite in each case. In Outer 
Mongolia the Hutuktu of Urga declared himself independent and 
made a secret treaty with Russia (1912), a realignment never since 
reversed. By 1916 five other provinces had opted for home rule. 
Japan moved into Manchuria and the North, and many coastal 
areas. The other great powers settled their 'spheres of influence' at 
meetings from which China was excluded. The only dependable 
source of revenue possessed by the Chinese Republican government 
(when it had one) was what remained of the old Imperial Maritime 
Customs, created by the Irishman Sir Robert Hart and manned by 
Europeans, mainly from the United Kingdom, which controlled the 
coasts and navigable rivers, maintained buoys, lighthouses and charts 
and collected duties. The rest of the government's taxation system 
dissolved into a morass of corruption. As there was no money, there 
could be no central army. 

Moreover, the destruction of the monarchy struck a fatal blow at 
the old Chinese landed gentry. They lost their privileges in law, and 
immediately sought to erect a system of bastard feudalism (as in 
Japan) to restore them in fact. Hitherto, their factions and clans had 
operated within the rules of the court. Without the court there was 
nothing. Traditional cosmology had gone with the throne. So had 
religion, for Confucianism revolved round monarchy. Taoism, a 
private cult, was no substitute as a creed of public morals. Some took 
refuge in Buddhism, others in Christianity. But most of the gentry 
aligned themselves with whatever local source of military authority 
they could find, becoming, with their dependents, its clients. Con- 
fronted with the state of dissolution so graphically described by 
Hobbes, they chose Leviathan, in the shape of the war-lord. Alas, 
there was not one monster but many: by 1920 four major war-lords 
held sway, and scores of minor ones. China entered a hateful period 
reminiscent of the Thirty Years' War in Europe. 40 

Dr Sun, the sorcerer's apprentice, had himself re-elected President, 
then in 1921 made Generalissimo. But he had no army, and no 
money to pay one. He wrote books, San-min cbu-i [The Three 
Principles of the People) and Chien-kuo fang-lueh {Plans for the 
Building of the Realm). It was all so easy on paper. First would come 
the phase of struggle against the old system; then the phase of 
educative rule; then the phase of true democratic government. He 
changed his revolutionary organization into the Kuomintang (kmt), 
or People's Party. It was based on Three Principles: National 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 193 

Freedom, Democratic Government, Socialist Economy. A master of 
the classroom, Sun used to draw on a blackboard a big circle with 
smaller circles within, Conservatism, Liberalism, Socialism and 
Communism - the kmt took the best out of each and combined 
them. The reality was rather different. Dr Sun admitted: 'Well- 
organized nations count votes out of ballot boxes. Badly organized 
nations count bodies, dead ones, on the battlefields.' To his head 
bodyguard, a celebrated Canadian Jew called Two-Gun' Cohen, he 
confessed his real political aim was modest: 'I want a China where 
there is no need to shut one's outer gate at night.' 41 

In the circumstances, the aim was too ambitious. Outer gates 
remained essential; so did bodyguards. Holed up in Canton, Dr Sun 
required six hundred men to guard him. Sometimes he could not pay 
them. Then they would mutiny and raid the Treasury, to see what 
they could find. When Sun and other military and civil leaders moved 
about, they did so in big American Packards, with gun-toting heavies 
mounted on the running-boards. Sometimes Sun was forced to go 
into hiding, in weird disguises. Once he fled to Hong Kong, in a 
British gunboat. Indeed, he would dearly have liked British help as a 
Protecting Power - so much for China's independence - but Lord 
Curzon vetoed it. He then turned to America, and urged Jacob Gould 
Schurman, the US Minister in Canton, for a five-year American 
intervention, with power to occupy all railway junctions and provin- 
cial capitals, authority over the army, police, sanitation, flood- 
control, and the right to appoint key administrative experts. But this 
too was turned down, in 1923 and again in 1925. 42 

Baffled, Sun turned to the Soviet government in 1923. A Chinese 
Communist Party had been formed in 1920—1, but joint membership 
with the kmt was permitted by both. Indeed the Soviet regime 
insisted on this alliance, forcing the CCP, at its third Congress, to 
declare: 'The kmt must be the central force in the national revolu- 
tion and assume its leadership.' 43 So Moscow (that is, Stalin) 
welcomed Sun's request, and in October 1923 sent him one Michael 
Borodin, also known as Berg and Grisenberg, to reorganize the kmt 
on Leninist lines of democratic centralism, and a military expert, 
'Galen', also known as 'General 'Blucher', to create an army. They 
brought with them many 'advisers', the first instance of a new Soviet 
form of political imperialism. Galen sold Sun Soviet rifles, at US $65 
each, then gave the cash to Borodin who put it into the ccp's 
organization. Galen also set up a military academy at Whampoa, and 
put in charge of it was Sun's ambitious brother-in-law, a former 
invoice-clerk called Chiang Kai-shek (they had married sisters of the 
left-wing banker, T.V. Soong). 

The arrangement worked, after a fashion. The academy turned out 



194 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

five hundred trained officers, whom Chiang made the elite of the 
kmt's first proper army. Then he decided to turn war-lord on his 
own account. The trouble with Chinese armies was discipline. 
Generals, indeed whole armies, often just ran away. In 1925 Chiang, 
promoted chief-of-staff to Generalissimo Sun, issued his first orders: 
'If a company of my troops goes into action and then retreats 
without orders, the company commander will be shot. This rule will 
also apply to battalions, regiments, divisions and army corps. In the 
event of a general retreat, if the commander of the army corps 
personally stands his ground and is killed, all the divisional comman- 
ders will be shot.' And so on down the line. This was followed up by 
drumhead courts-martial and mass-shootings. 44 

In 1924 Sun had held the first kmt Congress, and it emerged as a 
mass party organized on cp lines, with over 600,000 members. But 
he died in March 1925, lamenting the way that cp militants were 
taking over, and deploring the failure of Britain or America to help 
him save China from Communism. In the circumstances, the kmt's 
own war-lord, Chiang, was bound to take over, and did so. There 
now followed one of those decisive historical turning-points which, 
though clear enough in retrospect, were complicated and confused at 
the time. How should the revolution be carried through, now that 
Dr Sun was dead? The kmt controlled only the Canton area. The 
Communists were divided. Some believed revolution should be 
carried through on the slender basis of the small Chinese proletariat, 
concentrated in and around Shanghai. Others, led by Li Ta-chao, 
librarian of Peking University (whose assistant Mao Tse-tung be- 
came), thought revolution should be based on the peasants, who 
formed the overwhelming mass of the Chinese population. Orthodox 
Communist doctrine scouted this notion. As Ch'en Tu-hsiu, co- 
founder of the Chinese party, put it, 'over half the peasants are 
petit-bourgeois landed proprietors who adhere firmly to private 
property consciousness. How can they accept Communism?' 45 Stalin 
agreed with this. The Russian peasants had defeated Lenin; he 
himself had not yet settled their hash. He took the view that, in the 
circumstances, the Chinese cp had no alternative but to back the 
kmt and work through Chinese nationalism. 

In the vast chaos of China, everyone was an opportunist, Chiang 
above all. At the Whampoa Academy, whose object was to produce 
dedicated officers, he worked closely with a young Communist, 
Chou en-Lai, head of its political department. There was virtually no 
difference between kmt and cp political indoctrination. Indeed, the 
kmt at this stage could easily have become the form of national 
Communism which Mao Tse-tung was eventually to evolve. It was 
Chiang, not the Communists, who first grasped that hatred of 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 195 

foreigners and imperialism could be combined with hatred of the 
oppressive war-lords to mobilize the strength of the peasant masses. 
Mao Tse-tung, who was a member of the kmt Shanghai bureau, 
found this idea attractive, and he was made head of the Peasant 
Movement Training Institute, with an overwhelming stress on mili- 
tary discipline (128 hours out of the total course of 380 hours). His 
views and Chiang's were very close at this time. In some ways he was 
much more at home in the kmt, with its stress on nationalism, than 
in the ccp, with its city-oriented dogmatism. He collaborated with 
the kmt longer than any other prominent Communist, which meant 
that after he came to power in the late 1940s he had to 'lose' a year 
out of his life (1925-6) in his official biographies. 46 An article Mao 
wrote in February 1926, which forms the first item in the official 
Maoist Canon, is remarkably similar to a declaration by Chiang in 
Changsha the same year: 'Only after the overthrow of imperialism', 
said Chiang, 'can China obtain freedom .... If we want our revolu- 
tion to succeed, we must unite with Russia to overthrow imperial- 
ism .... The Chinese revolution is part of the world revolution.' 47 

The possibility of a merger of the kmt and the ccp into a national 
communist party under the leadership of Chiang and Mao was 
frustrated by the facts of life in China. In 1925—6 Chiang controlled 
only part of south China. The centre and north were in the hands of 
the war-lords. Marshal Sun Chuan-fang controlled Shanghai and ran 
five provinces from Nanking. North of the Yangtze, Marshal Wu 
Pei-fu ran Hankow. General Yen Hsi-shan controlled Shansi Pro- 
vince. Marshal Chang Tso-lin occupied Mukden and dominated the 
three Manchurian provinces. Marshal Chang Tsung-chang was the 
war-lord in Shantung, and Chu Yu-pu in the Peking-Tientsin area. 

In the early spring of 1926 this pattern was broken when Marshal 
Feng Yu-hsiang, the ablest of the kmt commanders, marched his 
300,000-strong force (known as the Kuominchun or People's Army) 
some 7,000 miles, circling southern Mongolia, then east through 
Shensu and Hunan, to attack Peking from the south. This stupen- 
dous physical and military feat (which became the model for Mao's 
own 'long march' in the next decade) made possible Chiang's 
conquest of the North in 1926— 7. 48 As a result, four of the principal 
war-lords recognized Chiang's supremacy, and the possibility ap- 
peared of uniting China under a republic by peaceful means. The 
Northern campaign had been fearfully costly in life, particularly of 
the peasants. Was it not preferable to seek a settlement by ideological 
compromise now, rather than trust to the slow carnage of revolu- 
tionary attrition? If so, then instead of expelling the 'foreign capital- 
ists', Chiang must seek their help; and being the brother-in-law of a 
leading banker was an advantage. But such a course must mean a 



196 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

break with the Communist elements within the kmt and a public 
demonstration that a workers' state was not just round the corner. 
Hence in April 1927, when he took Shanghai, Chiang turned on the 
organized factory workers, who had risen in his support, and 
ordered his troops to gun them down. The Shanghai business 
community applauded, and the banks raised money to pay the kmt 
army. 

Stalin now decided to reverse his policy. He had recently ousted 
Trotsky and, following his usual custom, adopted the policies of his 
vanquished opponents. The Chinese Communist Party was ordered 
to break with the kmt and take power by force. It was the only time 
Stalin ever followed Trotsky's revolutionary line, and it was a 
disaster. 49 The Communist cadres rose in Canton, but the citizens 
would not follow them; in the fighting that followed many townsfolk 
were massacred and a tenth of the city burnt down. The kmt 
attacked in force on 14 December 1927, the Communists broke, and 
they were hunted down through the streets by the Cantonese 
themselves. Most of the staff of the Soviet consulate were murdered. 
Borodin returned to Moscow in disgust and told Stalin: 'Next time 
the Chinese shout "Hail to the World Revolution!" send in the 
ogpu.' Stalin said nothing; in due course he had Borodin put to 
death. 50 

So Chiang and Mao came to the parting of the ways. Chiang 
became the supreme war-lord; the kmt was reorganized as a 
war-lord's party, its members including (in 1929) 172,796 officers 
and men in the various armies, 201,321 civilians and 47,906 
'overseas Chinese', who supplied much of the money and some of its 
worst gangsters. As it won ground among the business community 
and the foreign interests, it lost ground among the peasants. Dr Sun's 
widow left the kmt, went into exile in Europe and charged that her 
husband's successors had 'organized the kmt as a tool for the rich to 
get still richer and suck the blood of the starving millions of 
China .... Militarists and officials whom a few years ago I knew to 
be poor are suddenly parading about in fine limousines and buying 
up mansions in the Foreign Concessions for their newly acquired 
concubines.' Chiang was a case in point. In July 1929 the New York 
Times correspondent noted that he paid a Peking hotel bill of US 
$17,000, for his wife, bodyguard and secretaries, for a fifteen-day 
stay, forking out a further $1,500 in tips and $1,000 bribes to the 
local police. 51 

The moral Mao drew from Chiang's change of policy was not an 
ideological but a practical one. To make any political impression in 
China, a man had to have an army. He would become a war-lord on 
his own account. He was extremely well-suited for this pursuit. Mao 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 197 

was thirty-four in 1927: tall, powerfully built, the son of a cruel and 
masterful peasant who had fought and worked his way to affluence 
as a well-to-do farmer and grain merchant - a genuine kulak^ in 
short. A contemporary at Tungshan Higher Primary School des- 
cribed Mao as 'arrogant, brutal and stubborn'. 52 He was not a 
millennarian, religious-type revolutionary like Lenin, but a fierce and 
passionate romantic, with a taste for crude and violent drama; an 
artist of sorts, cast from the same mould as Hitler, and equally 
impatient. Like Hitler, he was first and foremost a nationalist, who 
trusted in the national culture. From the philosopher Yen Fu he 
derived the idea that 'culturalism', the pursuit of 'the Chinese Way', 
was the means to mobilize her people into an irresistible force. 53 He 
read and used Marxist-Leninism, but his fundamental belief was 
closer to the axiom of his ethics teacher at Peking, Yang Chang-chi, 
whose daughter became his first wife: 'Each country has its own 
national spirit just as each person has its own personality .... A 
country is an organic whole, just as the human body is an organic 
whole. It is not like a machine which can be taken apart and put 
together again. If you take it apart it dies.' 54 

In Mao's thinking, a form of radical patriotism was the main- 
spring. He never had to make the switch from internationalism to 
nationalism which Mussolini carried out in 1914: he was a national- 
ist ab initio^ like Ataturk. And his cultural nationalism sprang not 
from a sense of oppression so much as from an outraged consciousness 
of superiority affronted. How could China, the father of culture, be 
treated by European upstarts as a wayward infant — a metaphor 
often used by the Western press in the 1920s. Thus the Far Eastern 
Review ', commenting in 1923 on attempts to tax the British- 
American Tobacco monopoly: 'The solution of the problem, of 
course, is concerted action of the powers in making it clear to these 
young politicians that trickery never got anything for a nation, that 
sooner or later the Powers grow weary of tricks and childish pranks 
and will set the house in order and spank the child.' 55 In 1924 Mao 
took a Chinese friend, newly arrived from Europe, to see the 
notorious sign in the Shanghai park, 'Chinese and Dogs Not 
Allowed'. He interrupted a soccer game (against a Yale team) with a 
characteristic slogan, 'Beat the slaves of the foreigners!' and used an 
equally characteristic metaphor, 'If one of our foreign masters farts, 
it's a lovely perfume!' 'Do the Chinese people know only how to hate 
the Japanese,' he asked, 'and don't they know how to hate 
England?' 56 

Mao was not cast down by the difficulty of turning China, that 
helpless, prostrate beast of burden, into a formidable dragon again. 
This big, confident man, with his flat-topped ears and broad, pale 



198 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

face — 'a typical big Chinese', according to a Burmese; 'like a 
sea-elephant', as a Thai put it - was an incurable optimist, who 
scrutinized the mystery of China for favourable signs. Dr Sun had 
thought China in a worse position than an ordinary colony: ' We are 
being crushed by the economic strength of the powers to a greater 
degree than if we were a full colony. China is not the colony of one 
nation but of all, and we are not the slaves of one country but of all. I 
think we should be called a hypo-colony.' That was Stalin's view 
also. 57 But Mao thought the multiplicity of China's exploiters an 
advantage, because one power could be set against another; he did 
not believe in the Leninist theory of colonialism. He argued 'disunity 
among the imperialist powers made for disunity among the ruling 
groups in China', hence there could be no 'unified state power'. 58 

But all this analysis was mere words without an army. Mao 
accepted Chiang's original view that the key to revolutionary success 
was to rouse the peasants. But peasants were as helpless as China 
herself until they were armed and trained, and forged into a wxapon, 
as Genghis Khan had done. Was not Genghis a legitimate hero of a 
resurrected Chinese culture? It was part of Mao's romantic national- 
ism, so similar to Hitler's, that he scoured the past for exemplars, 
especially those who shared his own stress on force and physical 
strength. 59 His very first article declared: 'Our nation is wanting in 
strength. The military spirit has not been encouraged .... If our 
bodies are not strong we shall be afraid as soon as we see enemy 
soldiers, and then how can we attain our goals and make ourselves 
respected?' The principle aim of physical education', he added, 'is 
military heroism.' The martial virtues were absolutely fundamental 
to his national socialism. 60 

In September 1927, following the* break with the kmt, Mao was 
ordered by the Communist leadership to organize an armed rising 
among the Hunan peasants. This was his opportunity to become a 
war-lord, and thereafter he quickly turned himself into an indepen- 
dent force in Chinese politics. The revolt itself failed but he preserved 
the nucleus of a force and led it into the mountains of Chinghanshan, 
on the borders of Hunan and Kiangsi. It was small, but enough; 
thereafter he was never without his own troops. His appeal was 
crude but effective, systematizing the spontaneous land-grabbing 
which (though he was probably unaware of the fact) had destroyed 
Kerensky and made Lenin's putsch possible. His Regulations for the 
Repression of Local Bullies and Bad Gentry and his Draft Resolution 
on the Land Question condemned the traditional enemies of poor 
peasants - 'local bullies and bad gentry, corrupt officials, militarists 
and all counter-revolutionary elements in the villages'. He classified 
as 'uniformly counter-revolutionary' all the groups likely to oppose 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 199 

his peasant-army: 'All Right-Peasants, Small, Middle and Big Land- 
lords', categorized as 'those possessing over 30 mou' (4£ acres). In 
fact he was setting himself up against all the stable elements in rural 
society, forming a war-band which was the social reverse of those 
commanded by gentry war-lords and their iocal bullies'. 

Mao showed himself better at appealing to peasant patriotism 
than Chiang, as Japanese war-archives were later to show. 61 But to 
begin with he could not recruit more than 1,000 poor peasants. He 
supplemented his force with 600 bandits, recruiting deliberately 
from the very scum of a society in the midst of civil war, what he 
called his 'five declasse elements': deserters, bandits, robbers, beg- 
gars and prostitutes. 62 As with other war-lords, his army fluctuated, 
from less than 3,000 to over 20,000. And he was as ruthless as any 
war-lord in killing enemies. In December 1930 he had between 2,000 
and 3,000 officers and men in his army shot for belonging to the 'ab' 
(Anti-Bolshevik League), a kmt undercover organization within the 
Communist forces. Five months earlier his wife and younger sister 
had been executed by the kmt and there were other deaths to avenge 
- Chiang had killed tens of thousands of Communists in 1927-8. But 
Mao never hesitated to take the initiative in using force. He had by 
the end of 1930 already created his own secret police (as his purge 
revealed) and when he felt it necessary he acted with complete ruth- 
lessness and atrocious cruelty. The comparison between his ragged 
and savage band and Genghis's 'horde' was not inapt, and to most of 
those whose fields he crossed he must have seemed like any other 
war-lord. 63 

Thus in the last years of the 1920s China was given over to the 
rival armies, motivated by a variety of ideologies or by simple greed - 
to their victims, what did it matter? After Chiang's Northern 
campaign and the meeting of war-lords in Peking in 1928, one of the 
kmt commanders, Marshal Li Tsung-jen, declared: 'Something new 
had come to changeless China . . . the birth of patriotism and public 
spirit.' Within months these words had been shown to be total 
illusion, as the war-lords fell out with each other and the Nanking 
government. All parties found it convenient to fly the government 
and the kmt flag; none paid much regard to the wishes of either. 
Government revenue fell; that of the war-lords rose. As the destruc- 
tion of towns and villages increased, more of the dispossessed 
became bandits or served war-lords, great and small, for their food. 
In addition to the half-dozen major war-lords, many lesser generals 
controlled a single province or a dozen counties, with armies ranging 
from 20,000 to 100,000; Mao's was among the smallest of these. At 
the National Economic Conference on 30 June 1928, Chiang's 
brother-in-law, T.V.Soong, now Minister of Finance, said that 



200 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

whereas in 1911 under the monarchy China had an army of 
400,000, more or less under single control, in 1928 it had eighty-four 
armies, eighteen independent divisions and twenty-one independent 
brigades, totalling over 2 million. The nation's total revenue, $450 
million, was worth only $300 million after debt-payments. The army 
cost each year $360 million, and if the troops were regularly paid, 
$642 million - hence banditry was inevitable. Yet a disarmament 
conference held the following January, designed to reduce the troops 
to 715,000, was a complete failure. Soong told it that, in the last 
year, twice as much money had been spent on the army as on all 
other government expenditure put together. 64 

In practice, the anguished people of China could rarely tell the 
difference between bandits and government troops. The number of 
those killed or who died of exposure or starvation was incalculable. 
Hupeh province showed a net population loss of 4 million in the 
years 1925-30, though there had been no natural famine and little 
emigration. The worst-hit province in 1929-30 was Honan, with 
400,000 bandits (mostly unpaid soldiers) out of a total population of 
25 million. In five months during the winter of 1929-30, the 
once-wealthy city of Iyang in West Honan changed hands among 
various bandit armies seventy-two times. An official government 
report on the province said that in Miench'ih district alone 1,000 
towns and villages had been looted and 10,000 held to ransom: 
'When they capture a person for ransom they first pierce his legs with 
iron wire and bind them together as fish are hung on a string. When 
they return to their bandit dens the captives are interrogated and cut 
with sickles to make them disclose hidden property. Any who 
hesitate are immediately cut in two at the waist, as a warning to the 
others.' The report said that families were selling children and men 
their wives. Or men 'rented out' their wives for two or three years, 
any children born being the property of the men who paid the rent. 
'In many cases only eight or ten houses are left standing in towns 
which a year ago had 400 or 450.' 65 

In desperation, the peasants built stone turrets with loopholes and 
crenellations, as look-outs and refuges for humans and cattle — rather 
like the peel towers of the fifteenth-century border in Britain. But 
even strongly walled towns were besieged and stormed. Choctow, 
only thirty miles from Peking, was besieged for eighty days and its 
100,000 inhabitants starved; mothers strangled their new-born 
babies and girls were sold for as little as five Chinese dollars, and 
carried off into prostitution all over Asia. Liyang, in the heart of the 
Nanking government-controlled area, was stormed by a bandit force 
of 3,000, who looted $3 million and destroyed a further $10 million 
by fire. Six major towns in the Shanghai area were stormed and 



AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 201 

looted. At Nigkang the chief magistrate was bound hand and foot 
and murdered by pouring boiling water over him. Strange practices 
from the past were resumed: bamboo 'cages of disgrace' were hoisted 
twenty feet into the air and hung from city walls, offenders having 
to stand on tiptoe with their heads sticking through a hole in the 
top. At Fushun in Shantung, a defeated war-lord retired into the city 
with his 4,500 troops, taking 10,000 hostages with him. During a 
thirteen-day siege by kmt units, over 400 women and children were 
tied to posts on the city walls, the defenders firing from behind them. 

Mao and other Communist war-lords, who held down about 30 
million people in five provinces during 1929-30, did not rape or loot 
on the whole, and they suppressed gambling, prostitution and opium 
poppy-growing. On the other hand they ill-treated and murdered 
members of the middle classes, destroyed official documents, land- 
deeds and titles, and burned churches, temples and other places of 
worship, slaughtering priests and missionaries. A town might fall 
into the successive hands of a ccp band, a bandit-chief, an indepen- 
dent war-lord and a government force in turn, each exacting its due. 
A petition from Szechuan Province pleaded that the government's 
general was merely 'the leader of the wolves and tigers' and that he 
had 'desolated' the 'whole district' so that 'East and West for some 
tens of //, the bark of a dog or the crow of a cock is no longer heard. 
The people sigh that the sun and the moon might perish so that they 
could perish with them.' From Chengtu, capital of the province, the 
merchants lamented, 'We have nothing left but the grease between 
our bones.' 66 

In two decades, then, the pursuit of radical reform by force had led 
to the deaths of millions of innocents and reduced large parts of 
China to the misery and lawlessness that Germany had known in the 
Wars of Religion or France in the Hundred Years' War. Dr Sun's 
well-intentioned effort to create a modern Utopia had turned into a 
medieval nightmare. The trouble was, everyone believed in radical 
reform. Chiang was for radical reform. Mao was for radical reform. 
Many of the independent war-lords were for radical reform. Marshal 
Feng was known as 'the Christian General'. General Yen Hsi-shan 
was 'the model governor'. All these honourable gentlemen protested 
that they were working, and killing, for the good of China and her 
people. The tragedy of inter-war China illustrates the principle that 
when legitimacy yields to force, and moral absolutes to relativism, a 
great darkness descends and angels become indistinguishable from 
devils. 

Nor were the Chinese alone in urging radical reform. As already 
noted, China's gangrene attracted the predatory instincts of the 
Japanese. And they, too, favoured radical reform. As foreign journal- 



202 AN INFERNAL THEOCRACY, A CELESTIAL CHAOS 

ists conceded, more progress had been achieved in Korea under thirty 
years of Japanese rule than in 3,000 years of Chinese. 67 Port Arthur, 
the Shantung ports and other areas occupied by Japan were havens 
of order and prosperity. The young officers of this force, known as 
the Kwantung army, watched with distaste and horror China's 
interminable ordeal. In early 1928 two of them, Lt Colonel Kanji 
Ishihara and Colonel Seishiro Itagaki, decided to force their reluctant 
government into intervention. They reasoned that, while Japanese 
capitalists and Chinese war-lords might benefit from the present 
anarchy, it offered nothing to the Chinese people, who needed order, 
and the Japanese people, who needed space. 'From the standpoint of 
the proletariat,' Itagaki wrote, 'which finds it necessary to demand 
equalization of national wealth, no fundamental solution can be 
found within the boundaries of naturally poor Japan that will ensure 
a livelihood for the people at large.' The reasoning was fundamen- 
tally similar to the Soviet exploitation of its Asian empire on behalf 
of the proletariat of Great Russia. Manchuria would be freed of its 
feudal war-lords and bourgeois capitalists and turned into a prole- 
tarian colony of Japan. But the instrument of change would not be a 
revolutionary putsch but the Kwantung army. 68 On 4 June 1928 the 
two colonels took the first step towards a Japanese occupation by 
murdering Marshal Chang Tso-lin, the chief war-lord in Manchuria, 
dynamiting his private train and blowing him to eternity while he 
slept. It was the opening act in what was to become a great 
international war in the East. Curiously enough, in the United States, 
which had appointed itself the protector of China and the admonitor 
of Japan, the episode aroused little interest. The Philadelphia Record 
commented: The American people don't give a hoot in a rainbarrel 
who controls North China.' 69 America was busy manufacturing its 
own melodrama. 



SIX 

The Last Arcadia 



America's proclaimed indifference to events in North China was a 
bluff, an elaborate self-deceit. A nation which numbered 106 'ethnic 
groups', which was already a substantial microcosm of world 
society, could not be genuinely blind to major events anywhere. 1 
America's anti-Japanese policy sprang in great part from its anxiety 
and ambivalence about its own Japanese minority, which was only 
one aspect of a vast debate the nation was conducting about the 
nature and purpose of American society. Who was an American? 
What was America for? Many, perhaps most, Americans thought of 
their country, almost wistfully, as the last Arcadia, an innocent and 
quasi-Utopian refuge from the cumulative follies and wickedness of 
the corrupt world beyond her ocean-girded shores. But how to 
preserve Arcadia? That, in itself, demanded a global foreign policy. 
And how to create the true Arcadian? That demanded a race policy. 
And the two were inextricably mingled. 

The notion of a fusion of races in America was as old as Hector 
Crevecoeur and Thomas Jefferson. It was dramatized with sensa- 
tional effect in Israel Zangwill's play The Melting-pot, which was the 
New York hit of 1908. The new motion-picture industry, which was 
from its inception the epitome of multi-racialism, was obsessed by 
the idea, as many of its early epics testify. But with what propor- 
tions of ingredients should the pot be filled? By the time of the Great 
War, unrestricted immigration already appeared a lost cause. In 
1915 an itinerant Georgian minister, William Simmons, founded the 
Ku Klux Klan as an organization to control minority groups which it 
identified with moral and political nonconformity. Its aims were 
powerfully assisted by the publication, the following year, of Madi- 
son Grant's presentation, in an American context, of European 
'master-race' theory, The Passing of the Great Race, This quasi- 
scientific best-seller argued that America, by unrestricted immigra- 

203 



204 THE LAST ARCADIA 

tion, had already nearly 'succeeded in destroying the privilege of 
birth; that is, the intellectual and moral advantages a man of good 
stock brings into the world with him'. The result of the 'melting-pot', 
he argued, could be seen in Mexico, where 'the absorption of the 
blood of the original Spanish conquerors by the native Indian 
population' had produced a degenerate mixture 'now engaged in 
demonstrating its incapacity for self-government'. The virtues of the 
'higher races' were 'highly unstable' and easily disappeared 'when 
mixed with generalized or primitive characters'. Thus 'the cross 
between a white man and a Negro is a Negro' and 'the cross between 
any of the three European races and a Jew is a Jew'. 2 

This fear of 'degeneration' was used by Hiram Wesley Evans, a 
Dallas dentist and most effective of the Klan leaders, to build it up 
into a movement of Anglo-Saxon supremacist culture which at one 
time had a reputed 4 million members in the East and Midwest. 
Evans, who called himself 'the most average man in America', 
asserted that the Klan spoke 'for the great mass of Americans of the 
old pioneer stock ... of the so-called Nordic race which, with all its 
faults, has given the world almost the whole of modern civilization'. 3 
A racial pecking-order was almost universally accepted in political 
campaigning, though with significant variations to account for local 
voting-blocks. Thus, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, in private an 
unqualified Anglo-Saxon supremacist, always used the prudent 
code-term 'the English-speaking people' when campaigning. Will 
Hays, campaign manager for Warren Harding, comprehensively 
summed up the candidate's lineage as 'the finest pioneer blood, 
Anglo-Saxon, German, Scotch-Irish and Dutch'. 4 

America's entry into the Great War gave an enormous impetus to a 
patriotic xenophobia which became a justification for varieties of 
racism and a drive against nonconformity. Wilson had feared and 
predicted this emotional spasm — far more violent and destructive 
than McCarthyism after the Second World War - but he nevertheless 
signed the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918. The 
latter punished expressions of opinion which, irrespective of their 
likely consequences, were 'disloyal, profane, scurrilous or abusive' of 
the American form of government, flag or uniform; and under it 
Americans were prosecuted for criticizing the Red Cross, the ymca 
and even the budget. 5 Two Supreme Court judges, Justice Louis 
Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, sought to resist this wave of 
intolerance. In Schenk v. United States (1919), Holmes laid down 
that restraint of free speech was legal only when the words were of a 
nature to create 'a clear and present danger'; and, dissenting from 
Abrams v. United States which upheld a sedition conviction, he 
argued 'the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself 



THE LAST ARCADIA 205 

accepted in the competition of the market', a rephrasing of Milton's 
point in Areopagitica. 6 But theirs were lonely voices at the time. 
Patriotic organizations like the National Security League and the 
National Civil Federation continued their activities into the peace. 
The watchword in 1919 was 'Americanization'. 

From the autumn of 1919, with Wilson stricken, there was 
virtually no government in the USA, either to prevent the brief 
post-war boom from collapsing into the 1920 recession, or to control 
the xenophobic fury which was one of its consequences. The man in 
charge was the Attorney-General, Mitchell Palmer. He had made 
himself thoroughly unpopular during the war as Alien Property 
Controller and in spring 1919 he was nearly killed when an 
anarchist's bomb blew up in front of his house. Thereafter he led a 
nationwide drive against 'foreign-born subversives and agitators'. 
On 4 November 1919 he presented Congress with a report he 
entitled 'How the Department of Justice discovered upwards of 
60,000 of these organized agitators of the Trotzky doctrine in the US 
. . . confidential information upon which the government is now 
sweeping the nation clean of such alien filth.' He described 'Trotzky' 
as 'a disreputable alien . . . this lowest of all types known to New 
York City [who] can sleep in the Tsar's bed while hundreds of 
thousands in Russia are without food or shelter'. The 'sharp tongues 
of the Revolution's head', he wrote, 'were licking the altars of the 
churches, leaping into the belfry of the school bell, crawling into the 
sacred corners of American homes' and 'seeking to replace marriage 
vows with libertine laws'. 7 On New Year's Day 1920, in a series of 
concerted raids, his Justice Department agents rounded up more than 
6,000 aliens, most of whom were expelled. In the 'Red scare' that 
followed, five members of the New York State Assembly were 
disbarred for alleged socialism and a congressman was twice thrown 
out of the House of Representatives; and two Italians, Nicola Sacco 
and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, anarchists who had evaded military service, 
were convicted of murdering a Massachusetts paymaster in a highly 
prejudicial case which dragged on until 1927. 

A more permanent consequence was the 1921 Quota law which 
limited immigration in any year to 3 per cent of the number of each 
nationality in the USA according to the census of 1910. This device, 
whose object was to freeze the racial balance as far as possible, was 
greatly tightened by the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which limited 
the quota to 2 per cent of any nationality residing in the USA in 
1890. It debarred Japanese altogether (though Canadians and Mexi- 
cans were exempt) and not only cut the earlier quota but deliberately 
favoured Northern and Western Europe at the expense of Eastern 
and Southern Europe. With a further twist of the screw in 1929, 



206 THE LAST ARCADIA 

based on racial analysis of the USA population in the 1920s, the 
legislation of the 1920s brought mass immigration to America to an 
end. Arcadia was full, its drawbridge up, its composition now 
determined and to be perpetuated. 

There were plenty who criticized the new xenophobia. On 23 July 
1920 Walter Lippmann wrote to his old wartime boss, the Secretary 
of War Newton Baker: \ . . it is forever incredible that an adminis- 
tration announcing the most spacious ideals in our history should 
have done more to endanger fundamental American liberties than 
any group of men for a hundred years .... They have instituted a 
reign of terror in which honest thought is impossible, in which 
moderation is discountenanced and in which panic supplants rea- 
son.' 8 H.L Mencken, the Baltimore publicist (himself of German 
origin) who was perhaps the most influential US journalist of the 
1920s, called Palmer, in the Baltimore Evening Sun, 13 September 
1920, 'perhaps the most eminent living exponent of cruelty, dis- 
honesty and injustice'. A fortnight later he accused the Justice 
Department of maintaining 'a system of espionage altogether with- 
out precedent in American history, and not often matched in the 
history of Russia, Austria and Italy. It has, as a matter of daily 
routine, hounded men and women in cynical violation of their 
constitutional rights, invaded the sanctuary of domicile, manufac- 
tured evidence against the innocent, flooded the land with agents 
provocateurs, raised neighbor against neighbor, filled the public 
press with inflammatory lies and fostered all the worst poltrooneries 
of sneaking and malicious wretches.' 9 The sociologist Horace Kellen, 
of the New School for Social Research, argued that 'Americaniza- 
tion' was merely a recrudescence of the anti-Catholic 'Know- 
Nothingism' of the 1850s, a form of Protestant fundamentalism of 
which the 1924 Act, 'the witch-hunting of the Quaker Attorney- 
General Palmer, the Tsaristically-inspired Jew-baiting of the Baptist 
automobile-maker Ford, the malevolent mass-mummery of the 
Ku-Klux Klan, the racial mumblings of Mr Madesan Grant' were 
manifestations, along with such innocent expressions of homely 
patriotism as the novels of Mrs Gertrude Atherton and the Saturday 
Evening Post. 10 

There was an important point here: America, if it was anything, 
was a Protestant-type religious civilization, and the xenophobia of a 
Palmer was merely the extreme and distorted expression of all that 
was most valuable in the American ethic. From this time onwards, 
American 'highbrows' - the term, so much more appropriate than 
the French intellectuel or intelligentsia, had been devised by the critic 
Van Wyck Brooks in 1915 - had to face the dilemma that, in 
attacking the distortion, they were in danger of damaging the reality 



THE LAST ARCADIA 207 

of 'Americanism', which sprang from Jeffersonian democracy; and if 
that were lost, American culture was nothing except an expatriation 
of Europe. While Palmer was hunting aliens, East Coast highbrows 
were reading The Education of Henry Adams, the posthumous 
autobiography of the archetypal Boston mandarin, which the Massa- 
chusetts Historical Society published in October 1918. From then 
until spring 1920 it was the most popular non- fiction book in 
America, perfectly expressing the mood of educated disillusionment. 
It was the American equivalent of Strachey's Eminent Victorians, 
rejecting the notion of a national culture - especially one imposed by 
brutal repression - in favour of what Adams termed 'multiversity' 
but pessimistically stressing that, in the emerging America, the 
best-educated were the most helpless. 

In fact the East Coast highbrows were by no means helpless. Over 
the next sixty years they were to exercise an influence on American 
(and world) policy out of all proportion to their numbers and 
intrinsic worth. But they were ambivalent about America. In the 
spring of 1917, Van Wyck Brooks wrote in Seven Arts, the journal he 
helped to found, 'Towards a National Culture', in which he argued 
that hitherto America had taken the 'best' of other cultures: now it 
must create its own through the elementary experience of living 
which alone produced true culture. America, by experiencing its own 
dramas, through what he termed 'the Culture of Industrialism', 
would 'cease to be a blind, selfish, disorderly people; we shall 
become a luminous people, dwelling in the light and sharing our 
light'. 11 He endorsed his friend Randolph Bourne's view that the 
whole 'melting-pot' theory was unsound since it turned immigrants 
into imitation Anglo-Saxons, and argued that America ought to have 
not narrow European nationalism but 'the more adventurous ideal' 
of cosmopolitanism, to become 'the first international nation'. 12 But 
what did this mean? D.H. Lawrence rightly observed that America 
was not, or not yet, 'a blood-homeland'. Jung, putting it another 
way, said Americans were 'not yet at home in their unconscious'. 
Brooks, deliberately settling into Westport, Connecticut, to find his 
American cosmopolitanism, together with other Twenties intellec- 
tuals whom he neatly defined as 'those who care more for the state of 
their minds than the state of their fortunes', nevertheless felt the 
strong pull of the old culture; he confessed, in his autobiography, to 
'a frequently acute homesickness for the European scene'. Only 'a 
long immersion in American life', he wrote, 'was to cure me 
completely of any lingering fear of expatriation; but this ambivalence 
characterized my outlook in the Twenties.' 13 In May 1919, hearing 
that a friend, Waldo Frank, planned to settle in the Middle West, he 
wrote to him: 'All our will-to-live as writers comes to us, or rather 



208 THE LAST ARCADIA 

stays with us, through our intercourse with Europe. Never believe 
people who talk to you about the west, Waldo; never forget that it is 
we New Yorkers and New Englanders who have the monopoly of 
whatever oxygen there is in the American continent.' 14 

That was an arrogant claim; to echo, though not often so frankly 
avowed, down the decades of the twentieth century. But without the 
Midwest, what was America? A mere coastal fringe, like so many of 
the hispanic littoral-states of South America. The hate-figure of the 
East Coast highbrows in the Twenties was William Jennings Bryan, 
the Illinois Democrat who had denounced the power of money ('You 
shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold'), opposed imperialism, 
resigned as Secretary of State in 1915 in protest against the drift to war 
and, in his old age, fought a desperate rearguard action against 
Darwinian evolution in the 1925 Scopes trial. Fundamentally, Bryan's 
aims were democratic and progressive: he fought for women's 
suffrage and a federal income-tax and reserve-bank, for popular 
election to the Senate, for the publication of campaign contributions, 
for freeing the Philippines, and for the representation of labour in the 
cabinet. Yet his values were popular ones or, to use the new term of 
derogation, 'populist'; he spoke the language of anti-intellectualism. 
His wife's diaries testify to the bitterness the couple felt at the way his 
work was misrepresented or completely ignored in the 'Eastern 
press'. 15 At the Scopes trial he was not seeking to ban the teaching of 
evolution but to prevent state schools from undermining religious 
belief: evolution should, he argued, be taught as theory not fact, 
parents and taxpayers should have a say in what went on in the 
schools, and teachers should abide by the law of the land. He saw 
himself as resisting the aggressive dictatorship of a self-appointed 
scholastic elite who were claiming a monopoly of authentic know- 
ledge. 16 

The philosopher John Dewey, while opposing the Bryan anti- 
evolution crusade, warned the East Coast intelligentsia that the forces 
it embodied 'would not be so dangerous were they not bound up with 
so much that is necessary and good'. He feared the idea of a fissure, 
which he could see opening, between the East Coast leadership of 
educated opinion and what a later generation would call 'middle 
America' or 'the silent majority'. Evolution was a mere instance of 
antagonistic habits of thought. In a remarkable article, 'The American 
Intellectual Frontier', which he published in 1922, he warned readers 
of the New Republic that Bryan could not be dismissed as a mere 
obscurantist because he 'is a typical democratic figure - there is no 
gainsaying that proposition'. Of course he was mediocre but 'demo- 
cracy by nature puts a premium on mediocrity'. Moreover, he spoke 
for some of the best, and most essential, elements in American society: 



THE LAST ARCADIA 209 

... the church-going classes, those who have come under the influence of 
evangelical Christianity. These people form the backbone of philanthropic 
social interest, of social reform through political action, of pacifism, of 
popular education. They embody and express the spirit of kindly goodwill 
towards classes which are at an economic disadvantage and towards other 
nations, especially when the latter show any disposition towards a republi- 
can form of government. The Middle West, the prairie country, has been the 
centre of active social philanthropy and political progressivism because it is 
the chief home of this folk . . . believing in education and better opportuni- 
ties for its own children ... it has been the element responsive to appeals for 
the square deal and more nearly equal opportunities for all .... It followed 
Lincoln in the abolition of slavery and it followed Roosevelt in his 
denunciation of 'bad' corporations and aggregations of wealth .... It has 
been the middle in every sense of the word and of every movement. 17 

In so far as there was an indigenous American culture, this was it. 
Cosmopolitanism on the East Coast was thus in danger of becoming 
a counter-culture and involving America in the kind of internal 
conflict between 'culture' and 'civilization' which was tearing apart 
Weimar Germany and opening the gates to totalitarianism. Indeed 
the conflict already existed, finding its envenomed expression in the 
Prohibition issue. Bryan had been presented with a vast silver 
loving-cup in token of his prodigious efforts to secure ratification of 
the eighteenth 'National Prohibition' Amendment to the constitution, 
which made legal the Volstead Act turning America 'dry'. The Act 
came into effect the same month, January 1920, that Mitchell Palmer 
pounced on the alien anarchists, and the two events were closely 
related. Prohibition, with its repressive overtones, was part of the 
attempt to 'Americanize' America: reformers openly proclaimed that 
it was directed chiefly at the 'notorious drinking habits' of 'immi- 
grant working men'. 18 Like the new quota system, it was an attempt 
to preserve Arcadia, to keep the Arcadians pure. America had been 
founded as a Utopian society, populated by what Lincoln had, 
half-earnestly, half-wryly, called 'an almost-chosen people'; the 
eighteenth Amendment was the last wholehearted effort at millennari- 
anism. 

But if wholehearted in intention, it was not so in execution. It was 
another testimony to the ambivalence of American society. America 
willed the end in ratifying the eighteenth Amendment; but it failed to 
will the means, for the Volstead Act was an ineffectual compromise - 
if it had provided ruthless means of enforcement it would never have 
become law. The Prohibition Bureau was attached to the Treasury; 
efforts to transfer it to the Justice Department were defeated. 
Successive presidents refused to recommend the appropriations 



210 THE LAST ARCADIA 

needed to secure effective enforcement. 19 Moreover, the Utopianism 
inherent in Prohibition, though strongly rooted in American society, 
came up against the equally strongly rooted and active American 
principle of unrestricted freedom of enterprise. America was one of 
the least totalitarian societies on earth; it possessed virtually none of 
the apparatus to keep market forces in check once an unfulfilled need 
appeared. 

Hence the liquor gangsters and their backers could always com- 
mand more physical and financial resources than the law. Indeed 
they were far better organized on the whole. Prohibition illustrated 
the law of unintended effect. Far from driving alien minorities into 
Anglo-Saxon conformity, it allowed them to consolidate themselves. 
In New York, bootlegging was half Jewish, a quarter Italian and 
one-eighth each Polish and Irish. 20 In Chicago it was half Italian, half 
Irish. The Italians were particularly effective in distributing liquor in 
an orderly and inexpensive manner, drawing on the organizational 
experience not only of the Sicilian, Sardinian and Neapolitan secret 
societies but on the 'vanguard elitism' of revolutionary syndicalism. 
Prohibition offered matchless opportunities to subvert society, parti- 
cularly in Chicago under the corrupt mayoralty of 'Big Bill' Thomp- 
son. John Torrio, who ran large-scale bootlegging in Chicago 
1920-4, retiring to Italy in 1925 with a fortune of $30 million, 
practised the principle of total control: all officials were bribed in 
varying degrees and all elections rigged. 21 He could deliver high- 
quality beer as cheaply as $50 a barrel and his success was based on 
the avoidance of violence by diplomacy - in securing agreements 
among gangsters for the orderly assignment of territory. 22 His 
lieutenant and successor Al Capone was less politically minded and 
therefore less successful; and the Irish operators tended to think in 
the short term and resort to violent solutions. When this happened 
gang-warfare ensued, the public became indignant and the authori- 
ties were driven to intervene. 

As a rule, however, bootleggers operated with public approval, at 
any rate in the cities. Most urban men (not women) agreed with 
Mencken's view that Prohibition was the work of 'ignorant bump- 
kins of the cow states who resented the fact they had to swill raw 
corn liquor while city slickers got good wine and whiskey'. It 'had 
little behind it, philosophically speaking, save the envy of the country 
lout for the city man, who has a much better time of it in this 
world'. 23 City enforcement was impossible, even under reforming 
mayors. General Smedley Butler of the US Marine Corps, put in 
charge of the Philadelphia police under a 'clean' new administration 
in 1924, was forced to give up after less than two years: the job, he 
said, was 'a waste of time'. Politicians of both parties gave little help 



THE LAST ARCADIA 211 

to the authorities. At the 1920 Democratic Convention in San 
Francisco they gleefully drank the first-class whiskey provided free 
by the mayor, and Republicans bitterly resented the fact that, at their 
Cleveland Convention in 1924, prohibition agents 'clamped down 
on the city', according to Mencken, 'with the utmost ferocity'. Over 
huge areas, for most of the time, the law was generally defied. 'Even 
in the most remote country districts', Mencken claimed, 'there is 
absolutely no place in which any man who desires to drink alcohol 
cannot get it.' 24 

A similar pattern of non-enforcement appeared in Norway, which 
prohibited spirits and strong wines by a referendum of five to three in 
October 1919. But Norway had the sense to drop the law by a 
further referendum in 1926. 25 America kept Prohibition twice as 
long and the results were far more serious. The journalist Walter 
Ligget, probably the greatest expert on the subject, testified to the 
House Judiciary Committee in February 1930 that he had 'a truck 
load of detail and explicit facts' that 'there is considerably more hard 
liquor being drunk than there was in the days before prohibition and 
. . . drunk in more evil surroundings'. Washington DC had had 300 
licensed saloons before Prohibition: now it had 700 speakeasies, 
supplied by 4,000 bootleggers. Police records showed that arrests for 
drunkenness had trebled over the decade. Massachusetts had jumped 
from 1,000 licensed saloons to 4,000 speakeasies, plus a further 
4,000 in Boston: 'there are at least 15,000 people who do nothing 
but purvey booze illegally in the city of Boston today.' Kansas had 
been the first state to go dry; had been dry for half a century, yet 
'there is not a town in Kansas where I cannot go as a total stranger 
and get a drink of liquor, and very good liquor at that, within fifteen 
minutes after my arrival'. All this was made possible by universal 
corruption at all levels. Thus, in Detroit there were 20,000 speak- 
easies. He continued: 

There came to my attention in the city of Detroit - and this took place last 
November — a wild party given at a roadhouse, and a very wild party, where 
the liquor was donated by one of the principal gamblers of Detroit - Denny 
Murphy if you want his name - and there were at that drunken revel . . . the 
Governor of Michigan, the chief of police of Detroit, the chief of the State 
Police, politicians, club men, gamblers, criminals, bootleggers, all there 
fraternizing in the spirit of the most perfect equality under the god Bacchus, 
and I will say that there were four judges of the circuit of Michigan at that 
drunken revel, at which naked hoochy-koochy dancers appeared later . . . 
you find that hypocrisy today over the length and breadth of this land. 26 

As Ligget pointed out, evasion of Prohibition generated enormous 
funds which were reinvested in other forms of crime such as 



212 THE LAST ARCADIA 

prostitution, but above all gambling, which for the first time were 
organized on a systematic and quasi-legitimate basis. More recent 
studies confirm his view that Prohibition brought about a qualitative 
and - as it has turned out - permanent change in the scale and 
sophistication of American organized crime. Running large-scale 
beer-convoys required powers of organization soon put to use 
elsewhere. In the early 1920s, for the first time, gambling syndicates 
used phone-banks to take bets from all over the country. Meyer 
Lansky and Benjamin Siegel adapted bootlegging patterns to orga- 
nize huge nationwide gambling empires. Prohibition was the 'take- 
off point' for big crime in America; and of course it continued after 
the twenty-first Amendment, which ended prohibition, was ratified 
in December 1933. Throughout the 1930s organized crime matured, 
and it was from 1944 onwards, for instance, that the small desert 
town of Las Vegas was transformed into the world's gambling 
capital. Prohibition, far from 'Americanizing' minorities, tended to 
reinforce minority characteristics through specific patterns of crime: 
among Italians, Jews, Irish and, not least, among blacks, where from 
the early 1920s West Indians introduced the 'numbers game' and 
other gambling rings, forming powerful black ghetto crime-citadels 
in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Detroit. 27 Studies by the 
Justice Department's Law Enforcement Assistance Administration in 
the 1970s indicate that the beginning of Prohibition in 1920 was the 
starting-point for most identifiable immigrant crime-families, which 
continue to flourish and perpetuate themselves in our age. 28 

The truth is, Prohibition was a clumsy and half-hearted piece of 
social engineering, designed to produce a homogenization of a mixed 
community by law. It did not of course involve the enormous cruelty 
of Lenin's social engineering in Russia, or Mussolini's feeble imita- 
tion of it in Italy, but in its own way it inflicted the same damage to 
social morals and the civilized cohesion of the community. The 
tragedy is that it was quite unnecessary. America's entrepreneurial 
market system was itself an effective homogenizer, binding together 
and adjudicating between ethnic and racial groups without regard to 
colour or national origins. The way in which the enormous German 
and Polish immigrations, for instance, had been absorbed within an 
Anglo-Saxon framework, was astounding: the market had done it. 
Mitchell Palmer was mistaken in thinking that aliens in the mass 
brought radical politics. On the contrary: they were fleeing closed 
systems to embrace the free one. They were voting with their feet for 
the entrepreneurial economy. 

Indeed, at the very time Palmer expected revolution to manifest 
itself, American radicalism, especially of a collectivist kind, was 
entering a period of steady decline. It had never been strong. Marx 



THE LAST ARCADIA 213 

had been unable to explain why America, which, by the end of his life, 
had become the most powerful and inventive of the capitalist 
economies, showed no sign whatever of producing the conditions for 
the proletarian revolution which he claimed mature capitalism made 
inevitable. Engels sought to meet the difficulty by arguing that socialism 
was weak there 'just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely 
without a feudal past and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois 
organization'. Lenin (1908) thought that in the USA, 'the model and 
ideal of our bourgeois civilization', socialism had to deal with 'the most 
firmly established democratic systems, which confront the proletariat 
with purely socialist tasks'. Antonio Gramsci blamed 'Americanism', 
which he defined as 'pure rationalism without any of the class values 
derived from feudalism'. H.G. Wells in The Future of America (1906) 
attributed the absence of a powerful socialist party to the symmetrical 
absence of a conservative one: 'All Americans are, from the English 
point of view, Liberals of one sort or another.' 29 

Until the 1920s there were some grounds for thinking, however, that 
an American Left might eventually come to occupy a significant role in 
politics. In the years before 1914 the Socialist Party had about 125,000 
members, who included the leaders of the mineworkers, brewery 
workers, carpenters and ironworkers. It elected over 1,000 public 
officials, including the mayors of important towns and two congress- 
men; in 1912 its candidate Eugene Debs got 6 per cent of the popular 
vote. But thereafter the decline was continuous. The Workingmen's 
Party had some successes in a few cities in the 1920s and early 1930s. 
But the mainstream socialist parties floundered. The failure of the 
Socialist Party itself was attributed to its inability to decide whether it 
was a mass political party, a pressure group, a revolutionary sect or just 
an educational force, attempting to be all four at the same time. 30 
Even in the desperate year 1932 Norman Thomas got only 2 per cent of 
the presidential vote. The Communist Party equally failed to become a 
new expression of American radicalism and became a mere US 
appendage of Soviet policy. 31 Its highest score was the 1,150,000 it 
helped to collect for Henry Wallace, the Progressive candidate, in 1 948 . 
During the next thirty years the decline continued. In the 1976 election, 
for instance, the Socialists and five other radical parties fielded 
candidates; none polled as many as 100,000 out of a total of 80 million 
votes: added together they got less than a quarter of 1 per cent of votes 
cast. By the beginning of the 1980s the United States was the only 
democratic industrialized nation in which not a single independent 
socialist or labour party representative held elective office. 

This pattern was adumbrated by the politics of the 1 920s. Whereas in 
Britain, Austria, France, Germany, Spain and the Scandinavian 
countries, Social Democratic parties became the principal opposition 



214 THE LAST ARCADIA 

parties or even formed or participated in governments, in the USA 
the decade was a Republican one. The Republican Party was, of 
course, the party of Lincoln, which had emancipated the slaves and 
won the Civil War. Blacks, who poured into Northern cities during 
the First World War and after, still voted Republican in overwhelm- 
ing numbers. It had also been the party of Theodore Roosevelt and 
progressive capital. But it was, at the same time, the party of social 
conservatism and free market economics. In the 1920s its mastery 
was overwhelming. Between 1920 and 1932, Republicans controlled 
the White House and the Senate for the whole time and the House 
except for the years 1930-2. 32 Warren Harding in 1920 got 60.2 per 
cent, the largest popular majority yet recorded (16,152,000 to 
9,147,000), carrying every state outside the South. The Republicans 
took the House by 303 to 131 and won ten Senate seats to give them 
a majority of twenty-two. 33 In 1924 Calvin Coolidge won by 
15,725,000 votes to a mere 8,386,000 for his Democrat rival, John 
W. Davis. In 1928 Herbert Hoover won by 21,391,000 votes to 
15,016,000 for Al Smith, a landslide electoral college victory of 444 
to 87; he carried all but two Northern states and five in the 'Solid 
South'. The Socialists polled less than 300,000, the Communists 
under 50,000. 34 

These repeated successes indicated what Coolidge called 'a state of 
contentment seldom before seen', a marriage between a democratic 
people and its government, and the economic system the governing 
party upheld and epitomized, which is very rare in history and worth 
examining. In order to do so effectively it is necessary to probe 
beneath the conventional historiography of the period, especially as 
it revolves round its two key figures, Harding and Coolidge. 

Harding won the election on his fifty-fifth birthday, which, 
characteristically, he celebrated by playing a round of golf. He did 
not believe that politics were very important or that people should 
get excited about them or allow them to penetrate too far into their 
everyday lives. In short he was the exact opposite of Lenin, Mussolini 
and Hitler, and the professional Social Democratic politicians of 
Europe. He came from Ohio, the Republican political heartland, 
which had produced six out of ten presidents since 1865. He had 
emerged from poverty to create a successful small-town paper, the 
Marion Star, and had then become director of a bank, a phone 
company, a lumber firm and a building society. He was decent, 
small-town America in person: a handsome man, always genial and 
friendly, but dignified. He was not above answering the White House 
front door in person, and he always took a horse-ride on Sunday. He 
told a cheering crowd in Boston in May 1920: 'America's present 
need is not heroics but healing, not nostrums but normalcy; not 



THE LAST ARCADIA 215 

revolution but restoration . . . not surgery but serenity.' 35 America as 
Arcadia was a reality to him; somehow, he wished to preserve it. To 
get elected, he stuck old President McKinley's flagpole in front of his 
house and ran a 'front porch' campaign. Many famous people made 
the pilgrimage to Marion to listen to his campaign talk, Al Jolson, 
Ethel Barrymore, Lillian Gish, Pearl White among them, but 600,000 
ordinary folk too, thousands of them black - hence the Democrat 
rumour that Harding had negro blood. Everybody liked Harding. The 
worst thing about him was his sharp-faced wife, Flossie, known as 
'the Duchess', of whom Harding said (not in her hearing), 'Mrs 
Harding wants to be the drum-major in every band that passes'. 36 
Harding believed that America's matchless society was the crea- 
tion of voluntarism and that only government could spoil it. If he 
could plant a Rotary Club in every city and hamlet, he said, he would 
'rest assured that our ideals of freedom would be safe and civilization 
would progress'. That was a general view. 'There is only one 
first-class civilization in the world', wrote the Ladies 3 Home Journal. 
'It is right here in the United States.' That was also the view of most 
American intellectuals, to judge not by their subsequent rationaliza- 
tions in the Thirties but by what they actually wrote at the time. The 
same month Harding signed the 1921 Immigration Act, Scott 
Fitzgerald was writing to Edmund Wilson from London: 

God damn the continent of Europe. It is of merely antiquarian interest. 
Rome is only a few years behind Tyre and Babylon. The negroid streak 
creeps northward to defile the Nordic race. Already the Italians have the 
souls of blackamoors. Raise the bar of immigration and permit only 
Scandinavians, Teutons, Anglo-Saxons and Celts to enter. France made me 
sick. Its silly pose as the thing the world has to save .... I believe at last in 
the white man's burden. We are as far above the modern Frenchman as he is 
above the Negro. Even in art! Italy has no one .... They're thru and done. 
You may have spoken in jest about New York as the capital of culture but 
in 25 years it will be just as London is now. Culture follows money .... We 
will be the Romans in the next generations as the English are now. 37 

Harding believed this cultural supremacy would arise inevitably 
provided government allowed the wheels of free enterprise to turn. 
Far from selecting cronies from 'the buck-eye state' (as later alleged), 
he formed a cabinet of strong men: Charles Evans Hughes as 
Secretary of State, Andrew Mellon at the Treasury, Hoover at 
Commerce. He hurried with his cabinet list straight to the Senate, 
and his choice for the Department of the Interior, Albert Fall, 
Senator for New Mexico, sported a handle-bar moustache and wore 
a flowing black cape and broad-brimmed stetson — normalcy itself! — 
was so popular he was confirmed by immediate acclamation, the 



216 THE LAST ARCADIA 

only time in American history a cabinet member has been accorded 
such a vote of confidence. 38 The cabinet list was a cross-section of 
successful America: a car manufacturer, two bankers, a hotel direc- 
tor, a farm- journal editor, an international lawyer, a rancher, an 
engineer and only two professional politicians. 

Harding inherited an absentee presidency and one of the sharpest 
recessions in American history. By July 1921 it was all over and the 
economy was booming again. Harding had done nothing except cut 
government expenditure, the last time a major industrial power 
treated a recession by classic laissez-faire methods, allowing wages to 
fall to their natural level. Benjamin Anderson of Chase Manhattan 
was later to call it 'our last natural recovery to full employment'. 39 
But the cuts were important. Indeed, Harding can be described as the 
only president in American history who actually brought about 
massive cuts in government spending, producing nearly a 40 per cent 
saving over Wilsonian peacetime expenditure. 40 Nor was this a wild 
assault. It was part of a considered plan which included the creation 
of the Bureau of the Budget, under the Budget and Accounting Act of 
1921, to bring authorizations under systematic central scrutiny and 
control. Its first director, Charles Dawes, said in 1922 that, before 
Harding, 'everyone did as they damn pleased'; cabinet members were 
'commanchees', Congress 'a nest of cowards'. Then Harding 'waved 
the axe and said that anybody who didn't co-operate his head would 
come off; the result was 'velvet for the taxpayer'. 41 

Harding's regime was agreeably liberal. Against the advice of his 
cabinet and his wife he insisted on releasing the Socialist leader 
Eugene Debs, whom Wilson had imprisoned, on Christmas Eve 
1921: 'I want him to eat his Christmas dinner with his wife.' He 
freed twenty-three other political prisoners the same day, commuted 
death-sentences on the 'Wobblies' (Industrial Workers of the World) 
and before the end of his presidency had virtually cleared the gaols of 
political offenders. 42 He took the press into his confidence, calling 
reporters by their Christian names. When he moved, he liked to 
surround himself with a vast travelling 'family', many invited on the 
spur of the moment, occupying ten whole cars on his presidential 
train. He chewed tobacco, one of his chewing companions being 
Thomas Edison, who remarked, 'Harding is all right. Any man who 
chews tobacco is all right.' He drank hard liquor too, asking people 
up to his bedroom for a snort, and it was known he served whiskey 
in the White House. Twice a week he invited his intimates over for 
'food and action' ('action' meant poker). Commerce Secretary 
Hoover, a stuffed shirt, was the only one who declined to play: 'It 
irks me to see it in the White House.' 43 

Hoover's instinct was correct: a president cannot be too careful, as 



THE LAST ARCADIA 217 

had been demonstrated in virtually every presidency since. There is 
no evidence that Harding was ever anything other than a generous 
and unsuspicious man. The only specific charge of dishonesty 
brought against him was that the sale of the Marion Star was a fix; 
this was decisively refuted in court, the two men who bought the 
paper receiving $100,000 in damages. But Harding made two errors 
of judgement: appointing the florid Senator Fall, who turned out to 
be a scoundrel, and believing that his Ohio campaign-manager Harry 
Daugherty, whom he made Attorney-General, would screen and 
protect him from the influence-peddlars who swarmed up from his 
home state. 'I know who the crooks are and I want to stand between 
Harding and them,' Daugherty said. This proved an empty boast. 44 

The result was a series of blows which came in quick succession 
from early 1923. In February Harding discovered that Charles 
Forbes, Director of the Veterans Bureau, had been selling off 
government medical supplies at rock-low prices: he summoned him 
to the White House, shook him 'as a dog would a rat' and shouted 
'You double-crossing bastard'. Forbes fled to Europe and resigned, 
15 February. 45 On 4 March Albert Fall resigned. It was subsequently 
established that he had received a total of $400,000 in return for 
granting favourable leases of government oilfields at Elk Hills in 
California and Salt Creek (Teapot Dome), Wyoming. Fall was 
eventually gaoled for a year in 1929, though his leases later turned 
out well for America, since they involved building vital pipelines and 
installations at Pearl Harbor. 46 But that was not apparent at the time 
and Fall's departure was a disaster for Harding, more particularly 
since Charles Cramer, counsel for the Veterans Bureau, committed 
suicide a few days later. 

Finally on 29 May Harding forced himself to see a crony of 
Daugherty's, Jess Smith, who together with other Ohians had been 
selling government favours from what became known as 'the little 
green house [no. 1625] on K Street'. The 'Ohio Gang', as the group 
was soon called, had nothing to do with Harding and it was never 
legally established that even Daugherty shared their loot (he was 
acquitted when tried in 1926-7, though he refused to take the stand). 
But after Harding confronted Smith with his crimes on 29 May, the 
wretched man shot himself the following day and this second suicide 
had a deplorable effect on the President's morale. According to 
William Allen White (not a wholly reliable witness), Harding told 
him, 'I can take care of my enemies all right. But my damn friends, 
my God-damn friends, White, they're the ones that keep me walking 
the floors nights.' Given time, Harding would certainly have man- 
aged to stabilize the situation and refute the rumours of guilt by 
association — as have several presidents since — for his own hands 



218 THE LAST ARCADIA 

were completely clean, so far as the latest historical research has been 
able to establish. But the following month he left for a trip to Alaska 
and the West Coast and he died, of a cerebral haemorrhage, at the 
Palace Hotel, San Francisco, in early August. His wife followed him 
in November 1924 having first destroyed (so it was then believed) all 
Harding's papers, and this was taker! as conclusive evidence of guilty 
secrets. 47 

The false historiography which presented Harding and his admin- 
istration as the most corrupt in American history began almost 
immediately with the publication in 1924 in the New Republic of a 
series of articles by its violently anti-business editor, Bruce Bliven. 
This created the basic mythology of the 'Ohio Gang', run by 
Daugherty, who had deliberately recruited Harding as a front man as 
long ago as 1912 as part of a long-term conspiracy to hand over the 
entire nation to Andrew Mellon and Big Business. Thereafter Hard- 
ing was fair game for sensationalists. In 1927 Nan Britton, daughter 
of a Marion doctor, published The President's Daughter, claiming 
she had had a baby girl by Harding in 1919. In 1928 William Allen 
White repeated the conspiracy theory in Masks in a Pageant and 
again ten years later in his life of Coolidge, A Puritan in Babylon. In 
1930 a former fbi agent, Gaston Means, produced the best-selling 
The Strange Death of President Harding, portraying wholly imagin- 
ary drunken orgies with chorus girls at the K Street house, with 
Harding prominent in the 'action'. Equally damaging was the 1933 
memoir Crowded Hours, by Theodore Roosevelt's daughter, Alice 
Roosevelt Longworth, which presented Harding's White House 
study as a speakeasy: 'the air heavy with tobacco smoke, trays with 
bottles containing every imaginable brand of whisky stood about, 
cards and poker chips ready at hand — a general atmosphere of 
waistcoat unbuttoned, feet on the desk and the spittoon 
alongside .... Harding was not a bad man. He was just a slob.' 48 To 
cap it all came an apparently scholarly work by a New York Sun 
writer, Samuel Hopkins Adams, called Incredible Era: the Life and 
Times of Warren Gamaliel Harding (1939), which welded together 
all the inventions and myths into a solid orthodoxy. By this time the 
notion of Harding as the criminal king of the Golden Calf era had 
become the received version of events not only in popular books like 
Frederick Lewis Allen's Only Yesterday ... (1931) but in standard 
academic history. When in 1964 the Harding Papers (which had not 
been burnt) were opened to scholars, no truth at all was found in any 
of the myths, though it emerged that Harding, a pathetically shy man 
with women, had had a sad and touching friendship with the wife of 
a Marion store-owner before his presidency. The Babylonian image 
was a fantasy, and in all essentials Harding had been an honest and 



THE LAST ARCADIA 219 

exceptionally shrewd president. But by then it was too late. A New 
York Times poll of seventy- five historians in 1962 showed that he 
was rated 'a flat failure' with 'very little dissent'. 49 

The treatment of Harding is worth dwelling on because, taken in 
conjunction with a similar denigration of his vice-president and 
successor Calvin Coolidge, a man of totally different temperament, it 
amounts to the systematic misrepresentation of public policy over a 
whole era. Coolidge was the most internally consistent and single- 
minded of modern American presidents. If Harding loved America as 
Arcadia, Coolidge was the best-equipped to preserve it as such. He 
came from the austere hills of Vermont, of the original Puritan New 
England stock, and was born over his father's store. No public man 
carried into modern times more comprehensively the founding 
principles of Americanism: hard work, frugality, freedom of con- 
science, freedom from government, respect for serious culture (he 
went to Amherst, and was exceptionally well-read in classical and 
foreign literature and in history). He was sharp, hatchet-faced, 
'weaned on a pickle' (Alice Longworth), a 'runty, aloof little man, 
who quacks through his nose when he speaks ... he slapped no man 
on the back, pawed no man's shoulder, squeezed no man's hand' 
(William Allen White). 50 He married a beautiful, raven-haired 
schoolteacher called Grace, about whom no one ever said a critical 
word. During their courtship he translated Dante's Inferno into 
English but immediately after the wedding ceremony he presented 
her with a bag of fifty-two pairs of socks that needed darning. He 
always saved his money. As Harding's vice-president he lived in four 
rooms in Willard's Hotel and gladly accepted the role as the 
Administration's official diner-out — 'Got to eat somewhere.' He ran 
the White House down to the smallest detail (rather like Curzon, but 
much more efficiently), scrutinizing and initialling all household 
bills, and prowling round the deepest recesses of the kitchens. He 
banked his salary and by 1928 had $250,000 invested. 51 He went to 
bed at ten, a point celebrated by Groucho Marx in Animal Crackers: 
'Isn't it past your bedtime, Calvin?'. But the notion propagated by 
Mencken - 'He slept more than any other president, whether by day 
or by night. Nero fiddled but Coolidge only snored' - was mislead- 
ing. 52 No president was ever better briefed on anything that mattered 
or less often caught unprepared by events or the doings of his team. 

It suited Coolidge, in fact, to mislead people into believing he was 
less sophisticated and active than he was (a ploy later imitated by 
Dwight Eisenhower). 'A natural churchwarden in a rural parish,' 
wrote Harold Laski, 'who has by accident strayed into great 
affairs.' 53 That was exactly the impression Coolidge wished to 
convey. In fact few men have been better prepared for the presidency, 



220 THE LAST ARCADIA 

moving up every rung of the public ladder: parish councillor, 
assemblyman, mayor, State Representative, State Senator, President 
of the State Senate, Lieutenant-Governor, Governor, Vice-President. 
At every stage he insisted that government should do as little as was 
necessary ('He didn't do anything', remarked the political comic 
Will Rogers, 'but that's what the people wanted done'). 54 But he 
also insisted that, when it did act, it should be absolutely decisive. 
He made his national reputation in 1919 by crushing the Boston 
police strike: 'There is no right to strike against the public safety by 
anybody, anywhere, anytime.' He was elected Vice-President under 
the slogan 'Law and Order', and President with the messages 'Keep 
Cool with Coolidge', 'Coolidge or Chaos' and 'The chief business 
of the American people is business'. He articulated a generally held 
belief that the function of government is primarily to create a 
climate in which agriculture, manufacturing and commerce can 
seize the opportunities which God and nature provide. At the 
climax of his campaign for the presidency in 1924 a deputation of 
America's most successful men of affairs, led by Henry Ford, 
Harvey Firestone and Thomas Edison, called at his house. Edison, 
who as the world's best-known inventor acted as spokesman, told 
the crowd outside, 'The United States is lucky to have Calvin 
Coolidge.' 55 He won this and all his other contests handsomely, 
most of them by landslides. 

Coolidge reflected America's Arcadian separateness during the 
1920s by showing that, in deliberate contrast to the strident activ- 
ism taking over so much of Europe and driven by the idea that 
political motion had replaced religious piety as the obvious form of 
moral worth, it was still possible to practise successfully the archaic 
virtue of stasis. Coolidge believed that all activity - above all of 
government - not dictated by pressing necessity was likely to 
produce undesirable results and certainly unforeseen ones. His 
minimalism extended even, indeed especially, to speech. It was said 
that he and his father, Colonel Coolidge, communicated 'by little 
more than the ugh-ugh of the Indian'. 56 He rejoiced in his nickname 
'Silent Cal'. 'The Coolidges never slop over', he boasted. His advice 
as president to the Massachusetts senate was:- 'Be brief. Above all, 
be brief.' Taking over the White House, he settled the 'Ohio Gang' 
scandals by acting very fast, appointing special counsel and by 
saying as little as possible himself. Campaigning in 1924, he noted: 
T don't recall any candidate for president that ever injured himself 
very much by not talking.' 57 'The things I never say never get me 
into trouble', he remarked. In his Autobiography, he said his most 
important rule 'consists in never doing anything that someone else 
can do for you'. Nine-tenths of a president's callers at the White 



THE LAST ARCADIA 221 

House, he stressed, 'want something they ought not to have. If you 
keep dead still they will run out in three or four minutes.' 58 

Coolidge was as successful in handling the press as Harding but 
for quite different reasons. Not only did he keep no press secretary 
and refuse to hold on-the-record press conferences; he resented it if 
journalists addressed any remarks to him, even 'Good morning'. But 
if written questions were submitted in advance to his forbidding 
factotum, C. Bascom Slemp, he would write the answers himself: 
short, very dry, but informative and truthful. 59 The press liked his 
dependability, flavoured by eccentric habits: he used to get his valet 
to rub his hair with vaseline and, in the Oval Office, he would 
sometimes summon his staff by bell and then hide under his desk, 
observing their mystification with his curious wry detachment. 
Journalists also sensed he was wholly uncorrupted by power. On 2 
August 1927, he summoned thirty of them, told them, 'The line 
forms on the left', and handed each a two-by-nine-inch slip of paper 
on which he had typed: 'I do not choose to run for President in 
1928.' His final departure from the White House was characteristic. 
'Perhaps one of the most important accomplishments of my adminis- 
tration', he snapped at the press, 'has been minding my own 
business.' 60 

Yet if Coolidge was sparing of words, what he did say was always 
pithy and clear, showing that he had reflected deeply on history and 
developed a considered, if sombre, public philosophy. No one in the 
twentieth century, not even his eloquent contemporary F.E. Smith, 
Earl of Birkenhead, defined more elegantly the limitations of govern- 
ment and the need for individual endeavour, which necessarily 
involved inequalities, to advance human happiness. 'Government 
cannot relieve from toil', he told the Massachusetts senate in 1914. 
'The normal must take care of themselves. Self-government means 
self-support .... Ultimately, property rights and personal rights are 
the same thing .... History reveals no civilized people among whom 
there was not a highly educated class and large aggregations of 
wealth. Large profits means large payrolls. Inspiration has always 
come from above.' 61 Political morality, he insisted, must always be 
judged not by intentions but by effects: 'Economy is idealism in its 
most practical form', was the key sentence in his 1925 Inaugural. In an 
address to the New York chamber of commerce on 19 November 
that year he gave in lucid and lapidary form perhaps the last classic 
statement of laissez-faire philosophy. Government and business 
should remain independent and separate. It was very desirable 
indeed that one should be directed from Washington, the other from 
New York. Wise and prudent men must always prevent the mutual 
usurpations which foolish or greedy men sought on either side. 



222 THE LAST ARCADIA 

Business was the pursuit of gain but it also had a moral purpose: 'the 
mutual organized effort of society to minister to the economic 
requirement of civilization .... It rests squarely on the law of service. 
It has for its main reliance truth and faith and justice. In its larger 
sense it is one of the greatest contributing forces to the moral and 
spiritual advancement of the race.' That was why government had a 
warrant to promote its success by providing the conditions of 
competition within a framework of security. Its job was to suppress 
privilege wherever it manifested itself and uphold lawful possession 
by providing legal remedies for all wrongs: 'The prime element in the 
value of all property is the knowledge that its peaceful enjoyment 
will be publicly defended.' Without this legal and public defence 'the 
value of your tall buildings would shrink to the price of the 
waterfront of old Carthage or corner-lots in ancient Babylon'. The 
more business regulated itself, the less need there would be for 
government to act to ensure competition; it could therefore concen- 
trate on its twin task of economy and of improving the national 
structure within which business could increase profits and invest- 
ment, raise wages and provide better goods and services at the lowest 
possible prices. 62 

This public philosophy appeared to possess a degree of concor- 
dance with the actual facts of life which was rare in human 
experience. Under Harding and still more under Coolidge, the USA 
enjoyed a general prosperity which was historically unique in its 
experience or that of any other society. When the decade was over, 
and the prosperity had been, for the moment, wholly eclipsed, it was 
seen retrospectively, especially by writers and intellectuals, as grossly 
materialistic, febrile, philistine, and at the same time insubstantial 
and ephemeral, unmerited by any solid human accomplishment. The 
judgemental images were biblical: of a grotesque Belshazzar's Feast 
before catastrophe. 'The New Generation had matured,' Scott Fitz- 
gerald wrote in 1931, 'to find all gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths 
in man shaken; all they knew was that America was going on the 
greatest, gaudiest spree in history.' 63 Edmund Wilson saw the 
Twenties as an aberration in the basic seriousness of the American 
conscience: 'the fireworks of the Twenties were in the nature of a 
drunken fiesta'. 64 In The Epic of America, published in 1931, James 
Truslow Adams summed it up: 'Having surrendered idealism for the 
sake of prosperity, the "practical men" bankrupted us on both of 
them.' 65 There were indeed some intellectuals who felt the whole 
attempt to spread general prosperity was misconceived and certain to 
invoke destruction. Michael Rostovtzeff, then finishing his monu- 
mental history of the economy of antiquity, asked: 'Is it possible to 
extend a higher civilization to the lower classes without debasing its 



THE LAST ARCADIA 223 

standard and diluting its quality to the vanishing point? Is not every 
civilization bound to decay as soon as it begins to penetrate the 
masses?' 66 

But the view that the 1920s was a drunken spree destructive of 
civilized values can be substantiated only by the systematic distortion 
or denial of the historical record. The prosperity was very wide- 
spread and very solid. It was not universal: in the farming commun- 
ity particularly it was patchy, and it largely excluded certain older 
industrial communities, such as the textile trade of New England. 67 
But it was more widely distributed than had been possible in any 
community of this size before, and it involved the acquisition, by tens 
of millions, of the elements of economic security which had hitherto 
been denied them throughout the whole of history. The growth was 
spectacular. On a 1933-8 index of 100, it was 58 in 1921 and passed 
110 in 1929. That involved an increase in national income from 
$59.4 to $87.2 billion in eight years, with real per capita income 
rising from $522 to $716: not Babylonian luxury but a modest 
comfort never hitherto possible. 68 The expansion expressed itself not 
merely in spending and credit. For the first time, many millions of 
working people acquired insurance (life and industrial insurance 
policies passed the 100 million mark in the 1920s), savings, which 
quadrupled during the decade, and a stake in industry. Thus, an 
analysis of those buying fifty shares or more in one of the biggest 
public utility stock issues of the 1920s shows that the largest groups 
were (in order): housekeepers, clerks, factory workers, merchants, 
chauffeurs and drivers, electricians, mechanics and foremen. 69 The 
Twenties was also characterized by the biggest and longest 
building-boom: as early as 1924 some 11 million families had 
acquired their own homes. 

The heart of the consumer boom was in personal transport, which 
in a vast country, where some of the new cities were already thirty 
miles across, was not a luxury. At the beginning of 1914, 1,258,062 
cars had been registered in the USA, which produced 569,054 during 
the year. Production rose to 5,621,715 in 1929, by which time cars 
registered in the USA totalled 26,501,443, five-sixths of the world 
production and one car for every five people in the country. This 
gives some idea of America's global industrial dominance. In 1924 
the four leading European car producers turned out only 1 1 per cent 
of the vehicles manufactured in the USA. Even by the end of the 
decade European registrations were only 20 per cent of the US level 
and production a mere 13 per cent. 70 The meaning of these figures 
was that the working class as a whole was acquiring the individual 
freedom of medium- and long-distance movement hitherto limited to 
a section of the middle class. Meanwhile, though rail was in decline, 



224 THE LAST ARCADIA 

the numbers carried falling from 1,269 million in 1920 to 786 
million in 1929, the middle class was moving into air travel: air 
passengers rose from 49,713 in 1928 to 417,505 in 1930 (by 1940 
the figure was 3,185,278, and nearly 8 million by 1945). 71 What the 
Twenties demonstrates was the relative speed with which industrial 
productivity could transform luxuries into necessities and spread 
them down the class pyramid. 

Indeed, to a growing extent it was a dissolvent of class and other 
barriers. Next to cars, it was the new electrical industry which fuelled 
Twenties prosperity. Expenditure on radios rose from a mere 
$10,648,000 in 1920 to $411,637,000 in 1929, and total electrical 
products tripled in the decade to $2.4 billion. 72 First the mass radio 
audience, signalled by the new phenomenon of 'fan mail' in autumn 
1923, then regular attendance, especially by young people, at the 
movies (from 1927 the talkies) brought about the Americanization of 
immigrant communities and a new classlessness in dress, speech and 
attitudes which government policy, under Wilson, had been power- 
less to effect and which Harding and Coolidge wisely forwent. 
Sinclair Lewis, revisiting 'Main Street' for the Nation in 1924, 
described two working-class, small-town girls wearing 'well-cut 
skirts, silk stockings, such shoes as can be bought nowhere in 
Europe, quiet blouses, bobbed hair, charming straw hats, and easily 
cynical expressions terrifying to an awkward man'. One of them 
served hash. 'Both their dads are Bohemian; old mossbacks, tough 
old birds with whiskers that can't sling more English than a muskrat. 
And yet in one generation, here's their kids — real queens.' 73 

Such young people identified with movie-stars; for them, movies 
were a force of liberation, children from parents, wives from 
husbands. A motion-picture research survey quoted one seventeen- 
year-old: 'Movies are a godsend, and to express my sentiments long 
may they live and long may they stay in the land of the free and the 
home of the brave.' Another: 'I began smoking after watching 
Dolores Costella.' 74 Smoking was then seen as progressive and 
liberating, specially for women; and healthy - 'Reach for a Lucky 
instead of a sweet'; 'slenderize in a Sensible Way'. Advertising was a 
window into liberation too, especially for women of immigrant 
families. It educated them in the possibilities of life. The Twenties in 
America marked the biggest advances for women of any decade, 
before or since. By 1930 there were 10,546,000 women 'gainfully 
employed' outside the home: the largest number, as before, were in 
domestic/personal service (3,483,000) but there were now nearly 2 
million in clerical work, 1,860,000 in manufacturing and, most 
encouraging of all, 1,226,000 in the professions. 75 Equally signifi- 
cant, and culturally more important, were the liberated housewives, 



THE LAST ARCADIA 225 

the 'Blondies', to whom their appliances, cars and husbands' high 
wages had brought leisure for the first time. Writing on 'The New 
Status of Women' in 1931, Mary Ross epitomized the Blondies 'raised 
. . . above the need for economic activity': 

They raise their children — one, two, occasionally three or four of them — with 
a care probably unknown to any past generation. It is they who founded the 
great culture-club movement . . . they who spend the great American income, 
sustain the movie industry, buy or borrow the novels, support the fashions 
and the beauty-culture businesses, keep bridge and travel and medical cults at 
high levels of activity and help along the two-car-family standard. Out of this 
sudden burst of female leisure have come many good things, much of the 
foundation of American philanthropy for example. 76 

The coming of family affluence was one factor in the decline of 
radical politics and their union base. A 1929 survey quoted a union 
organizer: The Ford car has done an awful lot of harm to the unions 
here and everywhere else. As long as men have enough money to buy a 
second-hand Ford and tires and gasoline, they'll be out on the road 
and paying no attention to union meetings.' 77 In 1915, 1921 and 1922 
the unions lost three key Supreme Court actions, and their 1919 
strikes were disastrous failures. American Federation of Labor 
membership dropped from a high-point of 4,078,740 in 1920 to 
2,532,261 in 1932. 'Welfare capitalism' provided company sports 
facilities, holidays with pay, insurance and pension schemes, so that 
by 1927 4,700,000 workers were covered by group insurance and 
1,400,000 were members of company unions. 79 The American 
worker appeared to be on the threshold of a hitherto unimaginable 
bourgeois existence of personal provision and responsibility which 
made collective action increasingly superfluous. . 

This was, as might have- been expected, linked to a cultural 
liberation which belied the accusations of philistinism hurled (later, 
rather than at the time) at the Coolidge era. Perhaps the most 
important single development of the age was the spread of education. 
Between 1910 and 1930 total educational spending rose fourfold, 
from $426.25 million to $2.3 billion; higher education spending 
increased fourfold too, to nearly one billion a year. Illiteracy fell 
during the period from 7.7 to 4.3 per cent. The Twenties was the age of 
the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild; more new books 
were bought than ever before but there was a persistent devotion to 
the classics. Throughout the Twenties, David Copperfield was rated 
America's favourite novel, and among those voted 'the ten greatest 
men in history' were Shakespeare, Dickens, Tennyson and Long- 
fellow. 80 Jazz Age it may have been but by the end of the decade there 
were 35,000 youth orchestras in the nation. The decade was marked 



226 THE LAST ARCADIA 

both by the historical conservation movement which restored colon- 
ial Williamsburg and the collection of contemporary painting which 
created the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. 81 

The truth is the Twenties was the most fortunate decade in 
American history, even more fortunate than the equally prosperous 
1950s decade, because in the Twenties the national cohesion brought 
about by relative affluence, the sudden cultural density and the 
expressive originality of 'Americanism' were new and exciting. In 
1927 Andre Siegfried, the French academician, published America 
Comes of Age ', in which he argued that 'as a result of the revolution- 
ary changes brought about by modern methods of production ... the 
American people are now creating on a vast scale an entirely original 
social structure', The point might have brought a wry response from 
Henry James, who had died eleven years before. In 1878 he had 
written a little biography of Hawthorne which contained a cele- 
brated and (to Americans) highly offensive passage listing all the 
'items of high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are 
absent from the texture of American life' and which - so he argued - 
supplied the rich social texture essential to the writing of imaginative 
literature. America had, he enumerated, 

No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no 
clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, 
no castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor 
thatched cottages, nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor Norman 
churches; no great Universities, nor public schools - no Oxford, nor Eton, 
nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures, no political 
society, no sporting class — no Epsom nor Ascot! 82 

By the end of the Twenties America had achieved the social depth 
and complexity whose absence James had mourned, and achieved it 
moreover through what Hawthorne himself dismissed as the 'com- 
monplace prosperity' of American life. 83 But it was prosperity on an 
unprecedented and monumental scale, such as to constitute a sdcial 
phenomenon in itself, and bring in its train for the first time a 
national literary universe of its own. The decade was introduced by 
F. Scott Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise (1918) and it ended with A 
Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway, who was to prove 
the most influential writer of fiction in English between the wars. It 
included Sinclair Lewis's Main Street (1920), John Dos Passos's 
Three Soldiers (1921), Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy 
(1926), William Faulkner's Soldier's Pay (1926), Upton Sinclair's 
Boston (1928) and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel (1929). 
The emergence of this galaxy of novels, and of playwrights like Eugene 
O'Neill and Thornton Wilder, was evidence, as Lionel Trilling put it, 



THE LAST ARCADIA 227 

that 'life in America has increasingly thickened since the nineteenth 
century', producing not so much the 'social observation' James 
required of a novel but an 'intense social awareness', so that 'our present 
definition of a serious book is one which holds before us an image of 
society to consider and condemn'. 84 

This growing tendency of American culture to dispense with its 
umbilical source of supply from Europe began in the 1920s to produce 
forms of expression which were sui generis, not merely in cinema and 
radio broadcasting, where specific American contributions were 
present at the creation, but on the stage. The most spectacular maturing 
of the decade was the New York musical. It was the progeny, to be sure, 
of the Viennese operetta, the French boulevard music-play, English 
Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas and the English music-hall (its 
origins might be traced back, perhaps, to The Beggar's Opera of 1728) 
but the ingredients of American minstrel-show, burlesque, jazz and 
vaudeville transformed it into a completely new form of popular art. 
There had been prolific composers in the proto-genre before 1914, 
notably Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. But their work then seemed so 
marginal and fugitive that some of Kern's earliest and best songs have 
disappeared without leaving any copy. 85 It was in the early Twenties 
that the spectacular new prosperity of the Broadway theatres combined 
with the new talents — George Gershwin, Richard Rodgers, Howard 
Dietz, Cole Porter, Vincent Youmans, Oscar Hammerstein, Lorenz 
Hart and E. Y. Harburg- to bring the American musical into full flower. 
On 12 February 1924 Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue was performed by 
the Paul Whiteman band at the Aeolian Hall. It was the archetypal 
creative event of the decade. And that season, just after Coolidge 
had got himself elected in his own right, Gershwin's Lady, Be Good!, 
the first mature American musical, opened on 1 December in the 
Liberty Theatre, starring Fred Astaire and his sister Adele. 86 It was the 
outstanding event of a Broadway season which included Youmans' 
Lollypop, Kern's Sitting Pretty, Rudolph Friml's and Sigmund 
Romberg's The Student Prince, Irving Berlin's Music Box Revue and 
Sissie and Blake's Chocolate Dandies— among about forty musicals— as 
well as Marc Connelly's Green Pastures, Aaron Copland's First 
Symphony and the arrival of Serge Koussevitsky at the Boston 
Symphony Orchestra. Indeed, with the possible exception of Weimar 
Germany, the America of Coolidge prosperity was the leading theatre 
of western culture at this time, the place where the native creator had the 
widest range of opportunities and where the expatriate artist was most 
likely to find the freedom, the means and the security to express himself. 

The trouble with Twenties expansion was not that it was philistine or 
socially immoral. The trouble was that it was transient. Had it endured, 
carrying with it in its train the less robust but still (at that time) striving 



228 THE LAST ARCADIA 

economies of Europe, a global political transformation must have 
followed which would have rolled back the new forces of totalitarian 
compulsion, with their ruinous belief in social engineering, and 
gradually replaced them with a relationship between government 
and enterprise closer to that which Coolidge outlined to the business 
paladins of New York City. In 1929 the United States had achieved a 
position of paramountcy in total world production never hitherto 
attained during a period of prosperity by any single state: 34.4 per 
cent of the whole, compared with Britain's 10.4, Germany's 10.3, 
Russia's 9.9, France's 5.0, Japan's 4.0, 2.5 for Italy, 2.2 for Canada 
and 1.7 for Poland. The likelihood that the European continent 
would lean towards America's 'original social structure', as Siegfried 
termed it, increased with every year the world economy remained 
buoyant. Granted another decade of prosperity on this scale our 
account of modern times would have been vastly different and 
immeasurably happier. 

On 4 December 1928 Coolidge gave his last public message to the 
new Congress: 

No Congress of the United States ever assembled, on surveying the state of 
the Union, has met with a more pleasing prospect .... The great wealth 
created by our enterprise and industry, and saved by our economy, has had 
the widest distribution among our own people, and has gone out in a steady 
stream to serve the charity and business of the world. The requirements of 
existence have passed beyond the standard of necessity into the region of 
luxury. Enlarging production is consumed by an increasing demand at 
home and an expanding commerce abroad. The country can regard the 
present with satisfaction and anticipate the future with optimism. 87 

This view was not the flatulent self-congratulation of a successful 
politician. Nor was it only the view of the business community. It 
was shared by intellectuals across the whole spectrum. Charles 
Beard's The Rise of American Civilization, published in 1927, saw 
the country 'moving from one technological triumph to another, 
overcoming the exhaustion of crude natural resources and energies, 
effecting an ever-widening distribution of the blessings of civilization 
- health, security, material goods, knowledge, leisure and aesthetic 
appreciation . . . .' 88 Writing the same year, Walter Lippmann con- 
sidered: 'The more or less unconscious and unplanned activities of 
businessmen are for once more novel, more daring and in a sense 
more revolutionary, than the theories of the progressives.' 89 John 
Dewey, in 1929, thought the problem was not how to prolong 
prosperity - he took that for granted - but how to turn 'the Great 
Society' into 'the Great Community'. 90 Even on the Left the feeling 
spread that perhaps business had got it right after all. Lincoln 



THE LAST ARCADIA 229 

Steffens, writing in February 1929, felt that both the USA and the 
Soviet systems might be justified: 'The race is saved one way or the 
other and, I think, both ways.' 91 In 1929 the Nation began a 
three-month series on the permanence of prosperity, drawing atten- 
tion to pockets of Americans who had not yet shared in it; the 
opening article appeared on 23 October, coinciding with the first big 
break in the market. 

It may be that Coolidge himself, a constitutionally suspicious man, 
and not one to believe easily that permanent contentment is to be 
found this side of eternity, was more sceptical than anyone else, and 
certainly less sanguine than he felt it his duty to appear in public. It is 
curious that he declined to run for president again in 1928, when all 
the omens were in his favour, and he was only fifty-six. He told the 
chief justice, Harlan Stone, 'It is a pretty good idea to get out when 
they still want you.' There were very severe limits to his political 
ambitions, just as (in his view) there ought to be very severe limits to 
any political activity. Stone warned him of economic trouble ahead. 
He too thought the market would break. His wife Grace was 
reported: 'Poppa says there's a depression coming.' But Coolidge 
assumed it would be on the 1920 scale, to be cured by a similar phase 
of masterly inactivity. If something more was required, he was not 
the man. Grace Coolidge said he told a member of the cabinet: 'I 
know how to save money. All my training has been in that direction. 
The country is in a sound financial condition. Perhaps the time has 
come when we ought to spend money. I do not feel I am qualified to 
do that.' In his view, Hoover was the Big Spender; not the last of 
them, the first of them. He viewed Hoover's succession to the 
presidency without enthusiasm: 'That man has offered me unsoli- 
cited advice for six years, all of it bad.' Coolidge was the last man on 
earth to reciprocate with his own. Asked, during the interregnum in 
early 1929, for a decision on long-term policy, he snapped, 'We'll 
leave that to the Wonder Boy.' He left the stage without a word, 
pulling down the curtain on Arcadia. 



SEVEN 

Degringolade 



On Friday 3 October 1929, a new under-loader took part in his first 
pheasant shoot on the Duke of Westminster's estate near Chester. 
The day before a conference of senior officials had been held in the 
main gun-room. As dawn was breaking, the young loader put on his 
new uniform and reported to the head keeper, who 'looked very 
impressive in green velvet jacket and waistcoat with white breeches, 
box-cloth leggings and a hard hat with plenty of gold braid around 
it'. There were eighty keepers dressed in livery: 'a red, wide-brimmed 
hat with a leather band, and a white smock made of a very rough 
material in the Farmer Giles style and gathered in at the waist by a 
wide leather belt with a large brass buckle'. The beaters assembled 
and were inspected. Next to arrive were the leather cases of the 
'guns', with their engraved and crested brass name-plates. Then came 
the guests in their chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royces and Daimlers, and 
finally the Duke himself, to whom the new loader was deputed to 
hand his shooting stick. As soon as 'His Grace' got to his place, the 
head keeper blew his whistle, the beaters started off and the shoot 
began. 'It was all organized to the fine degree that was essential to 
provide the sport that His Grace wanted and expected.' At lunchtime 
the keepers drank ale poured from horn jugs, and in the afternoon 
the Duke's private narrow-gauge train, 'passenger carriages all 
brightly painted in the Grosvenor colours', brought the ladies to join 
the sport. The bag was nearly 2,00c 1 

A fortnight before this quasi-medieval scene was enacted, the 
Duke's good friend Winston Churchill, who until earlier that year 
had been Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer for five years, wrote 
to his wife from America: 

Now my darling I must tell you that vy gt & extraordinary good fortune 
has attended me lately in finances. Sir Harry McGowan asked me rather 
earnestly before I sailed whether he might if an opportunity came buy shares 

230 



DEGRINGOLADE 231 

on my account without previous consultation. I replied that I could always 
find 2 or 3,000£. I meant this as an investment limit i.e. buying the shares 
outright. He evidently took it as the limit to wh I was prepared to go in a 
speculative purchase on margin. Thus he operated on about ten times my 
usual scale .... So here we have recovered in a few weeks a small 
fortune .... It is a relief to me to feel something behind me and behind you 
all.* 

It is interesting that Churchill should have been speculating on 
margin right up to the brink of the crash. He was one of about 
600,000 trading on margin of the 1,548,707 customers who, in 
1929, had accounts with firms belonging to America's twenty-nine 
stock exchanges. At the peak of the craze there were about a million 
active speculators, and out of an American population of 120 million 
about 29—30 million families had an active association with the 
market. 3 Churchill, despite his experience and world-wide contacts, 
was no better informed than the merest street-corner speculator. The 
American economy had ceased to expand in June. It took some time 
for the effects to work their way through but the bull market in 
stocks really came to an end on 3 September, a fortnight before 
Churchill wrote his joyful letter. The later rises were merely hiccups 
in a steady downward trend. The echoes of the Duke's shoot had 
scarcely died away when the precipitous descent began. On Monday 
21 October, for the first time, the ticker-tape could not keep pace 
with the news of falls and never caught up; in the confusion the panic 
intensified (the first margin-call telegrams had gone out the Saturday 
before) and speculators began to realize they might lose their savings 
and even their homes. On Thursday 24 October shares dropped 
vertically with no one buying, speculators were sold out as they 
failed to respond to margin calls, crowds gathered in Broad Street 
outside the New York Stock Exchange, and by the end of the day 
eleven men well known on Wall Street had committed suicide. One 
of the visitors in the gallery that day was Churchill himself, watching 
his faerie gold vanish. Next week came Black Tuesday, the 29th, and 
the first selling of sound stocks in order to raise desperately needed 
liquidity. 4 

Great stock-exchange crises, with their spectacular reversals of 
fortune and human dramas, make the dry bones of economic history 
live. But they do not help to illuminate causes and consequences of 
events; quite the contrary. They enormously increase the mythology 
which is such a potent element in economic explanation. The nature 
of 1920s prosperity; the reason why it ended; the cause of the Great 
Crash and the Great Depression which followed; and, not least, the 
manner and means whereby the industrial societies emerged from it - 



232 DEGRINGOLADE 

all these are still matters of intense argument. The conventional 
account is largely moralistic: hubris followed by nemesis, wicked 
greed by salutary retribution. It is easily adapted to Marxist determin- 
ism, which of course is a form of moral, not economic, analysis. It may 
make an edifying tale but it does not tell us what actually happened, let 
alone why. The interpretation provided by the followers of Keynes, 
which was the received opinion of the 1950s and 1960s, no longer 
carries conviction, for it appeared to be refuted by the catastrophic 
economic events of the 1970s and early 1980s, which placed the Great 
Depression in an entirely new perspective. Indeed, the two episodes 
can no longer be usefully studied separately and it is likely that future 
historians will analyse them in conjunction. But it is most improbable 
that an agreed explanation of either, or both, will ever be forthcoming. 
Economic history is too closely linked to current economic theory and 
practice to be a matter for easy consensus. What is offered here, then, 
is a possible account, which seeks to remove certain misconceptions. 
The first fallacy to be dispelled is that America pursued an 
isolationist foreign policy in the 1920s. That is not true. 5 While 
America's rulers would not formally underwrite the Versailles peace 
settlement, still less Keynes's proposal for an American government- 
sponsored aid programme for European recovery, they privately and 
unostentatiously accepted a degree of responsibility for keeping the 
world economy on an even keel. They agreed to share with Britain the 
business of providing a global currency in which world trade could be 
conducted, a burden carried by the City of London virtually alone up 
to 1914. They also took it upon themselves to promote, by informal 
commercial and financial diplomacy, the expansion of world trade. 6 
Unfortunately, the means employed were devious and ultimately 
dishonest. Except during the years 1857-61, America had always 
been a high-tariff nation: US tariffs, which had been imitated in 
continental Europe, were the chief refutation of its claim to conduct its 
affairs on true capitalist, laissez-faire principles. If Harding, Coolidge 
and Hoover had acted on the entrepreneurial principles they proudly 
proclaimed, they would have resumed Wilson's abortive policy of 
1913 of reducing US tariffs. In fact they did the opposite. The 
Fordney— MacCumber Tariff Act of 1922 and, still more, the Hawley- 
Smoot Act of 1930, which Hoover declined to veto, were devastating 
blows struck at world commerce, and so in the end at America's own. 7 
The fact is that America's presidents, and her congressional leader- 
ship, lacked the political courage to stand up to the National 
Association of Manufacturers, the American Federation of Labour 
and local pressures, and so pursue internationalism in the most 
effective way open to them and the one which conformed most closely 
to the economic views they claimed to hold. 



DEGRINGOLADE 233 

Instead, they sought to keep the world prosperous by deliberate 
inflation of the money supply. This was something made possible by 
the pre-war creation of the Federal Reserve Bank system, and which 
could be done secretly, without legislative enactment or control, and 
without the public knowing or caring. It did not involve printing 
money: the currency in circulation in the US was $3.68 billion at the 
beginning of the 1920s and $3.64 billion when the boom ended in 
1929. But the expansion of total money supply, in money substitutes 
or credit, was enormous: from $45.3 billion on 30 June 1921 to over 
$73 billion in July 1929, an increase of 61.8 per cent in eight years. 8 
The White House, the Treasury under Andrew Mellon, the Congress, 
the federal banks, and of course the private banks too, connived 
together to inflate credit. In its 1923 Annual Report, the Federal 
Reserve described the policy with frank crudity: The Federal Res- 
erve banks are . . . the source to which the member banks turn when 
the demands of the business community have outrun their own 
unaided resources. The Federal Reserve supplies the needed addi- 
tions to credit in times of business expansion and takes up the slack 
in times of business recession.' 9 This policy of continuous credit- 
inflation, a form of vulgar Keynesianism before Keynes had even 
formulated its sophisticated version, might have been justified if 
interest rates had been allowed to find their own level: that is, if 
manufacturers and farmers who borrowed money had paid interest 
at the rate savers were actually prepared to lend it. But again, the 
White House, the Treasury, the Congress and the banks worked in 
consort to keep discount and interest rates artificially low. Indeed it 
was the stated policy of the Federal Reserve not only to 'enlarge 
credit resources' but to do so 'at rates of interest low enough to 
stimulate, protect and prosper all kinds of legitimate business'. 10 

This deliberate interference in the supply and cost of money was 
used in the 1920s not merely to promote its original aim, the 
expansion of US business, but to pursue a supposedly benevolent 
international policy. While the government demanded the repayment 
of its war-loans, it actively assisted foreign governments and 
businesses to raise money in New York both by its own cheap money 
policy and by constant, active interference in the foreign bond 
market. The government made it quite clear that it favoured certain 
loans and not others. So the foreign loan policy was an adumbration, 
at the level of private enterprise, of the post- 1947 foreign aid 
programme. The aims were the same: to keep the international 
economy afloat, to support certain favoured regimes and, not least, 
to promote America's export industries. It was made, in effect, a 
condition of cabinet boosting of specific loans that part of them were 
spent in the USA. The foreign lending boom began in 1921, 



234 DEGRINGOLADE 

following a cabinet decision on 20 May 1921 and a meeting between 
Harding, Hoover and US investment bankers five days later, and it 
ended in late 1928, thus coinciding precisely with the expansion of 
the money supply which underlay the boom. America's rulers, in 
effect, rejected the rational laissez-faire choice of free trade and hard 
money and took the soft political option of protective tariffs and 
inflation. The domestic industries protected by the tariff, the export 
industries subsidized by the uneconomic loans and of course the 
investment bankers who floated the bonds all benefited. The losers 
were the population as a whole, who were denied the competitive 
prices produced by cheap imports, suffered from the resulting 
inflation, and were the universal victims of the ultimate 
degringolade. 11 

Moreover, by getting mixed up in the foreign loan business, the 
government forfeited much of its moral right to condemn stock- 
exchange speculation. Hoover, who was Commerce Secretary 
throughout the 1920s until he became President, regarded Wall 
Street as a deplorable casino - but he was the most assiduous 
promoter of the foreign bond market. Even bad loans, he argued, 
helped American exports and so provided employment. 12 Some of 
the foreign bond issues, however, were at least as scandalous as the 
worst stock-exchange transactions. Thus, in 1927, Victor Schoep- 
perle, Vice-President for Latin-American loans at National City 
Company (affiliated to National City Bank), reported on Peru: 'Bad 
debt record; adverse moral and political risk; bad internal debt 
situation; trade situation about as satisfactory as that of Chile in the 
past three years. National resources more varied. On economic 
showing Peru should go ahead rapidly in the next ten years.' 
Nevertheless National City floated a $15 million loan for Peru, 
followed shortly afterwards by a $50 million loan and a $25 million 
issue. Congressional investigation, in 1933—4, established that Juan 
Leguia, son of the president of Peru, had been paid $450,000 by 
National and its associates in connection with the loan. When his 
father was overthrown Peru defaulted. 13 This was one example 
among many. The basic unsoundness of much of the foreign loan 
market was one of the principal elements in the collapse of con- 
fidence and the spread of the recession to Europe. And the unsound- 
ness was the consequence not, indeed, of government laissez-faire 
but of the opposite: persistent government meddling. 

Interventionism by creating artificial, cheap credit was not an 
American invention. It was British. The British called it 'stabiliza- 
tion'. Although Britain was nominally a laissez-faire country up to 
1914, more so than America in some respects since it practised free 
trade, British economic philosophers were not happy with the 



DEGRINGOLADE 235 

business cycle, which they believed could be smoothed out by 
deliberate and combined efforts to achieve price stabilization. It must 
not be thought that Keynes came out of a clear non-interventionist 
sky: he was only a marginal 'advance' on the orthodox British seers. 
Since before the war Sir Ralph Hawtrey, in charge of financial 
studies at the Treasury, had argued that the central banks, by 
creating international credit (that is, inflation), could achieve a stable 
price level and so enormously improve on the nineteenth century's 
passive acceptance of the cycle, which he regarded as immoral. After 
1918, Hawtrey's views became the conventional wisdom in Britain 
and spread to America via Versailles. In the 1920 recession the Stable 
Money League (later the National Monetary Association) was 
founded, attracting the American financial establishment and, 
abroad, men like Emile Moreau, Governor of the Bank of France, 
Edouard Benes, Lord Melchett, creator of ici, Louis Rothschild, 
head of the Austrian branch, A.J.Balfour and such British econom- 
ists as A.C.Pigou, Otto Kahn, Sir Arthur Salter and Keynes 
himself. 14 

Keynes put the case for a 'managed currency' and a stabilized 
price-level in his Tract on Monetary Reform (1923). By then, 
stabilization was not merely accepted but practised. Hawtrey had 
inspired the stabilization resolutions of the Genoa Conference in 
1922; the Financial Committee of the League of Nations was 
stabilizationist; most of all, the Bank of England was stabilizationist. 
Montagu Norman, its governor, and his chief international adviser 
Sir Charles Addis, were both ardent apostles of the creed. Their 
principal disciple was Benjamin Strong, governor of the New York 
Federal Reserve Bank, who until his death in 1928 was all-powerful 
in the formation of American financial policy. Hoover called Strong, 
justly, 'a mental annex to Europe', and he was the effective agent in 
America's covert foreign policy of economic management. Indeed it 
is not too much to say that, for most of the 1920s, the international 
economic system was jointly supervised by Norman and Strong. 15 It 
was Strong who made it possible for Britain to return to the gold 
standard in 1925, by extending lines of credit from the New York 
Federal Reserve Bank and getting J.P.Morgan to do likewise: the 
London Banker wrote: 'no better friend of England exists'. Similar 
lines of credit were opened later to Belgium, Poland, Italy and other 
countries which met the Strong-Norman standards of financial 
rectitude. 16 

Of course the 'gold standard' was not a true one. That had gone 
for good in 1914. A customer could not go into the Bank of England 
and demand a gold sovereign in return for his pound note. It was the 
same in other European gold-standard countries. The correct term 



236 DEGRINGOLADE 

was 'gold bullion standard': the central banks held gold in large bars 
but ordinary people were not considered sufficiently responsible to 
handle gold themselves (although in theory Americans could demand 
gold dollars until 1933). Indeed, when a plan was produced in 1926 
to give India a real gold standard, Strong and Norman united to kill 
it, on the grounds that there would then be a disastrous world-wide 
gold-drain into Indian mattresses. In short, the 1920s gold-standard 
movement was not genuine laissez-faire at all but a 'not in-front-of- 
the-servants' laissez-faire. 17 It was a benevolent despotism run by a 
tiny elite of the Great and the Good, in secret. Strong regarded his 
credit-expansion and cheap money policy as an alternative to 
America backing the League, and he was pretty sure US public 
opinion would repudiate it if the facts were made public: that was 
why he insisted the periodic meetings of bankers should be strictly 
private. A financial policy which will not stand the scrutiny of the 
public is suspect in itself. It is doubly suspect if, while making gold 
the measure of value, it does not trust ordinary people - the ultimate 
judges of value - to apply that measurement themselves. Why did the 
bankers fear that ordinary men and women, if given the chance, 
would rush into gold — which brought no return at all - when they 
could invest in a healthy economy at a profit? There was something 
wrong here. The German banker Hjalmar Schacht repeatedly called 
for a true gold standard, as the only means to ensure that expansion 
was financed by genuine voluntary savings, instead of by bank credit 
determined by a tiny oligarchy of financial Jupiters. 18 

But the stabilizers carried all before them. Domestically and 
internationally they constantly pumped more credit into the system, 
and whenever the economy showed signs of flagging they increased 
the dose. The most notorious occasion was in July 1927, when 
Strong and Norman held a secret meeting of bankers at the Long 
Island estates of Ogden Mills, the US Treasury Under-Secretary, and 
Mrs Ruth Pratt, the Standard Oil heiress. Strong kept Washington in 
the dark and refused to let even his most senior colleagues attend. He 
and Norman decided on another burst of inflation and the protests 
of Schacht and of Charles Rist, Deputy-Governor of the Bank of 
France, were brushed aside. The New York Fed reduced its rate by a 
further half per cent to 3|; as Strong put it to Rist, 'I will give a little 
coup de whiskey to the stock-market' — and as a result set in motion 
the last culminating wave of speculation. Adolph Miller, a member 
of the Federal Reserve Board, subsequently described this decision in 
Senate testimony as 'the greatest and boldest operation ever under- 
taken by the Federal Reserve System [which] resulted in one of the 
most costly errors committed by it or any other banking system in 
the last seventy-five years.' 19 



DEGRINGOLADE 237 

The German objection, influenced by the monetarists of the Viennese 
school, L. von Mises and F.A.Hayek, was that the whole inflationary 
policy was corrupt. The French objection was that it reflected British 
foreign economic policy aims, with the Americans as willing abettors. 
As Moreau put it in his secret diary: 

England, having been the first European country to re-establish a stable and 
secure money, has used that advantage to establish a basis for putting Europe 
under a veritable financial domination . . . .The currencies will be divided into 
two classes. Those of the first class, the dollar and sterling, based on gold, and 
those of the second class based on the pound and the dollar - with part of their 
gold reserves being held by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve of 
New York, the local currencies will have lost their independence. 20 

Moreau was making a general point that economic policies shaped for 
political purposes, as Anglo-American currency management un- 
doubtedly was, are unlikely to achieve economic objectives in the long 
run. That is unquestionably true, and it applies both in the domestic and 
the international field. At home, both in America and Britain, the object 
of stabilization was to keep prices steady and so prevent wages from 
dropping, which would mean social unrest; abroad, cheap money and 
easy loans kept trade flowing despite US protectionism and Britain's 
artificially strong pound. The aim was to avoid trouble and escape the 
need to resolve painful political dilemmas. 

The policy appeared to be succeeding. In the second half of the 
decade, the cheap credit Strong-Norman policy pumped into the world 
economy perked up trade, which had failed to reach its pre-war level. 
Whereas in 1921-5 the world-trade growth rate, compared with 
1911-14, was actually minus 1.42, during the four years 1926-9 it 
achieved a growth of 6.74, a performance not to be exceeded until the 
late 1950s. 21 Prices nevertheless remained stable: the Bureau of Labor 
Statistics Index of Wholesale Prices, taking 1926 as 100, shows that the 
fluctuation in the US was merely from 93.4 in June 1921 to a peak of 
104.5 in November 1925 and then down to 95.2 in June 1929. So the 
notion of deliberate controlled growth within a framework of price 
stability had been turned into reality. This was genuine economic 
management at last! Keynes described 'the successful management of 
the dollar by the Federal Reserve Board from 1923-8' as a 'triumph'. 
Hawtrey's verdict was: 'The American experiment in stabilization 
from 1 922 to 1 928 showed that early treatment could check a tendency 
either to inflation or to depression . . ..The American experiment was a 
great advance upon the practice of the nineteenth century.' 22 

Yet in fact the inflation was there, and growing, all the time. What no 
one seems to have appreciated is the significance of the phenomenal 
growth of productivity in the US between 1919 and 1929: output per 



238 DEGRINGOLADE 

worker in manufacturing industry rising by 43 per cent. This was 
made possible by a staggering increase in capital investment which 
rose by an average annual rate of 6.4 per cent a year. 23 The 
productivity increase should have been reflected in lower prices. The 
extent to which it was not reflected the degree of inflation produced 
by economic management with the object of stabilization. It is true 
that if prices had not been managed, wages would have fallen too. 
But the drop in prices must have been steeper; and therefore real 
wages - purchasing power - would have increased steadily, pari 
passu with productivity. The workers would have been able to enjoy 
more of the goods their improved performance was turning out of 
the factories. As it was, working-class families found it a struggle to 
keep up with the new prosperity. They could afford cars — just. But it 
was an effort to renew them. The Twenties boom was based 
essentially on the car. America was producing almost as many cars in 
the late 1920s as in the 1950s (5,358,000 in 1929; 5,700,000 in 
1953). The really big and absolutely genuine growth-stock of the 
1920s was General Motors: anyone who in 1921 had bought 
$25,000 of gm common stock was a millionaire by 1929, when gm 
was earning profits of $200 million a year. 24 The difficulty about an 
expansion in which cars are the leading sector is that, when money is 
short, a car's life can be arbitrarily prolonged five or ten years. 
In December 1 927 Coolidge and Hoover proudly claimed that average 
industrial wages had reached $4 a day, that is $1,200 a year. But 
their own government agencies estimated that it cost $2,000 a year 
to bring up a family of five in 'health and decency'. There is some 
evidence that the increasing number of women in employment 
reflected a decline in real incomes, especially among the middle 
class. 25 As the boom continued, and prices failed to fall, it became 
harder for the consumer to keep the boom going. The bankers, in 
turn, had to work harder to inflate the economy: Strong's 'little 
coup de whiskey' was the last big push; next year he was dead, 
leaving no one with either the same degree of monetary adventurism 
or the same authority. 

Strong's last push, in fact, did little to help the 'real' economy. It 
fed speculation. Very little of the new credit went through to the 
mass-consumer. As it was, the spending-side of the US economy was 
unbalanced. The 5 per cent of the population with the top incomes 
had one-third of all personal income: they did not buy Fords or 
Chevrolets. Indeed the proportion of income received in interest, 
dividends and rents, as opposed to wages, was about twice as high as 
post-1945 levels. 26 Strong's coup de whiskey benefited almost solely 
the non-wage earners: the last phase of the boom was largely 
speculative. Until 1928 stock-exchange prices had merely kept pace 



DEGRINGOLADE 239 

with actual industrial performance. From the beginning of 1928 the 
element of unreality, of fantasy indeed, began to grow. As Bagehot 
put it, 'All people are most credulous when they are most happy.' 27 
The number of shares changing hands, a record of 567,990,875 in 
1927, went to 920,550,032. 

Two new and sinister elements emerged: a vast increase in 
margin-trading and a rash of hastily cobbled-together investment 
trusts. Traditionally, stocks were valued at about ten times earnings. 
With high margin-trading, earnings on shares, only 1 or 2 per cent, 
were far less than the 8-12 per cent interest on loans used to buy 
them. This meant that any profits were in capital gains alone. Thus, 
Radio Corporation of America, which had never paid a dividend at 
all, went from 85 to 420 points in 1928. By 1929 some stocks were 
selling at fifty times earnings. As one expert put it, the market was 
'discounting not merely the future but the hereafter'. 28 A market- 
boom based on capital gains is merely a form of pyramid-selling. The 
new investment trusts, which by the end of 1928 were emerging at 
the rate of one a day, were archetypal inverted pyramids. They had 
what was called 'high leverage' through their own supposedly 
shrewd investments, and secured phenomenal growth on the basis of 
a very small plinth of real growth. Thus, the United Founders 
Corporation was built up into a company with nominal resources of 
$686,165,000 from an original investment (by a bankrupt) of a mere 
$500. The 1929 market value of another investment trust was over a 
billion dollars, but its chief asset was an electric company worth only 
$6 million in 1921. 29 They were supposed to enable the 'little man' 
to 'get a piece of the action'. In fact they merely provided an 
additional superstructure of almost pure speculation, and the 'high 
leverage' worked in reverse once the market broke. 

It is astonishing that, once margin-trading and investment-trusting 
took over, the Federal bankers failed to raise interest rates and 
persisted in cheap money. But many of the bankers had lost their 
sense of reality by the beginning of 1929. Indeed, they were 
speculating themselves, often in their own stock. One of the worst 
offenders was Charles Mitchell (finally indicted for grand larceny in 
1938), the Chairman of National City Bank, who, on 1 January 1929, 
became a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. 
Mitchell filled the role of Strong, at a cruder level, and kept the boom 
going through most of 1929. Of course many practices which 
contributed to the crash, and were made illegal by Congress and the 
new Securities and Exchange Commission in the 1930s, were re- 
garded as acceptable in 1929. The ferocious witch-hunt begun in 
1932 by the Senate Committee on Banking and the Currency, which 
served as a prototype for the witch-hunts of the 1940s and early 



240 DEGRINGOLADE 

1950s, actually disclosed little law-breaking. Mitchell was the only 
major victim and even his case revealed more of the social mores of 
high finance than actual wickedness. 30 Henry James would have had 
no complaints; but the Marxist zealots were disappointed. 'Every 
great crisis', Bagehot remarked, 'reveals the excessive speculations of 
many houses which no one before suspected.' 31 The 1929 crash 
exposed in addition the naivety and ignorance of bankers, business- 
men, Wall Street experts and academic economists high and low; it 
showed they did not understand the system they had been so 
confidently manipulating. They had tried to substitute their own 
well-meaning policies for what Adam Smith called 'the invisible 
hand' of the market and they had wrought disaster. Far from 
demonstrating, as Keynes and his school later argued - at the time 
Keynes failed to predict either the crash or the extent and duration of 
the Depression - the dangers of a self-regulating economy, the 
degringolade indicated the opposite: the risks of ill-informed 
meddling. 

The credit inflation petered out at the end of 1928. The economy 
went into decline, in consequence, six months later. The market 
collapse followed after a three-month delay. All this was to be 
expected; it was healthy; it ought to have been welcomed. It was the 
pattern of the nineteenth century and of the twentieth up to 1920-1: 
capitalist 'normalcy'. A business recession and a stock-exchange 
drop were not only customary but necessary parts of the cycle of 
growth: they sorted out the sheep from the goats, liquidated the 
unhealthy elements in the economy and turned out the parasites; as 
J.K.Galbraith was to put it: 'One of the uses of depression is to 
expose what the auditors fail to find.' 32 Business downturns serve 
essential purposes. They have to be sharp. But they need not be long 
because they are self-adjusting. All they require on the part of 
governments, the business community and the public is patience. The 
1920 recession had adjusted itself within a year. There was no reason 
why the 1929 recession should have taken longer, for the American 
economy was fundamentally sound, as Coolidge had said. As we 
have seen, the Stock Exchange fall began in September and became 
panic in October. On 13 November, at the end of the panic, the 
index was at 224, down from 452. There was nothing wrong in that. 
It had been only 245 in December 1928 after a year of steep rises. 
The panic merely knocked out the speculative element, leaving sound 
stocks at about their right value in relation to earnings. If the 
recession had been allowed to adjust itself, as it would have done by 
the end of 1930 on any earlier analogy, confidence would have 
returned and the world slump need never have occurred. Instead, the 
market went on down, slowly but inexorably, ceasing to reflect 



DEGRINGOLADE 241 

economic realities - its true function - and instead becoming an 
engine of doom, carrying to destruction the entire nation and, in its 
wake, the world. By 8 July 1932 New York Times industrials had 
fallen from 224 at the end of the panic to 58. US Steel, selling at 262 
before the market broke in 1929, was now only 22. gm, already one 
of the best-run and most successful manufacturing groups in the 
world, had fallen from 73 to 8. 33 By this time the entire outlook for 
the world had changed - infinitely for the worse. How did this 
happen? Why did the normal recovery not take place? 

To find the answer we must probe beneath the conventional view 
of Herbert Hoover and his successor as president, Franklin 
Roosevelt. The received view is that Hoover, because of his ideologi- 
cal attachment to laissez-faire, refused to use government money to 
reflate the economy and so prolonged and deepened the Depression 
until the election of Roosevelt, who then promptly reversed official 
policy, introducing the New Deal, a form of Keynesianism, and 
pulled America out of the trough. Hoover is presented as the symbol 
of the dead, discredited past, Roosevelt as the harbinger of the 
future, and 1932—3 the watershed between old-style free market 
economics and the benevolent new managed economics and social 
welfare of Keynes. Such a version of events began as the quasi- 
journalistic propaganda of Roosevelt's colleagues and admirers and 
was then constructed into a solid historical matrix by two entire 
generations of liberal-democrat historians. 34 

This most durable of historical myths has very little truth in it. The 
reality is much more complex and interesting. Hoover is one of the 
tragic figures of modern times. No one illustrated better Tacitus's 
verdict on Galba, omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset 
(by general consent fit to rule, had he not ruled). As we have seen, the 
First World War introduced the age of social engineering. Some 
pundits wished to go further and install the engineer himself as king. 
Thorstein Veblen, the most influential progressive writer in America 
in the first quarter of the twentieth century, had argued, both in The 
Theory of the Leisure Class (1899) and The Engineers and the Price 
System (1921) that the engineer, whom he regarded as a disinterested 
and benevolent figure, should replace the businessman, eliminating 
both the values of the leisure class and the motives of profit, and run 
the economy in the interests of consumers. 35 In the Soviet Union, 
which has embraced social engineering more comprehensively and 
over a longer period than any other society, this is more or less what 
has happened, engineers becoming the paramount element in the 
ruling class (though not as yet with much advantage to the con- 
sumer). 

Hoover, born in 1874, not only believed in a kind of social 



242 DEGRINGOLADE 

engineering; he actually was an engineer. An orphan from a desper- 
ately poor Iowa farming background, his was a classical American 
success-story. He worked his way through Stanford University 
with an engineering degree and then, from 1900 to 1915, made $4 
million in mining all over the world. 36 Recruited to Wilson's 
war-team, he became its outstanding member, absorbed its philos- 
ophy of forceful government direction and planning, and then as 
head of America's post-war Commission of Relief (an adumbration 
of the later Marshall Aid and Point Four programmes) achieved a 
world-wide reputation for benevolent interventionism. Maxim 
Gorky wrote to him: 'You have saved from death 3,500,000 
children and 5,500,000 adults.' 37 In fact he used food diplomacy 
selectively, to defeat both Bela Kun's Communist regime in Hung- 
ary and a Habsburg come-back in Austria, while propping up the 
regimes the Anglo-Saxon powers favoured. 38 Keynes wrote of him 
as 'the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an 
enhanced reputation . . . [who] imported in the councils of Paris, 
when he took part in them, precisely that atmosphere of reality, 
knowledge, magnanimity and disinterestedness which, if they had 
been found in other quarters also, would have given us the Good 
Peace.' 39 Franklin Roosevelt, who as Navy Under-Secretary had 
also been in the wartime administration and shared Hoover's 
general outlook, wrote to a friend: 'He is certainly a wonder and I 
wish we could make him President of the United States. There could 
not be a better one.' 40 

As Secretary of Commerce for eight years, Hoover showed him- 
self a corporatist, an activist and an interventionist, running counter 
to the general thrust, or rather non-thrust, of the Harding— Coolidge 
administrations. His predecessor, Oscar Straus, told him he only 
needed to work two hours a day, 'putting the fish to bed at night 
and turning on the lights around the coast'. In fact his was the only 
department which increased its staff, from 13,005 to 15,850, and 
its cost, from $24.5 million to $37.6 million. 41 He came into office 
at the tail-end of the Depression and immediately set about forming 
committees and trade councils, sponsoring research programmes, 
pushing expenditure, persuading employers to keep up wages and 
'divided time' to increase jobs and, above all, forcing 'co-operation 
between the Federal, state and municipal governments to increase 
public works'. 42 Everywhere he formed committees and study- 
groups, sponsoring reports and working-parties, generating an at- 
mosphere of buzz and business. There was no aspect of public 
policy in which Hoover was not intensely active, usually personally: 
child-health, Indian policy, oil, conservation, public education, 
housing, social waste, agriculture - as President, he was his own 



DEGRINGOLADE 243 

Agriculture Secretary, and the 1929 Agricultural Marketing Act was 
entirely his work. 43 Harding did not like this hyperactivity, but was 
overwhelmed by Hoover's brains and prestige - 'The smartest gink I 
know'. 44 Coolidge hated it; but by then Hoover was too much part 
of the furniture of Republican government to be removed. 

Besides, Hoover's corporatism - the notion that the state, busi- 
ness, the unions and other Big Brothers should work together in 
gentle, but persistent and continuous manipulation to make life 
better — was the received wisdom of the day, among enlightened 
capitalists, left-wing Republicans and non-socialist intellectuals. 
Yankee-style corporatism was the American response to the new 
forms in Europe, especially Mussolini's fascism; it was as important 
to right-thinking people in the Twenties as Stalinism was in the 
Thirties. 45 Hoover was its outstanding impresario and ideologue. 
(One of his admirers was Jean Monnet, who later re-named the 
approach 'indicative planning' and made it the basis both for 
France's post-war planning system and for the European Economic 
Community.) Yet Hoover was not a statist. He said he was against 
any attempt 'to smuggle fascism into America through a back 
door'. 46 On many issues he was liberal. He wanted aid to flow to 
underdeveloped countries. He deplored the exclusion of Japanese 
from the 1924 immigration quotas. His wife entertained the ladies of 
black congressmen. He did not make anti-Semitic jokes, like Wood- 
row Wilson and his wife or Franklin Roosevelt. 47 To a very wide 
spectrum of educated American opinion, he was the leading Ameri- 
can public man long before he got to the White House. 

Hence the general belief that Hoover, as President, would be a 
miracle-worker. The Philadelphia Record called him 'easily the most 
commanding figure in the modern science of "engineering statesman- 
ship"'. The Boston Globe said the nation knew they had at the 
White House one who believed in 'the dynamics of mastery'. 48 He 
was 'the Great Engineer'. Hoover said he was worried by 'the 
exaggerated idea people have conceived of me. They have a convic- 
tion that I am a sort of superman, that no problem is beyond my 
capacity.' 49 But he was not really disturbed. He knew exactly what 
to do. He ran the administration like a dictator. He ignored or 
bullied Congress. He laid down the law, like a character from 
Dickens. He was fond of telling subordinates, 'When you know me 
better, you will find that when I say a thing is a fact, it is a fact.' 50 

When Hoover became President in March 1929 the mechanism 
which was to create the Depression was already in motion. The only 
useful action he might have taken was to allow the artificially low 
interest rates to rise to their natural level — a high one in the 
circumstances - which would have killed off the Stock Exchange 



244 DEGRINGOLADE 

boom much earlier and avoided the damaging drama of the 1929 
autumn. But he did not do so: government-induced cheap credit was 
the very bedrock of his policy. When the magnitude of the crisis 
became apparent, Andrew Mellon, the Treasury Secretary, at last 
repudiated his interventionist philosophy and returned to strict 
laissez-faire. He told Hoover that administration policy should be to 
'liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real 
estate' and so 'p ur g e the rottenness from the economy'. 51 It was the 
only sensible advice Hoover received throughout his presidency. By 
allowing the Depression to rip, unsound businesses would quickly 
have been bankrupted and the sound would have survived. Wages 
would have fallen to their natural level, and that for Hoover was the 
rub. He believed that high wages were an essential element in 
prosperity and that maintaining wages was the most important 
element in policy to contain and overcome depressions. 52 

From the very start, therefore, Hoover agreed to take on the 
business cycle and stamp on it with all the resources of government. 
'No president before has ever believed there was a government 
responsibility in such cases,' he wrote; ' . . . there we had to pioneer a 
new field.' 53 He resumed credit inflation, the Federal Reserve adding 
almost $300 million to credit in the last week of October 1929 alone. 
In November he held a series of conferences with industrial leaders in 
which he exacted from them solemn promises not to cut wages; even 
to increase them if possible - promises kept until 1932. The 
American Federation of Labor's journal lauded this policy: never 
before had US employers been marshalled to act together, and the 
decision marked an 'epoch in the march of civilization - high 
wages'. 54 Keynes, in a memo to Britain's Labour Prime Minister, 
Ramsay MacDonald, praised Hoover's record in maintaining 
wage-levels and thought the Federal credit-expansion move 
'thoroughly satisfactory'. 55 

Indeed in all essentials, Hoover's actions embodied what would 
later be called a 'Keynesian' policy. He cut taxes heavily. Those of a 
family man with an income of $4,000 went down by two-thirds. 56 
He pushed up government spending, deliberately running up a huge 
government deficit of $2.2 billion in 1931, so that the government 
share of the Gross National Product went up from 16.4 per cent in 
1930 to 21.5 per cent in 1931. This increase in government spending, 
by far the largest in US history in peacetime, reaching $1.3 billion in 
1931, was largely accounted for ($1 billion) by a rise in transfer 
payments. 57 It is true that Hoover ruled out direct relief and 
wherever possible he channelled government money through the 
banks rather than direct to businesses and individuals. But that he 
sought to use government cash to reflate the economy is beyond 



DEGRINGOLADE 245 

question. Coolidge's advice to angry farmers' delegations had been a 
bleak: Take up religion.' Hoover's new Agricultural Marketing Act 
gave them $500 million of Federal money, increased by a further $100 
million early in 1930. In 1931 he extended this to the economy as a 
whole with his Reconstruction Finance Corporation (rfc), as part of a 
nine-point programme of government intervention which he produced 
in December. More major public works were started in Hoover's four 
years than in the previous thirty, including the San Francisco Bay 
Bridge, the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the Hoover Dam; the project for 
a St Lawrence Seaway was a casualty of Congressional, not White 
House, action. In July 1932 the rfc's capital was almost doubled to 
$3.8 billion and the new Emergency Relief and Construction Act 
extended its positive role: in 1932 alone it gave credits of $2.3 billion 
and $1.6 billion in cash. Alas, as there was then unanimous agreement 
that the budget had to be brought back into balance after two years of 
deficit, the 1932 Revenue Act saw the greatest taxation increase in US 
history in peacetime, with the rate on high incomes jumping from a 
quarter to 63 per cent. This made nonsense of Hoover's earlier tax cuts 
but by now Hoover had lost control of Congress and was not in a 
position to pursue a coherent fiscal policy. 

Hoover's interventionism was accompanied by an incessant activist 
rhetoric. He was perhaps the first of what was to become a great army of 
democratic statesmen to use military metaphors in a context of positive 
economic policy: 'The battle to set our economic machine in motion in 
this emergency takes new forms and requires new tactics from time to 
time. We used such emergency powers to win the war; we can use them 
to fight the Depression . . .' (May 1932). 'If there shall be no retreat, if 
the attack shall continue as it is now organized, then this battle is won 
. . .' (August 1932). 'We might have done nothing. That would have 
been utter ruin. Instead we met the situation with proposals to private 
business and to Congress of the most gigantic programme of economic 
defence and counter-attack ever evolved in the history of the 
Republic .... For the first time in the history of depression, dividends, 
profits and the cost of living have been reduced before wages have 

suffered They were maintained until . . . the profits had practically 

vanished. They are now the highest real wages in the world Some of 

the reactionary economists urged that we should allow the liquidation 
to take its course until we had found bottom .... We determined that 
we would not follow the advice of the bitter-end liquidationists and see 
the whole body of debtors of the US brought to bankruptcy and the 
savings of our people brought to destruction . . .' (October 1932). 58 

Hoover, the active engineer, thought in terms of tools and weapons. 
Tools and weapons are meant to be used. He used them. His incessant 
attacks on the stock exchanges, which he hated as parasitical, and his 



246 DEGRINGOLADE 

demands that they be investigated pushed stocks down still further 
and discouraged private investors. His policy of public investment 
prevented necessary liquidations. The businesses he hoped thus to 
save either went bankrupt in the end, after fearful agonies, or were 
burdened throughout the 1930s by a crushing load of debt. Hoover 
undermined property rights by weakening the bankruptcy laws and 
encouraging states to halt action-sales for debt, ban foreclosures or 
impose debt moratoria. This, in itself, impeded the ability of the 
banks to save themselves and maintain confidence. Hoover delib- 
erately pushed federal credits into the banks and bullied them into 
inflating, thus increasing the precariousness of their position. 

The final crisis came when America's protectionist policy boom- 
eranged. The atrocious Smoot-Hawley tariff of 1930, which sharply 
increased import-duties, more than any other positive act of policy, 
spread the Depression to Europe. In the summer of 1931 the collapse 
of Austria's leading bank, the Credit Anstalt, pushed over a whole 
row of European dominoes (Britain had already abandoned the gold 
standard on 21 September 1930) and a series of debt-repudiations 
ensued. What remained of America's exports to Europe vanished, 
and her policy of foreign loans as a substitute for free trade 
collapsed. Foreigners lost confidence in the dollar and since the USA 
was still on the gold standard began to pull out their gold, a habit 
that spread to American customers. In a 'normal' year about 700 
US banks failed. In 1931-2 there were 5,096 failures, with deposits 
totalling well over $3 billion, and the process culminated early in 
1933 when the US banking system came to a virtual standstill in the 
last weeks of the Hoover presidency, adding what appeared to be 
the coping-stone to the President's monument of failure. 59 

By that time Hoover's interventionism had prolonged the Depres- 
sion into its fourth year. The cumulative banking crisis had, in all 
probability, the deflationary effect which Hoover had struggled so 
hard and so foolishly to prevent, so that by the end of 1932 the very 
worst of the Depression was over. But the cataclysmic depth to 
which the economy had sunk in the meantime meant that recovery 
would be slow and feeble. The damage was enormous, though it was 
patchy and often contradictory. Industrial production, which had 
been 1 14 in August 1929, was 54 by March 1933. Business construc- 
tion, which had totalled $8.7 billion in 1929, fell to a mere $1.4 
billion in 1933. There was a 77 per cent decline in durable 
manufactures over the same period. Thanks to Hoover, average real 
wages actually increased during the Depression; the victims, of 
course, were those who had no wages at all. 60 Unemployment, which 
had been only 3.2 per cent of the labour force in 1929, rose to 24.9 
per cent in 1933 and 26.7 per cent in 1934. 61 At one point it was 



DEGRINGOLADE 247 

estimated that (excluding farm families) some 34 million men, 
women and children were without any income at all - 28 per cent of 
the population. 62 Landlords could not collect rents and so could not 
pay taxes; city revenues collapsed, bringing down the relief system 
(such as it was) and services. Chicago owed its teachers $20 million. 
In some areas schools closed down most of the year. In New York in 
1932, more than 300,000 children could not be taught because there 
were no funds, and among those still attending the Health Depart- 
ment reported 20 per cent malnutrition. 63 By 1933 the US Office of 
Education estimated that 1,500 higher education colleges had gone 
bankrupt or shut and university enrolments fell by a quarter- 
million. 64 Few bought books. None of the public libraries in Chicago 
could buy a single new book for twelve months. Total book sales fell 
50 per cent and Little, Brown of Boston reported 1932-3 as the 
worst year since they began publishing in 1837. 65 John Steinbeck 
complained: 'When people are broke, the first things they give up are 
books.' 66 

Intellectuals bitterly resented their own plight and the misery all 
around which it reflected. But they reacted in different ways. Some 
just reported what they saw. In one of the best of the Depression 
articles, 'New York in the Third Winter', James Thurber noted the 
contrasts and the ironies. Of the eighty-six legitimate theatres in the 
city, only twenty-eight had shows running: but O'Neill's Mourning 
Becomes Electra had sold out even its $6 seats. About 1,600 of the 
20,000 taxis had 'dropped out'; but the rest were much smarter and 
cleaner as a result of intensified competition. Both the Ritz and the 
Pierre had cut their lowest room rates to a humiliating $6; but the 
new Waldorf, charging the same as before, was packed. The new 
Empire State, the last product of the great Twenties building boom, 
had only rented a third of its rooms: 'Many floors were not finished 
at all, merely big plastery spaces'; but 550,000 people had already 
paid a dollar to go up to the top. The big transatlantic liners were 
cutting their suite prices by a third; but 'whoopee cruises' beyond the 
twelve-mile-limit-ban on gambling were a roaring success. So was 
bridge, with Ely Culbertson selling 400,000 books a year and the 
industry racking up a turnover of $100 million, and the new 
striptease shows, with dancers earning $475 a week. Above all, he 
reported bargains in the big stores, which slashed their prices and 
kept up business accordingly. Indeed, it is a significant fact that the 
retail trade, reacting directly to market conditions, was the least 
depressed sector of the economy; industry, trapped by Hoover's iron 
law of high wages, was sandbagged. 67 Thurber's reporting stressed 
that for anyone who could actually make or earn money, Depressions 
were the best of times. 



248 DEGRINGOLADE 

Most intellectuals moved sharply to the Left, or rather into politics 
for the first time, presenting their newly discovered country in crude, 
ideological colours. Thomas Wolfe, the baroque writing phenome- 
non of the Thirties, described the public lavatories outside New 
York's City Hall, where an astonishing proportion of America's two 
million derelicts congregated: 

. . . drawn into a common stew of rest and warmth and a little surcease 
from their desperation .... The sight was revolting, disgusting, enough to 
render a man forever speechless with very pity. [Nearby were] the giant 
hackles of Manhattan shining coldly in the cruel brightness of the winter 
night. The Woolworth building was not fifty yards away, and a little further 
down were the silvery spires and needles of Wall Street, great fortresses of 
stone and steel that housed enormous banks ... in the cold moonlight, only 
a few blocks away from this abyss of human wretchedness and misery, 
blazed the pinnacles of power where a large section of the world's entire 
wealth was locked in mighty vaults. 68 

Edmund Wilson, whose Depression articles were collected as The 
American Jitters (1932), eschewed the rhetoric but powerfully re- 
flected the growing anti-enterprise sentiment which was overwhelm- 
ing the country. Books might not be bought but more people were 
reading serious ones than ever before. He recognized shrewdly that a 
good time - or rather an influential time - for intellectuals had 
come: especially for the younger ones 'who had grown up in the Big 
Business era and had always resented its barbarism, its crowding-out 
of everything they cared about'. For them, 'these years were not 
depressing but stimulating. One couldn't help being exhilarated at 
the sudden, unexpected collapse of the stupid gigantic fraud. It gave 
us a new sense of freedom; and it gave us a new sense of power.' 69 

For it is a curious fact that writers, the least organized in their own 
lives, instinctively support planning in the public realm. And at the 
beginning of the Thirties planning became the new Weltanschauung. 
In 1932 it dominated the booklists: Stuart Chase, so embarrassingly 
wrong about the 'continuing boom' in October 1929, now published 
A New Deal, its title as timely as Bruck's The Third Reich. George 
Soule demanded Hooveresque works-programmes in A Planned 
Society. Corporatist planning reached its apotheosis in Adolf Berle's 
and Gardiner Means's Modern Corporation and Private Property, 
which went through twenty impressions as the Depression climaxed 
and predicted that the 'law of corporations' would be the 'potential 
constitutional law' for the new economic state. 

Everyone wanted planning. America's most widely read historian, 
Charles Beard, advocated 'A Five Year Plan for America'. 70 Business- 
men like Gerard Swope, head of General Electric, produced their 



DEGRINGOLADE 249 

own. Henry Harriman, Chairman of the New England Power 
Company, declared, 'We have left the period of extreme individual- 
ism .... Business prosperity and employment will be best maintained 
by an intelligent planned business structure.' Capitalists whp dis- 
agreed would be 'treated like any maverick . . . roped and branded 
and made to run with the herd'. Charles Abbott of the American 
Institute of Steel Construction declared the country could no longer 
afford 'irresponsible, ill-informed, stubborn and non-co-operative 
individualism'. Business Week, under the sneering title 'Do You Still 
Believe in Lazy-Fairies?', asked: 'To plan or not to plan is no longer 
the question. The real question is: who is to do it?' 71 

Who, in logic and justice, but the Great Engineer, the Wonder 
Boy? Had not, in logic and justice, his time come at last? But there is 
no logic or justice in history. It is all a matter of chronology. 
Hoover's time had come and gone. He had been in power four years, 
frantically acting and planning, and what was the result? By 1932 his 
advisers were telling him to 'keep off the front page' as his public acts 
were discrediting the notion that the government could intervene 
effectively. 72 He had warned himself in 1929 that 'If some unprece- 
dented calamity should come upon this nation I would be sacrificed to 
the unreasoning disappointment of a people who had expected too 
much.' That fear — confidently dismissed at the time — proved 
abundantly justified. In 1907 Theodore Roosevelt had remarked that 
'when the average man loses his money, he is simply like a wounded 
snake and strikes right and left at anything, innocent or the reverse, 
that represents itself as conspicuous in his mind'. 73 That maxim, too, 
was now resoundingly confirmed, with Hoover as its helpless victim, 
a transfixed rabbit in a boiled shirt. He had always been a dour man; 
now, imperceptibly, he became the Great Depressive. The ablest of 
his cabinet colleagues, Henry Stimson, said he avoided the White 
House to escape 'the ever-present feeling of gloom that pervades 
everything connected with this Administration'. He added: 'I don't 
remember there has ever been a joke cracked in a single meeting of 
the last year and a half.' As his party and cabinet colleagues 
distanced themselves from this voodoo-figure, Hoover began to keep 
an 'enemies list' of the disloyal. 74 Calling on the beleaguered man, 
H.G.Wells found him 'sickly, overworked and overwhelmed'. 75 

And as usually happens on these occasions, sheer luck deserts the 
ruined cause and becomes the source of further myth. In 1924 a 
Bonus bill had provided army veterans with service certificates and 
the right to borrow 22£ per cent of their matured value. In 1931, over 
Hoover's veto, Congress raised that to 50 per cent. Some of the 
veterans were not content and the Left, reviving for the first time 
since 1919, organized a 'Bonus expeditionary force' of 20,000 



250 D^GRINGOLADE 

veterans which set up a shanty-town 'camp' in the middle of 
Washington in 1932. But Congress refused to budge further and on 
28 July Hoover, whose policy on the issue was identical to 
Roosevelt's when the issue was revived in 1936, ordered the camp to 
be dispersed. The police proving inadequate, some troops were used 
under Major (later General) Patton of the US Cavalry. Both General 
MacArthur, then Army Chief of Staff, and his aide Major Eisen- 
hower played minor roles in the messy operation that followed. 

No episode in American history has been the basis for more 
falsehood, much of it deliberate. The Communists did not play a 
leading role in setting up the camp but they organized the subsequent 
propaganda with great skill. There were tales of cavalry charges; of 
the use of tanks and poison gas; of a little boy bayonetted while 
trying to save his rabbit; and of tents and shelters being set on fire 
with people trapped inside. These were published in such works as 
W.W.Walters: BEF: the Whole Story of the Bonus Army (1933) and 
Jack Douglas: Veteran on the March (1934), both almost entirely 
fiction. A book of Ballads of the BEF appeared, including such 
choice items as 'The Hoover Diet Is Gas' and 'I have seen the sabres 
gleaming as they lopped off veterans' ears'. A characteristic Com- 
munist tract of 1940 by Bruce Minton and John Stuart, The Fat 
Years and the Lean, concluded: 'The veterans began to leave the 
capital. But President Hoover would not let them disband peace- 
fully .... Without warning he ordered the army forcibly to eject the 
bef from Washington. The soldiers charged with fixed bayonets, 
firing into the crowd of unarmed men, women and children.' While 
the camp was burning, it was said, Hoover and his wife, who kept 
the best table in White House history, dined alone in full evening 
dress off a seven-course meal. Some of the fictions were still being 
repeated in respectable works of history even in the 1970s. 76 

What mattered more at the time was the Administration's inept 
handling of the subsequent investigation, leading to a violent and 
public disagreement between the Attorney-General and the Superin- 
tendant of the Washington police, which took place in the closing 
stages of the election campaign. Hoover, loyally supporting his 
cabinet colleague, was made to look a liar and a monster: 'There was 
no question that the President was hopelessly defeated,' wrote one of 
his staff. 77 Not only was his credibility impugned, but the episode 
lost him the support of many of the churches, who had hitherto 
opposed the 'Wet' Roosevelt, Prohibition being the other big issue - 
perhaps, for most voters, the biggest issue - of the campaign. 

Thus a combination of myth and alcohol, plus his own sense and 
image of failure, swept the Wonder Boy into oblivion in a watershed 
election. Reversing the huge Republican margins of the 1920s, 



DEGRINGOLADE 251 

Roosevelt scored 22,833,000 votes to Hoover's 15,762,000, with an 
electoral college majority of 472 to 59, carrying all but six states. The 
new voting pattern of 1932 saw the emergence of the Democratic 
'coalition of minorities', based on the industrial north-east, which 
was to last for nearly half a century and turn Congress almost into a 
one-party legislature. The pattern had been foreshadowed by the 
strong showing of Al Smith, the Democratic candidate, in the 1928 
presidential and, still more, in the 1930 mid-term congressional 
elections. But it was only in 1932 that the Republicans finally lost the 
progressive image they had enjoyed since Lincoln's day and saw it 
triumphantly seized by their enemies, with all that such a transfer 
involves in the support of the media, the approval of academia, the 
patronage of the intelligentsia and, not least, the manufacture of 
historical orthodoxy. 

Paradoxically, on what is now seen as the central issue of how to 
extricate America from Depression, there was virtually no real 
difference - as yet - between the parties. Both Hoover and Roosevelt 
were interventionists. Both were planners of a sort. Both were 
inflationists. It is true that Roosevelt was inclined to favour some 
direct relief, which Hoover still distrusted; on the other hand he was 
(at this stage) even more insistent than Hoover on the contradictory 
need for a strictly balanced budget. The actual Democratic campaign 
platform was strictly orthodox. Roosevelt himself was seen as an 
unstable lightweight in economic matters. Indeed he appeared a 
lightweight generally compared to his fifth cousin, Theodore. He was 
an aristocrat, the only child of a Hudson River squire, descended 
from seventeenth-century Dutch and the 'best' Anglo-Saxon stock; 
the proud owner of the magnificient Hyde Park estate half-way 
between New York and the state capital, Albany. He had been 
educated by governesses to the age of fourteen; then at Groton, the 
American Eton, where he acquired a slight English accent and 
learned Latin, Greek and European history. He had four years at 
Harvard, 'on the Gold Coast' (high-priced dormitories and clubs), 
developing an outlook which was, says his best biographer, 'a 
mixture of political conservatism, economic orthodoxy and anti- 
imperialism, steeped in a fuzzy altruism and wide ignorance' - a 
brew from which he was never wholly weaned. 78 

By 1932 Roosevelt was an experienced administrator, with over 
seven years in the Navy Department behind him and a moderately 
successful governorship of New York. But no one regarded him as a 
Wonder Boy. At the beginning of 1932 Lippmann described him as 'a 
highly impressionable person without a firm grasp of public affairs 
and without very strong convictions . . . not the dangerous enemy of 
anything. He is too eager to please ... no crusader ... no tribune of 



252 DEGRINGOLADE 

the people ... no enemy of entrenched privilege. He is a pleasant 
man who, without any important qualifications for the office, would 
very much like to be President.' 79 Time called him 'a vigorous, 
well-intentioned gentleman of good birth and breeding'. 

In no sense was Roosevelt the cynosure of the left-wing intelligent- 
sia. Common Sense, one of their favourite journals, thought the 
election a non-choice between 'the laughing boy from Hyde Park' 
and 'the great glum engineer from Palo Alto'. Theodore Dreiser, 
Sherwood Anderson, Erskine Caldwell, Edmund Wilson, John Dos 
Passos, Lincoln Steffens, Malcolm Cowley, Sidney Hook, Clifton 
Fadiman and Upton Sinclair backed the Communist candidate 
William Z. Foster. They signed a joint letter insisting that 'It is 
capitalism which is destructive of all culture and Communism which 
desires to save civilization and its cultural heritage from the abyss to 
which the world crisis is driving it.' Other intellectuals such as 
Reinhold Neibuhr, Stuart Chase, Van Wyck Brooks, Alexander 
Woolcott, Edna St Vincent Millay and Paul Douglas voted for the 
Socialist, Norman Thomas. 80 Even after Roosevelt was well esta- 
blished in the White House, some of them continued to note a lack of 
specific gravity which he never wholly lost. 'Washington seems much 
more intelligent and cheerful than under any recent administration,' 
Edmund Wilson wrote, 'but as one lady said to me, it is "pure 
Chekhov". Where the Ohio Gang played poker, the brain trustees 
get together and talk. Nothing really makes much sense, because 
Roosevelt has no real policy.' 81 

There was an element of truth in the remark. Indeed, it was 
essentially Hoover's campaign rhetoric which opened an ideological 
gap between the men. Hoover had never reciprocated Roosevelt's 
admiration, and thought him a frivolous fellow who might easily 
become a dangerous one. During the campaign, feeling he was 
losing, he worked himself up into a fine froth about minor differ- 
ences on direct relief (which Roosevelt had practised in New York) 
and proposed meddling in public utilities. 'My countrymen,' he 
roared, 'the proposals of our opponents represent a profound change 
in American life ... a radical departure from the foundations of 150 
years which have made this the greatest nation in the world. This 
election is not a mere shift from the ins to the outs. It means deciding 
the direction our nation will take over a century to come.' 'This 
campaign', he warned, 'is more than a contest between the two men. 
It is more than a contest between the two parties. It is a contest 
between two philosophies of government.' 82 Roosevelt, delighted to 
see some spice attributed to a programme which the New York 
Times found contained 'not one wild nostrum or disturbing proposal 
in the whole list' and which the New Republic dismissed as 'a puny 



DEGRINGOLADE 253 

answer to the challenge of the times', took the same bellicose line: 
'Never before in modern history have the essential differences 
between the two major American parties stood out in such striking 
contrast as they do today.' 83 It was all baloney. It illustrates the 
degree to which oratory engenders myths and myths, in turn, breed 
realities. 

And not only oratory: personalities, too. Hoover, who had made 
his money by honest toil, and grown dour in the process, first 
despised, then hated the grinning and meretricious Whig who had 
simply inherited his wealth and then used it as a platform to attack 
the industrious. He had been incensed by a Roosevelt remark in 
1928, which he never forgot, that he was 'surrounded by material- 
istic and self-seeking advisers'. 84 Roosevelt acquired a grievance in 
turn. He had been crippled by poliomyelitis since the early 1920s, 
and, at a White House reception for governors in spring 1932, had 
been kept waiting by Hoover for half an hour. He had refused to ask 
for a chair, seeing the incident as a trial of strength and believing — it 
is astonishing how paranoid politicians can become in election year — 
that Hoover had planned it deliberately. As it happened, Roosevelt's 
successful struggle over his disability was the one aspect of his 
character Hoover admired; it is inconceivable that he could have 
sought to take advantage of it. 85 But Roosevelt and his wife 
remembered the half-hour with hatred. 

The mutual antipathy proved of great historical importance. 
Roosevelt seems to have been quite unaware that Hoover genuinely 
regarded him as a public menace; not taking politics too seriously 
himself, he dismissed Hoover's Cassandra-cries as partisan verbiage, 
the sort he might employ himself. There was then a huge hiatus 
between the election and the transfer of power, from early November 
to March. Both men agreed action was urgent; except on details, 
they agreed what it should be - more of the same. Roosevelt 
conceived the fantastic notion that Hoover ought to appoint him 
Secretary of State immediately, so that he and his vice-president 
could both resign and Roosevelt could constitutionally move into the 
White House immediately. Hoover, equally optimistically, thought 
Roosevelt should be persuaded to disavow some of his campaign 
remarks and promises, which he thought had made a bad situation 
still worse, and humbly endorse, in public, measures which the 
President proposed to take, thus restoring confidence and ensuring 
continuity of (Hoover's) policy. Granted these ludicrous misap- 
prehensions, it is not surprising that their contacts over the long 
interregnum were confined to icy epistles and a mere courtesy call by 
Roosevelt on 3 March 1933, the eve of the transfer. It terminated in 
an arctic exchange which would have warmed Henry James's heart. 



254 DEGRINGOLADE 

When Roosevelt, who was staying at the Mayflower, said Hoover 
was obviously too busy to return his call, the stricken Jupiter 
unleashed his last thunderbolt: 'Mr Roosevelt, when you have been 
in Washington as long as I have, you will learn that the President of 
the United States calls on nobody.' 86 Roosevelt took his revenge by 
refusing to give the departing President, whose life was under 
constant threat, a Secret Service bodyguard to accompany him back 
to Palo Alto. 87 

The public lack of co-operation between the two men during the 
long interregnum worked decisively in Roosevelt's political favour 
by drawing a profound, if wholly false, distinction between the two 
regimes. Roosevelt was a new face at exactly the right time and it was 
a smiling face. Hence he got all the credit when the recovery, under 
way during Hoover's last semester, became visible in the spring in the 
form of what was promptly dubbed 'the Roosevelt Market'. The 
historian hates to admit it, but luck is very important. Hoover had 
asked Rudy Vallee in 1932 for an anti-Depression song; the wretched 
fellow produced 'Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?' Roosevelt's 
campaign song, actually written for mgm's Chasing Rainbows on 
the eve of the great stock market crash, struck just the right button: 
'Happy Days Are Here Again'. He had a lot of the intuitive skills of 
Lloyd George, a politician he greatly resembled. He could coin a 
phrase, or get others to coin one for him, as his Inaugural showed 
('Let me assert my firm belief that the only thing we have to fear is 
fear itself'). 88 At the end of his first week in office he showed his 
mastery of the new radio medium by inaugurating his 'fireside chats'. 
In terms of political show-business he had few equals and he had an 
enviable knack of turning problems into solutions. Thus, faced with 
shut banks, he declared them shut by law (using an old 1917 Act) 
and termed it 'A bankers' holiday'. But he also had the solid 
advantage of an overwhelmingly Democrat and unusually subser- 
vient Congress. His first bill, the Emergency Banking Act, went 
through in less than a day, after a mere forty-minute debate 
interrupted by cries of 'Vote, vote!' From midnight on 6 April, after a 
mere month in office, he had America drinking legal liquor again, an 
immense boost to morale. His programme was rushed through 
Congress in record time but it was political showbiz which chris- 
tened it 'the Hundred Days'. 

Beyond generating the impression of furious movement, what his 
Treasury Secretary, William Woodin, called 'swift and staccato 
action', there was no actual economic policy behind the 
programme. 89 Raymond Moley, the intellectual who helped 
Roosevelt pick his cabinet, said future historians might find some 
principle behind the selection, but he could not. 90 This lack of real 



DEGRINGOLADE 255 

design was reflected in the measures. At Roosevelt's exciting press 
conferences, he boasted he played things by ear and compared himself 
to a quarter-back who 'called a new play when he saw how the last one 
had turned out'. 91 While increasing federal spending in some direc- 
tions he slashed it in others, cutting the pensions of totally disabled 
war-veterans, for instance, from $40 to $20 a month, and putting 
pressure on states to slash teachers' salaries, which he said were 'too 
high'. He remained devoted to the idea of a balanced budget; his first 
message to Congress called for major cuts in expenditure and one of 
his first bills was a balanced-budget measure entitled 'To Maintain the 
Credit of the United States Government'. So far from being a 
proto-Keynesian, nothing made him more angry than journalistic 
suggestions that his finance was unsound. 92 The notion that Roosevelt 
was the first deliberately to practise deficit finance to reflate an 
economy is false. Keynes indeed urged this course on him in a famous 
letter to the New York Times at the end of 1933: 'I lay overwhelming 
emphasis on the increase of national purchasing power resulting from 
government expenditure financed by loans.' 93 But that was not 
actually Roosevelt's policy except by accident. When the two men met 
the following summer they did not hit it off, and there is no evidence, 
from start to finish, that Roosevelt ever read Keynes's writings — 
'During all the time I was associated with him', Moley wrote, 'I never 
knew him read a serious book' — or was in the slightest influenced by 
Keynes's ideas. 94 The Federal Reserve Bank was certainly inflationary 
under Roosevelt; but then it had been throughout the previous decade. 
Roosevelt's legislation, for the most part, extended or tinkered with 
Hoover policies. The Emergency Banking Act and the Loans to 
Industry Act of June 1934 extended Hoover's RFC. The Home 
Owners' Loan Act (1932) extended a similar act of the year before. 
The Sale of Securities Act (1933), the Banking Acts (1933, 1935) and 
the Securities and Exchange Act (1934) merely continued Hoover's 
attempts to reform business methods. The National Labour Relations 
Act of 1935 (the 'Wagner Act'), which made it easier to organize 
unions and won the Democrats organized labour for a generation, 
simply broadened and strengthened the Norris-La Guardia Act 
passed under Hoover. The First Agricultural Adjustment Act (1933) 
actually undermined the reflationary aspects of government policy, 
curtailed the production of foodstuffs and paid farmers to take land 
out of production. It was, moreover, in flat contradiction to other 
government measures to counter the drought and dust-storms of 
1934—5, such as the Soil Erosion Service, the Soil Erosion Act (1935) 
and the Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment Act (1936). 95 
Roosevelt's agricultural policy, in so far as he had one, was statist, 
designed to win votes by raising farming incomes. But it also raised 



256 DEGRINGOLADE 

food-prices for the consumer and so delayed general recovery. The 
National Industrial Recovery Act (1933), which created a corporatist 
agency under General Hugh Johnson, was in essence a Hoover-type 
shot at 'indicative planning'. But, drawing on Roosevelt's Great War 
experience - the sole source of such novel ideas as he had - it had a 
flavour of compulsion about it, Johnson warning that if businessmen 
refused to sign his 'voluntary' codes, 'They'll get a sock right on the 
nose.' It was this which led Hoover to denounce it as 'totalitarian'. 96 
Johnson's bullying made the scheme counterproductive and there 
was not much real regret when the Supreme Court declared it 
unconstitutional. 97 

Where Roosevelt really departed from Hooverism was in reviving 
and extending a Wilson Great War scheme for the state to provide 
cheap power for the Tennessee Valley. But this was an isolated item 
of improvization, a 'boondoggle' to keep the South solid. Asked how 
he would explain its philosophy to Congress, Roosevelt replied, 
characteristically, 'I'll tell them it's neither fish nor fowl but, 
whatever it is, it will taste awfully good to the people of the 
Tennessee Valley.' 98 Roosevelt also spent a great deal of money on 
public works: $10.5 billion, plus $2.7 billion on sponsored projects, 
employing at one time or another 8.5 million people and construct- 
ing 122,000 public buildings, 77,000 new bridges, 285 airports, 
664,000 miles of roads, 24,000 miles of storm and water-sewers, 
plus parks, playgrounds and reservoirs. 99 But this again was an old 
Hoover policy on a somewhat larger scale. In all essentials, the New 
Deal continued the innovatory corporatism of Hoover. It was what 
Walter Lippmann, writing in 1935, termed 'the Permanent New 
Deal'. 'The policy initiated by President Hoover in the autumn of 
1929 was something utterly unprecedented in American history,' he 
wrote. 'The national government undertook to make the whole 
economic order operate prosperously ... the Roosevelt measures are 
a continuous evolution of the Hoover measures.' 100 

Hoover-Roosevelt interventionism was thus a continuum. Did it 
work? Pro-Roosevelt historians argue that the additional elements of 
the New Deal brought recovery. Pro-Hoover historians counter that 
Roosevelt's acts delayed what Hoover's were already bringing 
about. 101 From the perspective of the 1980s it seems probable that 
both men impeded a natural recovery brought about by deflation. It 
was certainly slow and feeble. 1937 was the only reasonably good 
year, when unemployment, at 14.3 per cent, actually dipped below 8 
million; but by the end of the year the economy was in free fall again 
— the fastest fall so far recorded — and unemployment was at 19 per 
cent the following year. In 1937 production briefly passed 1929 
levels but quickly slipped again. The real recovery to the boom 



DEGRINGOLADE 257 

atmosphere of the 1920s came only on the Monday after the Labor 
Day weekend of September 1939, when the news of war in Europe 
plunged the New York Stock Exchange into a joyful confusion which 
finally wiped out the memory of October 1929. Two years later the 
dollar value of production finally passed 1929 levels. 102 Keynes 
himself, addressing Americans in 1940, conceded that the war was 
crucial to economic recovery: 'Your war preparations, so far from 
requiring a sacrifice, will be a stimulus, which neither the victory nor 
the defeat of the New Deal could give you, to greater individual 
consumption and a higher standard of life.' 103 If interventionism 
worked, it took nine years and a world war to demonstrate the fact. 

The political success of Roosevelt was due to quite other factors 
than the effectiveness of his economic measures, which were largely 
window-dressing, transposed by time into golden myth. He demon- 
strated the curious ability of the aristocratic rentier liberal (as 
opposed to self-made plebeians like Harding, Coolidge and Hoover) 
to enlist the loyalty and even the affection of the clerisy. 
Newspaper-owners opposed Roosevelt, but their journalists loved 
him, forgiving his frequent lies, concealing the fact that he took 
money off them at poker (which had damned Harding), obeying his 
malicious injunctions to give his Administration colleagues a 'hard 
time'. 104 There were dark corners in the Roosevelt White House: his 
own infidelities, his wife's passionate attachments to another 
woman, the unscrupulous, sometimes vicious manner in which he 
used executive power. 105 None was exposed in his lifetime or for 
long after. Even more important was his appeal to intellectuals, once 
the news he employed a 'brains trust' got about. 106 In fact, of 
Roosevelt's entourage only Harry Hopkins, a social worker not an 
intellectual as such, Rexford Tugwell and Felix Frankfurter were 
radical as well as influential; the two last disagreed violently, 
Tugwell being a Stalinist-type big-scale statist, Frankfurter an anti- 
business trust-buster, symbolizing in turn the First New Deal 
(1933-6) and the Second New Deal (1937-8), which were flatly 
contradictory. 107 There was no intellectual coherence to the 
Roosevelt administration, but it seemed a place where the clerisy 
could feel at home. Among the able young who came to Washington 
were Dean Acheson, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson, Adlai 
Stevenson, William Fulbright, Abe Fortas, Henry Fowler and, not 
least, Alger Hiss, who held meetings with four other New Deal 
members of a Communist cell in a Connecticut Avenue music 
studio. 108 

Attacks on Roosevelt served only to strengthen his appeal to the 
intelligentsia. A curious case in point was Mencken. In 1926 the New 
York Times had described him 'the most powerful private citizen 



258 DEGRINGOLADE 

in America'. Walter Lippmann called him 'the most powerful 
personal influence on this whole generation of educated people'. 109 
A great part of his appeal lay in his ferocious attacks on presidents. 
Theodore Roosevelt was 'blatant, crude, overly confidential, devi- 
ous, tyrannical, vainglorious and sometimes quite childish'. Taft's 
characteristic was 'native laziness and shiftlessness'. Wilson was 'the 
perfect model of the Christian cad' who wished to impose 'a Cossack 
despotism'. Harding was 'a stonehead', Coolidge 'petty, sordid and 
dull ... a cheap and trashy fellow . . . almost devoid of any notion of 
honour ... a dreadful little cad'. Hoover had 'a natural instinct for 
low, disingenuous, fraudulent manipulators'. 110 These fusillades 
enthralled the intelligentsia and helped permanently to wound the 
reputations of the men at whom they were directed. Mencken 
excelled himself in attacking Roosevelt, whose whiff of fraudulent 
collectivism filled him with genuine outrage. He was 'the Fiihrer', 
'the quack', surrounded by 'an astounding rabble of impudent 
nobodies', 'a gang of half-educated pedagogues, non-constitutional 
lawyers, starry-eyed uplifters and other such sorry wizards', and his 
New Deal 'a political racket', 'a series of stupendous bogus miracles', 
with its 'constant appeals to class envy and hatred', treating govern- 
ment as 'a milch-cow with 125 million teats' and marked by 
'frequent repudiations of categorical pledges'.* The only conse- 
quence of these diatribes was that Mencken forfeited his influence 
with anyone under thirty. 

Intellectuals, indeed, relished the paranoia of the rich and the 
conventional, and the extraordinary vehemence and fertility of 
invention with which Roosevelt was assailed. His next-door neigh- 
bour at Hyde Park, Howland Spencer, called him 'a frustrated 
darling', a 'swollen-headed nitwit with a Messiah complex and the 
brain of a boy scout'; to Senator Thomas Schall of Minnesota he was 
'a weak-minded Louis xiv'; Owen Young, Chairman of General 
Electric, claimed he 'babbled to himself, Senator William Borah of 
Idaho that he spent his time in his study cutting out paper dolls. 
According to rumour (often surfacing in pamphlets), he was insane, 
weak-minded, a hopeless drug-addict who burst into hysterical 
laughter at press conferences, an impostor (the real Roosevelt was in 
an insane-asylum), under treatment by a psychiatrist disguised as a 
White House footman, and had to be kept in a straitjacket most of 
the time. It was said that bars had been placed in the windows to 

* Mencken himself was variously described as a polecat, a Prussian, a British toady, a howling 
hyena, a parasite, a mangy mongrel, an affected ass, an unsavoury creature, putrid of soul, a 
public nuisance, a literary stink-pot, a mountebank, a rantipole, a vain hysteric, an outcast, a 
literary renegade, and a trained elephant who wrote the gibberish of an imbecile: Charles 
Fecher: Mencken: A Study of his Thought (New York 1978), 179 footnote. 



DEGRINGOLADE 259 

prevent him from hurling himself out (the same rumour had arisen in 
Wilson's last phase; the bars, in fact, had protected the children of 
Theodore Roosevelt). He was said to be suffering from an Oedipus 
complex, a 'Silver Cord complex', heart trouble, leprosy, syphilis, 
incontinence, impotency, cancer, comas and that his polio was 
inexorably 'ascending into his head'. He was called a Svengali, a 
Little Lord Fauntleroy, a simpleton, a modern political Juliet 'mak- 
ing love to the people from the White House balcony', a pledge- 
breaker, a Communist, tyrant, oath-breaker, fascist, socialist, the 
Demoralizer, the Panderer, the Violator, the Embezzler, petulant, 
insolent, rash, ruthless, blundering, a sorcerer, an impostor, callow 
upstart, shallow autocrat, a man who encouraged swearing and 'low 
slang' and a 'subjugator of the human spirit'. 111 Crossing the 
Atlantic on the Europa, just before the 1936 election, Thomas Wolfe 
recorded that, when he said he was voting for the Monster, 

. . . boiled shirts began to roll up their backs like window-shades. Maidenly 
necks which a moment before were as white and graceful as the swan's 
became instantly so distended with the energies of patriotic rage that 
diamond dog-collars and ropes of pearls were snapped and sent flying like 
so many pieces of string. I was told that if I voted for this vile Communist, 
this sinister fascist, this scheming and contriving socialist and his gang of 
conspirators, I had no longer any right to consider myself an American 
citizen. 112 

It was against this background that Roosevelt won the greatest of 
electoral victories in 1936, by 27,477,000 to 16,680,000 votes, 
carrying all but two states (Maine and Vermont) and piling up 
enormous Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress. 
Roosevelt's attraction for the young, the progressives and the 
intellectuals survived even the abandonment of New Deal innova- 
tions in 1938 and his collapse into the hands of the Big City 
Democratic machine bosses, who ensured his re-election in 1940 and 
1944. 

The truth is that Roosevelt appeared to be in tune with the Thirties 
spirit, which had repudiated the virtues of capitalist enterprise and 
embraced those of collectivism. The heroes of the 1920s had been 
businessmen, the sort of titans, led by Thomas Edison, who had 
endorsed Harding and Coolidge on their front porches. The 1929 
crash and its aftermath weakened faith in this pantheon. By 1931 
Felix Frankfurter was writing to Bruce Bliven, editor of the New 
Republic: 'Nothing I believe sustains the present system more than 
the pervasive worship of success and the touching faith we have in 
financial and business messiahs .... I believe it to be profoundly 
important to undermine that belief .... Undermine confidence in 



260 DEGRINGOLADE 

their greatness and you have gone a long way towards removing 
some basic obstructions to the exploration of economic and social 
problems.' 113 By 1932 this undermining process was largely com- 
plete, helped by revelations that J.P.Morgan, for instance, had paid 
no income-tax for the three previous years, and that Andrew Mellon 
had been coached by an expert from his own Treasury Department 
in the art of tax-avoidance. 

Loss of faith in American business leaders coincided with a sudden 
and overwhelming discovery that the Soviet Union existed and that it 
offered an astonishing and highly relevant alternative to America's 
agony. Stuart Chase's A New Deal ended with the question: 'Why 
should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?' 114 The 
first Soviet Five Year Plan had been announced in 1928, but it was 
only four years later that its importance was grasped by American 
writers. Then a great spate of books appeared, praising Soviet-style 
planning and holding it up as a model to America. Joseph Freeman: 
The Soviet Worker, Waldo Frank: Dawn in Russia, William Z. 
Foster: Towards Soviet America, Kirby Page: A New Economic 
Order, Harry Laidler: Socialist Planning, Sherwood Eddy: Russia 
Today: What Can We Learn From It? all of them published in 1932, 
reinforced Lincoln Steffens' best-selling pro-Soviet autobiography, 
which had appeared the year before, and introduced a still more 
influential tract, The Coming Struggle for Power by the British 
Communist John Strachey, which appeared in 1933. 115 

America was and is a millennarian society where overweening 
expectations can easily oscillate into catastrophic loss of faith. In the 
early 1930s there was net emigration. When Amtorg, the Soviet 
trading agency, advertised for 6,000 skilled workers, more than 
100,000 Americans applied. To the comedian Will Rogers: Those 
rascals in Russia, along with their cuckoo stuff have got some mighty 
good ideas .... Just think of everybody in a country going to work.' 
'All roads in our day lead to Moscow,' Steffens proclaimed; and 
Strachey echoed him: To travel from the capitalist world into Soviet 
territory is to pass from death to birth.' We must now explore the 
gruesome and unconscious irony of these remarks. 



EIGHT 

The Devils 



At the very moment the American intelligentsia turned to totalitarian 
Europe for spiritual sustenance and guidance in orderly planning, it 
was in fact embarking on two decades of unprecedented ferocity 
and desolation - moral relativism in monstrous incarnation. On 
21 December 1929 Stalin had celebrated his fiftieth birthday, as 
absolute master of an autocracy for which, in concentrated savagery, 
no parallel in history could be found. A few weeks earlier, while the 
New York Stock Exchange was collapsing, he had given orders for 
the forced collectivization of the Russian peasants, an operation 
involving far greater material loss than anything within the scope of 
Wall Street, and a human slaughter on a scale no earlier tyranny had 
possessed the physical means, let alone the wish, to bring about. By 
the time John Strachey wrote of fleeing capitalist death to find Soviet 
birth, this gruesome feat of social engineering had been accom- 
plished. Five million peasants were dead; twice as many in forced 
labour camps. By that time, too, Stalin had acquired a pupil, admirer 
and rival in the shape of Hitler, controlling a similar autocracy and 
planning human sacrifices to ideology on an even ampler scale. For 
Americans, then, it was a case of moving from a stricken Arcadia to 
an active pandaemonium. The devils had taken over. 

When Lenin died in 1924 his autocracy was complete and Stalin, 
as General Secretary of the Party, had already inherited it. All that 
remained was the elimination of potential rivals for sole power. For 
this Stalin was well equipped. This ex-seminarist and revolutionary 
thug was half-gangster, half-bureaucrat. He had no ideals; no 
ideological notions of his own. According to the composer Shostako- 
vich, Stalin wanted to be tall, with powerful hands. The court painter 
Nalbandian satisfied this wish by fixing the angle of vision from 
below and getting his master to fold his hands over his stomach; 
several other portrait painters were shot. 1 Stalin was only five foot 
four inches tall, thin, swarthy and with a pockmarked face. A Tsarist 

261 



262 THE DEVILS 

police description of him, compiled when he was twenty-two, noted 
that the second and third toes of his left foot were fused together; 
and in addition an accident as a boy caused his left elbow to be stiff, 
with a shortening of the arm, the left hand being noticeably thicker 
than the right. As Shostakovich said, he kept hiding his right hand. 
Bukharin, two years before he was murdered, said that in his view 
Stalin suffered bitterly from these disabilities and from real or 
imagined intellectual incapacity. This suffering is probably the most 
human thing about him'; but it led him to take revenge on anyone 
with higher capacities: There is something diabolical and inhuman 
about his compulsion to take vengeance for this same suffering on 
everybody .... This is a small, vicious man; no, not a man, but a 
devil.' 2 Stalin did not have Lenin's ideological passion for violence. 
But he was capable of unlimited violence to achieve his purposes, or 
indeed for no particular reason; and he sometimes nursed feelings of 
revenge against individuals for years before executing them. He 
served his apprenticeship in large-scale violence as Chairman of the 
North Caucasus Military District in 1918, when he decided to act 
against his 'bourgeois military specialists' whom he suspected of lack 
of enthusiasm for killing. The chief of staff of the district, Colonel 
Nosovich, testified: 'Stalin's order was brief, "Shoot them!" .... A 
large number of officers . . . were seized by the Cheka and 
immediately shot without trial.' 3 At the time Stalin also complained 
of all three Red Army commanders in the area sent to him by Trotsky 
and later held this as a grudge against him. He had them all 
murdered in 1937-9. 4 

However, immediately after Lenin's incapacitation and mindful of 
his criticisms, Stalin sought power by posing as a moderate and a 
man of the Centre. His problem was as follows. By controlling the 
rapidly expanding Secretariat Stalin was already in virtual control of 
the party machinery and in the process of filling the Central 
Committee with his creatures. On the Politburo, however, four 
important figures stood between him and autocracy: Trotsky, the 
most famous and ferocious of the Bolsheviks, who controlled the 
army; Zinoviev, who ran the Leningrad party - for which Stalin, 
then and later, had a peculiar hatred; Kamenev, who controlled the 
Moscow party, now the most important; and Bukharin, the leading 
theorist. The first three leaned towards the Left, the last to the Right, 
and the way in which Stalin divided and used them to destroy each 
other, and then appropriated their policies as required - he seems to 
have had none of his own — is a classic exercise in power-politics. 

It is important to realize that, just as Lenin was the creator of the 
new autocracy and its instruments and practice of mass terror, so 
also there were no innocents among his heirs. All were vicious killers. 



THE DEVILS 263 

Even Bukharin, whom Lenin called 'soft as wax' and who has been 
presented as the originator of 'socialism with a human face', 5 was an 
inveterate denouncer of others, 'a gaoler of the best Communists' as 
he was bitterly called. 6 Zinoviev and Kamenev were wholly un- 
scrupulous party bosses. Trotsky, who after his fall presented himself 
as a believer in party democracy and who was apotheosized by his 
follower and hagiographer Isaac Deutscher as the epitome of all that 
was noblest in the Bolshevik movement, was never more than a 
sophisticated political gangster. 7 He carried through the original 
October 1917 putsch and thereafter slaughtered opponents of the 
regime with the greatest abandon. It was he who first held wives and 
children of Tsarist officers hostage, threatening to shoot them for 
non-compliance with Soviet orders, a device soon built into the 
system. He was equally ruthless with his own side, shooting com- 
missars and Red Army commanders who 'showed cowardice' (i.e. 
retreated), later to become a universal Stalinist practice; the rank- 
and-file were decimated. 8 Trotsky always took the most ruthless line. 
He invented conscript labour and destroyed the independent trade 
unions. He used unspeakable brutality to put down the Kronstadt 
rising of ordinary sailors and was even preparing to use poison gas 
when it collapsed. 9 Like Lenin, he identified himself with history and 
argued that history was above all moral restraints. 

Trotsky remained a moral relativist of the most dangerous kind 
right to the end. 'Problems of revolutionary morality', he wrote in his 
last, posthumous book, 'are fused with the problems of revolution- 
ary strategy and tactics.' 10 There were no such things as moral 
criteria; only criteria of political efficacy. He said it was right to 
murder the Tsar's children, as he had done, because it was politically 
useful and those who carried it out represented the proletariat; but 
Stalin did not represent the proletariat - he had become a 'bureau- 
cratic excess' - and therefore it was wrong for him to murder 
Trotsky's children. 11 Trotsky's followers are, of course, notorious 
for their attachment to this subjectively defined code of ethics and 
their contempt for objective morality. 

The term 'Trotskyist', first used as a term of abuse by Zinoviev, 
was defined in its mature form by Stalin, who created the distinction 
between 'permanent revolution' (Trotsky) and 'revolution in one 
country' (Stalin). In fact they all believed in immediate world 
revolution to begin with, and all turned to consolidating the regime 
when it didn't happen. Trotsky wanted to press ahead with indus- 
trialization faster than Stalin but both were, from first to last, 
opportunists. They had graduated in the same slaughterhouse and 
their quarrel was essentially about who should be its new high priest. 
Had Trotsky come out on top, he would probably have been even 



264 THE DEVILS 

more bloodthirsty than Stalin. But he would not have lasted: he 
lacked the skills of survival. 

Indeed Stalin found it easy to destroy him. Soviet internal struggles 
have always been about ambition and fear rather than policies. 
Although Kamenev and Zinoviev were broadly in agreement with 
Trotsky's Left line, Stalin formed a triumvirate with them to prevent 
him using the Red Army to stage a personal putsch. He used the two 
Leftists to hunt Trotsky down and afterwards was able to present 
them as violently impetuous and himself as the servant of modera- 
tion. All the crucial moves took place in 1923, while Lenin was still 
in a coma. Stalin flexed his muscles in the summer by getting the 
ogpu to arrest a number of party members for 'indiscipline 5 and 
persuading his two Leftist allies to endorse the arrest of the first 
major Bolshevist victim, Sultan-Galiyev (Stalin did not actually 
murder him until six years later). 12 All the time he was building up 
his following in local organizations and the cc. 

Trotsky made every mistake open to him. During his 1920 visit 
Bertrand Russell had shrewdly noted the contrast between Trotsky's 
histrionics and vanity, and Lenin's lack of such weakness. An 
eye-witness account of the 1923-4 Politburo meetings says that 
Trotsky never bothered to conceal his contempt for his colleagues, 
sometimes slamming out or ostentatiously turning his back and 
reading a novel. 13 He scorned the notion of political intrigue and still 
more its demeaning drudgery. He never attempted to use the army 
since he put the party first; but then he did not build up a following 
in the party either. He must have been dismayed when for the first 
time he attacked Stalin in the autumn of 1923 and discovered how 
well-entrenched he was. Trotsky wanted the palm without the dust, a 
fatal mistake for a gangster who could not appeal from the mafia to 
the public. He was often sick or away; never there at the right time. 
He even missed Lenin's state funeral, a serious error since it was 
Stalin's first move towards restoring the reverential element in 
Russian life that had been so sadly missed since the destruction of the 
throne and church. 14 Soon Stalin was resurrecting the old 
Trotsky-Lenin rows. At the thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924 
he branded Trotsky with the Leninist term of 'fractionalist'. Trotsky 
refused to retract his criticism that Stalin was becoming too power- 
ful. But he could not dispute Lenin's condemnation of internal 
opposition and, like a man accused of heresy by the Inquisition, he 
was disarmed by his own religious belief. 'Comrades,' he admitted, 
'none of us wishes to be right or can be right against the party. The 
party is in the last resort always right ... I know that one cannot be 
right against the party. One can only be right with the party and 
through the party, since history has created no other paths to the 



THE DEVILS 265 

realization of what is right.' 15 Since Stalin was already in control of 
the party, Trotsky's words forged the ice-pick that crushed his skull 
sixteen years later. 

By the end of 1924 Stalin, with Kamenev and Zinoviev doing the 
dirty work, had created the heresy of Trotskyism' and related it to 
Trotsky's earlier disputes with Lenin, who had been embalmed and 
put into his apotheosis-tomb five months earlier. In January 1925 
Stalin was thus able to strip Trotsky of the army control with the full 
approval of the party. Party stalwarts were now informed that 
Trotsky's part in the Revolution was very much less than he claimed 
and his face was already being blacked out of relevant photographs - 
the first instance of Stalinist re-writing of history. 16 Trotsky's first 
replacement as army boss, Frunze, proved awkward; so it seems 
Stalin had him murdered in October 1925 in the course of an 
operation his doctors had advised against. 17 His successor, a creature 
later to be known as Marshal Voroshilov, proved entirely obedient 
and accepted the rapid penetration of the army by the ogpu, which 
Stalin now controlled. 

With Trotsky destroyed (he was expelled from the Politburo 
October 1926, from the party the following month, sent into internal 
exile in 1928 and exiled from Russia in 1929; murdered on Stalin's 
orders in Mexico in 1940), Stalin turned on his Leftist allies. Early in 
1925 he stole Kamenev's Moscow party from under his nose by 
suborning his deputy, Uglanov. In September he brought in Bukharin 
and the Right to help in a frontal attack on Zinoviev-Kamenev, and 
had them decisively defeated at the Party Congress in December. 
Immediately afterwards, Stalin's most trusted and ruthless hench- 
man, Molotov, was sent to Leningrad with a powerful squad of party 
'heavies', to smash up Zinoviev's party apparatus there and take it 
over - essentially the same methods, but on a larger scale, that Al 
Capone was employing to extend his territory in Chicago at that very 
time. 18 Frightened, Zinoviev now joined forces with Trotsky, the 
man he had helped to break. But it was too late: they were both 
immediately expelled from the party, and at the fifteenth Party 
Congress in December 1926, Kamenev's protest was shouted down 
by the massed ranks of carefully drilled Stalinists who now filled the 
party's ranks. Consciously echoing Lenin, Stalin came out into the 
open against his old allies: 'Enough comrades, an end must be put to 
this game .... Kamenev's speech is the most lying, pharasaical, 
scoundrelly and roguish of all the opposition speeches that have been 
made from this platform.' 19 

The moment the Left was beaten and disarmed, Stalin began to 
adopt their policy of putting pressure on the peasants to speed 
industrialization, thus preparing the means to destroy Bukharin and 



266 THE DEVILS 

the Right. The big clash came on 10 July 1928 at a meeting of the 
Central Committee, when Bukharin argued that while the kulak 
himself was not a threat - 'we can shoot him down with machine- 
guns' — forced collectivization would unite all the peasants against 
the government. Stalin interrupted him with sinister piety, 'A fearful 
dream, but God is merciful!' 20 God might be; not the General- 
Secretary. The next day, a scared Bukharin speaking on behalf of his 
allies Rykov, the nominal head of the government, and Tomsky, the 
hack 'trade union' leader, had a secret meeting with Kamenev and 
offered to form a united front to stop Stalin. He now realized, he 
said, that Stalin was not primarily interested in policy but in sole 
power: 'He will strangle us. He is an unprincipled intriguer who 
subordinates everything to his appetite for power. At any given 
moment he will change his theories in order to get rid of someone . . . 
[He is] Genghis Khan!' He seems to have thought that Yagoda, of the 
ogpu, would come over to them; but he was misinformed. 21 None 
of these nervous men had the numerical support in the key party 
bodies to outvote Stalin; or the means, in the shape of trained men 
with guns, to overrule him by force; or the skill and resolution - both 
of which he had shown in abundance - to destroy him by intrigue. In 
1929 they were all dealt with: Rykov ousted from the premiership, 
Tomsky from the trade union leadership, and both, plus Bukharin, 
forced publicly to confess their errors (Kamenev and Zinoviev had 
already done so). They could now be tried and murdered at leisure. 

Stalin had already begun to perfect the dramaturgy of terror. 
Drawing on his monkish memories, he arranged party meetings to 
provide a well-rehearsed antiphonal dialogue between himself and 
his claque, with Stalin suggesting moderation in dealing with party 
'enemies' and the claque insisting on severity. Thus, reluctantly 
demanding the expulsion of Trotsky and Zinoviev, Stalin said he had 
been against this before and had been 'cursed' by 'honest Bolsheviks' 
for being too lenient. The claque: 'Yes - and we still do curse you for 
it.' 22 In May-July 1929 Stalin staged the first of his show-trials, 
against a group of Donbass mining engineers charged with 'sabot- 
age'. The script was written by the ogpu official Y.G.Yevdokimov, 
one of Stalin's creatures, and featured the twelve-year-old son of one 
of the accused, who denounced his father and called for his execu- 
tion. 23 The actual head of the ogpu, Menzhinsky, opposed this trial, 
as did some Politburo members. 24 But this was the last time Stalin 
met genuine opposition from within the secret police or security 
apparatus. Towards the end of the year he ordered the shooting of 
the senior ogpu official Yakov Blyumkin, the first party member to 
be executed for an intra-party crime. 25 

Thereafter the trials went exactly as Stalin planned them, down to 



THE DEVILS 267 

the last indignant crowd-scene, like some gigantic production by the 
Soviet cineaste Sergei Eisenstein. While the trial of the 'Industrial 
Party' was taking place the next year, the body of the court shouted, 
at carefully arranged intervals, 'Death to the wreckers!' and in the 
streets outside, thousands of workers marched past shouting 'Death, 
death, death!' 26 By 1929 Stalin had the all-purpose term Stakhtyites 
(wreckers) for anyone he wished to destroy. As he put it, 'Stakhtyites 
are now lurking in all branches of our industry. Many, though far 
from all, have been caught .... Wrecking is all the more dangerous 
because it is linked with international capital. Bourgeois wrecking is 
an indubitable sign that capitalist elements ... are gathering strength 
for new attacks on the Soviet Union.' 27 He was rapidly moving to the 
point when he had only to mention a list of names to the Central 
Committee and would receive the instant instructions: 'Arrest, try, 
shoot!' 28 

While goading on the witch-hunting and building up the paranoia 
and hysteria, Stalin was contriving his own apotheosis as the heir of 
the deified Lenin. As early as 1924—5, Yuzovka, Yuzovo and 
Tsaritsyn became Stalino, Stalinsky, Stalingrad; but it was the fiftieth 
birthday celebrations at the end of 1929 which marked the real 
beginning not only of Stalin's unfettered personal rule but of the 
Stalin cult in all its nightmare maturity, with names like Stalinabad, 
Stalin-Aul, Staliniri, Stalinissi, Stalino, Stalinogorsk, Stalinsk, 
Mount Stalin, sprouting all over the Soviet Empire, and with the first 
appearance of the Stalinist litanies: Man of Steel, the Granite 
Bolshevik, the Brass-hard Leninist, the Iron Soldier, the Universal 
Genius, 29 a form of ruler-worship which went back to the Egyptian 
pharaohs. While Soviet government became more hieratic and 
liturgical in its externals, and more terroristic in essentials, Soviet 
'science' moved into the irrational, with quasi-religious groups of 
'leading thinkers', known variously as Geneticists, Teleologists, 
Mechanists and Dialecticians — there were many others — struggling 
to win Stalin's approval for their all-embracing theories of physical 
progress, 30 Some of the experts at Stalin's court were ready to argue 
that, with the 'Man of Steel' in charge, human will could overcome 
anything, and what had hitherto been regarded as the laws of nature 
or of economics could be suspended. As one of his economists, 
S.G.Shumilin, put it: 'Our task is not to study economics but to 
change it. We are bound by no laws.' 31 

It was against this background of irrationality, and thus emanci- 
pated from any system of economics or morality, that Stalin carried 
through his colossal exercise in social engineering, the destruction of 
the independent Russian peasantry. As we have seen, it was the 
peasants who had made Lenin's putsch possible; and who had later, 



268 THE DEVILS 

by defying him, forced on him the surrender he had concealed by the 
euphemism New Economic Planning. It was in the name of the 
continuity of Leninism and the nep that Stalin had destroyed the Left 
in the years 1924—8. But now the time had come to exact a dreadful 
revenge on the rural multitudes who had humbled Soviet power. 

There was no theoretical basis in Marxism, or anything else, for 
what Stalin now did. But it had a certain monstrous logic. There is no 
point of stability in a state which is socializing itself. It must go either 
forward or back. If it does not go forward, the power of the market 
system, which expresses certain basic human instincts of barter and 
accumulation, is such that it will always reassert itself, and capital- 
ism will make its reappearance. Then the embryo socialist state will 
collapse. If socialism is to go forward, it must push ahead with 
large-scale industrialization. That means surplus food for the 
workers; and surplus food to export to raise money for capital 
investment. In short the peasants must pay the price for socialist 
progress. And since they are unwilling to pay this price voluntarily, 
force must be used, in ever-growing quantities, until their will is 
broken and they deliver what is required of them. That is the bitter 
logic of socialist power which Stalin grasped in the 1920s: there was 
no stable point of rest between a return to capitalism and the use of 
unlimited force. 32 

This logic formed a sinister counterpoint to the successive stages of 
Stalin's destruction of his opponents to Left and Right. Trotsky, 
Zinoviev and Kamenev had always argued that the peasant would 
never surrender enough food voluntarily, and must be coerced and, if 
need be, crushed. Stalin removed them, using the argument that they 
planned to 'plunder the peasantry' which was 'the ally of the 
working class', not to be subjected to 'increased pressure'. 33 But the 
harvest of 1927 was poor and that was when the logic of socialism 
began to operate. The peasants hoarded what food they had; they 
would not take the government's paper money, which bought 
nothing worth having. Thus Lenin's compromise, based on the 
theory of backing the 76.7 million 'middle peasants' and the 22.4 
million 'poor peasants' against the 5 million 'kulaks' (in fact it was 
impossible to make these distinctions except on paper: all peasants 
hated the government), broke down. 34 

In January 1928, with no food in the towns, no grain exports and 
increasingly short of foreign currency, Stalin unleashed his first 
attack on the peasants, sending 30,000 armed party workers into the 
countryside, a repetition of the gouging process used in 1918. There 
were soon reports of atrocities, disguised by such phrases as 'compe- 
tition between grain-collective organizations', 'regrettable lapses 
from Soviet legality', 'slipping into the methods of War Commun- 



THE DEVILS 269 

ism', 'administrative mistakes' and so forth. More sinister was the 
growing tendency of Stalin's spokesmen to lump all peasants to- 
gether. Molotov spoke of forcing 'the middle peasant to come to 
heel'; Mikoyan accused the 'poor peasant' of being 'under kulak 
influence'. Some 1,400 'terrorist acts' by peasants (that is, resistance 
to seizure of food by armed force) were reported in 1928. One kulak, 
caught with a rifle, sneered, 'This is what the class war is all about.' 
The Smolensk region records, captured by the Nazis and later 
published, give us our only glimpse, through unfiltered official 
documents, into this seething cauldron of peasant agony. For the first 
time Stalin used the word 'liquidate', referring to 'the first serious 
campaign of capitalist elements in the countryside . . . against the 
Soviet power'. Anyone, he cynically remarked, who thought the 
policy could be carried through without unpleasantness, 'is not a 
Marxist but a fool'. 35 

But stealing the peasants' food led to them sowing less, and the 
1928 harvest was even worse. By the autumn of 1928, Stalin's need 
for foreign exchange was desperate, as we know from a quite 
separate development, the large-scale secret sales of Russian art 
treasures to the West. It was in November 1928, according to one of 
the Leningrad Hermitage curators, Tatiana Chernavin, that 'We 
were commanded in the shortest possible time to reorganize the 
whole of the Hermitage collection "on the principles of sociological 
formations" . . . and set to work and pulled to pieces a collection 
which it had taken more than a hundred years to create.' 36 The 
paintings went to millionaires all over the world. The biggest 
purchaser was Andrew Mellon, who in 1930-1 bought for 
$6,654,053 a total of twenty-one paintings, including five Rem- 
brandts, a Van Eyck, two Franz Hals, a Rubens, four Van Dycks, 
two Raphaels, a Velazquez, a Botticelli, a Veronese, a Chardin, a 
Titian and a Perugino - probably the finest hoard ever transferred in 
one swoop and cheap at the price. All went into the Washington 
National Gallery, which Mellon virtually created. It is one of the 
many ironies of this period that, at a time when the intelligentsia 
were excoriating Mellon for tax-evasion, and contrasting the 
smooth-running Soviet planned economy with the breakdown in 
America, he was secretly exploiting the frantic necessities of the 
Soviet leaders to form the basis of one of America's most splendid 
public collections. 37 The dollar value of Mellon's purchases alone 
came to a third of all officially recorded Soviet exports to the USA in 
1930. 

By a further and more fearful irony, it was the example of 
successful enterprise in America which finally persuaded Stalin to 
drop his flagging policy of extorting grain from independent pea- 



270 THE DEVILS 

sants and to herd them all by force into collectives. Hitherto Stalin 
had always denied that co-operatives and collectives were different, 
describing the collective farm as merely 'the most pronounced type of 
producer co-operative'. 38 As such it was a voluntary institution. But 
in 1928 Stalin heard of the great Campbell farm in Montana, 
covering over 30,000 hectares, the biggest single grain-producer in 
the world. 39 He decided to set up such 'grain factories' in Russia, on 
a gigantic scale. One of 150,000 hectares was cobbled together the 
same year in the Caucasus. This unit was equipped with 300 tractors, 
and the tractor (as opposed to the wooden plough, of which 5.5 
million were still in use in Russia in October 1927) became for Stalin 
a symbol of the future, as electricity was for Lenin. He got his men to 
accuse kulaks of an anti-tractor campaign, saying they spread 
rumours of 'anti-Christ coming to earth on a steel horse', of 
petrol-fumes 'poisoning' the soil and Volga sayings: 'The tractor digs 
deep, the soil dries up.' In fact it was the richer peasants who were 
buying tractors as quickly as they could afford them. Stalin's forcing 
of what he called 'tractor columns' and 'tractor stations' on the 
collectives led to what one of the few independent observers de- 
scribed as 'the reckless treatment of machinery in all the socialized 
lands' and 'fleets of disabled tractors' which 'dot the Russian 
landscape'. 40 But this was characteristic of Stalin's ignorance of what 
actually went on in the Russian countryside - an ignorance, of 
course, which Lenin had shared. According to Khrushchev, 'Stalin 
separated himself from the people and never went anywhere .... The 
last time he visited a village was in January 1928. ' 41 The whole of the 
gigantic operation of collectivizing the peasants, involving about 105 
million people, was conducted from Stalin's study in the Kremlin. 

Not that there was much deliberative and rational planning about 
it. Quite the contrary. The case against using force to bring peasants 
into state farms had always been regarded as unassailable. It was 
based on Engels's dictum in his The Peasant Question in France and 
Germany (1894): 'When we acquire state power we shall not think 
of appropriating the small peasants by force.' Lenin often quoted this 
passage. Even Trotsky had spoken of 'agreement', 'compromise' and 
'gradual transition'. As late as 2 June 1929 Pravda insisted: 'Neither 
terror nor de-kulakization, but a socialist offensive on the paths of 
nep.' 42 The decision to collectivize by force was taken suddenly, 
without any kind of public debate, in the last weeks of 1929. It was 
typical of the way in which the pursuit of Utopia leads the tiny 
handful of men in power abruptly to assault a society many centuries 
in the making, to treat men like ants and stamp on their nest. 
Without warning, Stalin called for an 'all-out offensive against the 
kulak .... We must smash the kulaks, eliminate them as a class .... 



THE DEVILS 271 

We must strike at the kulaks so hard as to prevent them from rising 
to their feet again .... We must break down the resistance of that 
class in open battle.' On 27 December 1929, the Feast of St John the 
Apostle, he declared war with the slogan 'Liquidate the kulaks as a 
class!' 43 It was the green light for a policy of extermination, more 
than three years before Hitler came to power, twelve years before the 
ordering of the 'Final Solution'. 

Collectivization was a calamity such as no peasantry had known 
since the Thirty Years' War in Germany. The organizing agency was 
the ogpu but any instrument which came to hand was used. The 
poorer peasants were encouraged to loot the homes of dispossessed 
kulaks and hunt them down across the fields. But soon kulak meant 
any peasant whatever who actively opposed collectivization, and 
entire peasant communities resisted desperately. They were sur- 
rounded by police and military units, using methods which Hitler 
imitated in detail when rounding up the Jews, and gunned down or 
forced into trucks for deportation. Deutscher, travelling in Russia, 
met an ogpu colonel who wept, saying, 'I am an old Bolshevik. I 
worked in the underground against the Tsar and then I fought in the 
civil war. Did I do all that in order that I should now surround 
villages with machine-guns and order my men to fire indiscriminately 
into crowds of peasants? Oh, no, no, no!' 44 The large-scale violence 
began at the end of 1929 and continued to the end of February, by 
which time the number of collectivized households had jumped to 
about 30 per cent. Disturbed by the scale of the resistance, Stalin 
suddenly reversed his policy in a Pravda article of 2 March 1930: 
'One cannot implant collective farms by violence - that would be 
stupid and reactionary.' But half the collectives then voted to 
denationalize themselves in a few weeks, and by early summer he had 
resumed his 'stupid and reactionary' policy of force, this time 
carrying it through to the bitter end. 45 

The result was what the great Marxist scholar Leszek Kolakowski 
has called 'probably the most massive warlike operation ever con- 
ducted by a state against its own citizens'. 46 The number of peasants 
actually shot by the regime is not yet known and may not be 
discoverable even when, and if, scholars ever get at the Soviet 
archives. Churchill said that, in Moscow in August 1942, Stalin told 
him coolly that 'ten millions' of peasants had been 'dealt with'. 47 
According to one scholarly estimate, in addition to those peasants 
executed by the ogpu or killed in battle, between 10 and 11 million 
were transported to north European Russia, to Siberia and Central 
Asia; of these one-third went into concentration camps, a third into 
internal exile and a third were executed or died in transit. 48 

The peasants who remained were stripped of their property, 



272 THE DEVILS 

however small, and herded into the 'grain factories'. To prevent them 
from fleeing to the towns, a system of internal passports was 
introduced, and any change of domicile without official permission 
was punished by imprisonment. Peasants were not allowed passports 
at all. So they were tied to the soil, glebae adscript^ as in the final 
phases of the Roman Empire or during the age of feudal serfdom. 
The system was more stringent than in the blackest periods of the 
Tsarist autocracy, and was not relaxed until the 1970s. 49 

The result was predictable: what has been termed 'perhaps the 
only case in history of a purely man-made famine'. 50 Rather than 
surrender their grain, the peasants burnt it. They smashed their 
implements. They slaughtered 18 million horses, 30 million cattle 
(45 per cent of the total), 100 million sheep and goats (two-thirds of 
the total). Even according to the figures in the official Soviet history, 
livestock production was only 65 per cent of the 1913 level in 1933, 
draught animals fell by more than 50 per cent, and total draught 
power, including tractors, did not surpass the 1928 level until 1935. 51 
Despite the famine of 1932—3, Stalin managed to keep up some grain 
exports to pay for imported machinery, including the tooling of his 
new war-factories. The cost in Russian lives was staggering. Iosif 
Dyadkin's demographic study, 'Evaluation of Unnatural Deaths in 
the Population of the USSR 1927-58', which circulated in samizdat 
(underground newsletter) form in the late 1970s, calculates that 
during the collectivization and 'elimination of the classes' period, 
1929-36, 10 million men, women and children met unnatural 
deaths. 52 

The re-feudalization of the Soviet peasantry, who then formed 
three-quarters of the population, had a calamitous effect on the 
morale of the Communist rank-and-file, who carried it through. As 
Kolakowski puts it: 'The whole party became an organization of 
torturers and oppressors. No one was innocent, and all Communists 
were accomplices in the coercion of society. Thus the party acquired 
a new species of moral unity, and embarked on a course from which 
there was no turning back.' 53 Exactly the same thing was to happen 
to the German National Socialists a few years later: it was Stalin who 
pointed the way to Hitler. Everyone in the party knew what was 
going on. Bukharin grumbled privately that the 'mass annihilation of 
completely defenceless men, women and children' was acclimatizing 
party members to violence and brute obedience, transforming them 
'into cogs in some terrible machine'. 54 But only one person protested 
to Stalin's face. His second wife, Nadezhda, had left him in 1926 
with her two small children, Vasily and Svetlana. Stalin persuaded 
her to return, but had her watched by the ogpu and, when she 
complained, traced her informants and had them arrested. On 



THE DEVILS 273 

7 November 1932, in front of witnesses, she protested violently to 
him about his treatment of the peasants, and then went home and 
shot herself. This was the second family drama - his first son Yakov 
had attempted suicide in despair in 1928 - and Svetlana later wrote: 
'I believe that my mother's death, which he had taken as a personal 
betrayal, deprived his soul of the last vestiges of human warmth.' 55 

Stalin's response was to get the ogpu to take over the organiza- 
tion of his household; it hired and trained his servants, superintended 
his food and controlled all access to his person. 56 He operated now 
not through the normal government or party organs but through his 
personal secretariat, an outgrowth of the old party Secretariat; and 
through this he created a personal secret police within the official 
one, called the Special Secret Political Department of State 
Security. 57 Thus cocooned, he felt himself invulnerable; certainly 
others did. Though the state of Russia was so desperate in 1932 that 
Stalin's regime came near to foundering, as had Lenin's early in 
1921, no one came even near to killing him. 

As for the planning, held up as a model to the world, it was in all 
essentials a paper exercise. None of its figures have ever been 
independently verified, from 1928 to this day. The non- 
governmental auditing controls, which are an essential part of every 
constitutional state under the rule of law, do not exist in the Soviet 
Union. There was something fishy about the First Five Year Plan 
from the start. It was approved by the Central Committee in 
November 1928, formally adopted in May 1929, and then declared 
retrospectively operative since October 1928! Since from the end of 
1929 the entire country was turned upside down by the sudden 
decision to collectivize agriculture, the 1928 Plan (assuming it ever 
existed in fact) was rendered totally irrelevant. Yet in January 1933, 
the month Hitler came to power, Stalin suddenly announced it had 
been completed in four-and-a-half years, with 'maximum over- 
fulfilment' in many respects. 58 

The Plan, held up to sophisticated Western society as a model of 
civilized process, was in fact a barbarous fantasy. Russia is a rich 
country, with a wealth and variety of raw materials unparalleled 
anywhere else in the world. The Soviet regime inherited an expan- 
ding population and a rapidly growing industrial base. As Wilhel- 
mine Germany had surmised, nothing could stop Russia becoming 
one of the greatest, soon the greatest, industrial power on earth. The 
policies of Lenin and, still more, Stalin — or rather the series of hasty 
expedients which passed for policy — had the net effect of slowing 
down that inevitable expansion, just as Lenin-Stalin policies enor- 
mously, and in this case permanently, damaged Russia's flourishing 
agriculture. 



274 THE DEVILS 

But progress was made nonetheless. Great projects were com- 
pleted. There was the Dnieper Dam of 1932; the Stalingrad tractor 
factory; the Magnitogorsk steel plant in the Urals; the Kuznetsk 
Basin mines of Siberia; the Baltic-White Sea Canal; and many 
others. Some of them, such as the canal, were built wholly or in part 
by slave labour. As we have seen, the use of political slaves had been 
part of the Lenin regime - though initially a small part - from its first 
months. Under Stalin the system expanded, first slowly, then with 
terrifying speed. Once forced collectivization got under way, in 
1930—3, the concentration camp population rose to 10 million, and 
after the beginning of 1933 it never fell below this figure until well 
after Stalin's death. Among industries which regularly employed 
slave-labour on a large scale were gold-mining, forestry, coal, 
industrial agriculture and transport - especially the building of 
canals, railways, airports and roads. The ogpu negotiated slave- 
labour deals with various government agencies in exactly the same 
manner that the Nazi ss were later to hire such labour to Krupps, 
I.G.Farben and other German firms. For the big Baltic-White Sea 
Canal, one of Stalin's showpieces, 300,000 slaves were used. 59 Slave- 
labour ceased to be marginal, as in Lenin's time, and became an 
important and integral part of the Stalinist economy, with the ogpu 
administering large areas of Siberia and Central Asia. 60 

The death-rate in totalitarian slave-labour camps appears to have 
been about 10 per cent a year, to judge from German figures. 61 It 
may have been higher in Russia because so many of the camps were 
located within the Arctic and sub-Arctic regions. At all events the 
need to keep the slave-labour force supplied was undoubtedly one of 
the main reasons for the countless arrests of non-party workers 
during the years 1929-33. Periodically there were carefully staged 
show-trials, such as the Menshevik trial in March 1931, or the 
Metro -Vickers engineers trial in April 1933. These highly publicized 
events, which revealed in elaborate detail the existence of a series of 
diabolical conspiracies, each a small part of one gigantic conspiracy 
against the regime and the Russian people, were needed to create the 
xenophobia and hysteria without which the Stalinist state could not 
hang together at all. But of course they were only a tiny fraction of 
the process, the public rationale for arrests and disappearances 
taking place all over the country on an unprecedented scale. 

Most 'trials' were not reported, although they often involved large 
groups of people, classified together according to occupation. Many 
were never tried at all. The arbitrary nature of the arrests was 
essential to create the climate of fear which, next to the need for 
labour, was the chief motive for the non-party terror. An ogpu man 
admitted to the Manchester Guardian Moscow correspondent that 



THE DEVILS 275 

innocent people were arrested: naturally — otherwise no one would 
be frightened. If people, he said, were arrested only for specific 
misdemeanours, all the others would feel safe and so become ripe 
for treason. 62 But this apart, there seems to have been no pattern of 
logic or sense in many instances. An old Bolshevik recounts the case 
of an energy expert who, over eighteen months, was arrested, 
sentenced to death, pardoned, sent to a camp, released, rehabili- 
tated and finally given a medal, all for no apparent reason. 63 But 
the overwhelming majority of those arrested spent the rest of their 
lives in the camps. 

In the outside world, the magnitude of the Stalin tyranny — or 
indeed its very existence - was scarcely grasped at all. Most of 
those who travelled to Russia were either businessmen, anxious to 
trade and with no desire to probe or criticize what did not concern 
them, or intellectuals who came to admire and, still more, to 
believe. If the decline of Christianity created the modern political 
zealot - and his crimes - so the evaporation of religious faith among 
the educated left a vacuum in the minds of Western intellectuals 
easily filled by secular superstition. There is no other explanation 
for the credulity with which scientists, accustomed to evaluat- 
ing evidence, and writers, whose whole function was to study and 
criticize society, accepted the crudest Stalinist propaganda at its face 
value. They needed to believe; they wanted to be duped. 64 Thus, 
Amabel Williams-Ellis wrote an introduction to a book about the 
building of the White Sea Canal, later so harrowingly described by 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, which contains the sentence: 'This tale of 
accomplishment of a ticklish engineering job, in the middle of 
primaeval forests, by tens of thousands of enemies of the state, 
helped - or should it be guarded? - by only thirty-seven ogpu 
officers, is one of the most exciting stories that has ever appeared in 
print.' Sidney and Beatrice Webb said of the same project: 'It is 
pleasant to think that the warmest appreciation was officially 
expressed of the success of the ogpu, not merely in performing a 
great engineering feat, but in achieving a triumph in humari regen- 
eration.' Harold Laski praised Soviet prisons for enabling convicts 
to lead 'a full and self-respecting life'; Anna Louise Strong re- 
corded: 'The labour camps have won a high reputation throughout 
the Soviet Union as places where tens of thousands of men have 
been reclaimed.' 'So well-known and effective is the Soviet method 
of remaking human beings', she added, 'that criminals occasionally 
now apply to be admitted.' Whereas in Britain, wrote George 
Bernard Shaw, a man enters prison a human being and emerges a 
criminal type, in Russia he entered 'as a criminal type and would 
come out an ordinary man but for the difficulty of inducing him to 



276 THE DEVILS 

come out at all. As far as I could make out they could stay as long as they 
liked.' 65 

The famine of 1932, the worst in Russian history, was virtually 
unreported. At the height of it, the visiting biologist Julian Huxley 
found 'a level of physique and general health rather above that to be 
seen in England'. Shaw threw his food supplies out of the train window 
just before crossing the Russian frontier 'convinced that there were no 
shortages in Russia'. 'Where do you see any food shortage?' he asked, 
glancing round the foreigners-only restaurant of the Moscow Metro- 
pole. 66 He wrote: 'Stalin has delivered the goods to an extent that 
seemed impossible ten years ago, and I take off my hat to him 
accordingly.' But Shaw and his travelling companion, Lady Astor, 
knew of the political prisoners, since the latter asked Stalin for clemency 
on behalf of a woman who wished to join her husband in America 
(Stalin promptly handed her over to the ogpu) and she asked him, 
'How long are you going to go on killing people?' When he replied 'As 
long as necessary', she changed the subject and asked him to find her a 
Russian nurserymaid for her children. 67 

Estimates of Stalin written in the years 1929-34 make curious 
reading. H. G. Wells said he had 'never met a man more candid, fair and 
honest. . .no one is afraid of him and everybody trusts him'. The Webbs 
argued that he had less power than an American president and was 
merely acting on the orders of the Central Committee and the 
Presidium. Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, described him as 
leading 'his people down new and unfamiliar avenues of democracy'. 
The American Ambassador, Joseph E. Davies, reported him as having 
'insisted on the liberalization of the constitution' and 'projecting actual 
secret and universal suffrage'. 'His brown eye is exceedingly wise and 
gentle,' he wrote. 'A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would 
sidle up to him.' Emil Ludwig, the famous popular biographer, found 
him a man 'to whose care I would readily confide the education of my 
children'. The physicist J.D.Bernal paid tribute both to his 'deeply 
scientific approach to all problems' and to his 'capacity for feeling'. He 
was, said the Chilean writer Pablo Neruda, 'a good-natured man of 
principle'; 'a man of kindly geniality', echoed the Dean. 68 

Some of these tributes can be variously explained by corruption, 
vanity or sheer folly. Davies, who consistently misrepresented the 
nature of Stalin's Russia to his government, was being in effect bribed 
by the Soviet regime, who allowed him to buy icons and chalices for his 
collection at below-market prices. 69 Anna Louise Strong was well 
described by Malcolm Muggeridge as 'an enormous woman with a very 
red face, a lot of white hair, and an expression of stupidity so 
overwhelming that it amounted to a kind of strange beauty'. 70 
Self-delusion was obviously the biggest single factor in the presentation 



THE DEVILS 277 

of an unsuccessful despotism as a Utopia in the making. But there 
was also conscious deception by men and women who thought of 
themselves as idealists and who, at the time, honestly believed they 
were serving a higher human purpose by systematic misrepresenta- 
tion and lying. If the Great War with its unprecedented violence 
brutalized the world, the Great Depression corrupted it by appearing 
to limit the options before humanity and presenting them in garishly 
contrasting terms. Political activists felt they had to make terrible 
choices and, having made them, stick to them with desperate 
resolution. The Thirties was the age of the heroic lie. Saintly 
mendacity became its most prized virtue. Stalin's tortured Russia was 
the prime beneficiary of this sanctified falsification. The competition 
to deceive became more fierce when Stalinism acquired a mortal rival 
in Hitler's Germany. 

There was, indeed, an element of deception right at the heart of 
this rivalry between the Communist and fascist forms of totalitarian- 
ism. They were organically linked in the process of historical 
development. Just as the war had made Lenin's violent seizure of 
power possible, and German 'War Socialism' had given him an 
economic policy, so the very existence of the Leninist state, with its 
one-party control of all aspects of public life and its systematized 
moral relativism, offered a model to all those who hated the liberal 
society, parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. It inspired 
imitation and it generated fear; and those who feared it most were 
most inclined to imitate its methods in constructing defensive 
counter-models of their own. Totalitarianism of the Left bred 
totalitarianism of the Right; Communism and fascism were the 
hammer and the anvil on which liberalism was broken to pieces. The 
emergence of Stalin's autocracy changed the dynamic of corruption 
not in kind but in degree. For Stalin 'was but old Lenin writ large'. 
The change in degree nonetheless was important because of its sheer 
scale. The arrests, the prisons, the camps, the scope, the brutality and 
violence of the social engineering — nothing like it had ever been seen 
or even imagined before. So the counter-model became more mon- 
strously ambitious; and the fear which energized its construction 
more intense. If Leninism begot the fascism of Mussolini, it was 
Stalinism which made possible the Nazi Leviathan. 

Hitler emerged from the Landsberg prison at the end of 1924 at 
almost exactly the same moment that Stalin completed the political 
destruction of Trotsky and established himself in a commanding 
position at the head of the Leninist state. The two events were 
connected, for Hitler now realized that he could not storm the 
Weimar state by force but would have to infiltrate it by creating a 
mass party; and the lengthening shadow of Stalin was an essential 



278 THE DEVILS 

ally in this task. It was the Communist state of 1919 which first gave 
Hitler his base in Bavaria, bringing together in a unity of fear the 
'black' Catholic separatists and the 'brown' radical-nationalists of 
Captain Roehm's private army. The core of the party was Bavarian, 
as well as an important group of Baltic refugees from Leninism living 
in Bavaria. 71 But to take power Hitler had to break out of the 
Bavarian enclave and move into the industrial north. In 1925 he 
formed an alliance with Gregor Strasser, a radical demagogue who, 
with his gifted lieutenant Joseph Goebbels, preached his own brand 
of socialist revolution to the working class. Hitler persuaded Strasser 
to transform his idea of a specifically 'German revolution', with its 
anti-capitalist but nationalist aims, into an 'anti-Jewish revolution', 
which had a broader middle-class appeal. 72 It was Strasser and 
Goebbels who first established Nazism as a broad movement in the 
north. But at the Bamberg Conference in 1926 Hitler was able to 
assert his supremacy in the party and Goebbels transferred his 
allegiance. 

During the years 1925-9, the best years of Weimar, when Ger- 
many was enjoying an industrial revival which came close to pre-war 
levels and there were no economic factors working in his favour, 
Hitler established himself as a brilliant and innovatory speaker, a 
hard-working party organizer and an authoritarian leader of terrify- 
ing will-power. As with Leninism, the organization was to become 
the basis of control once power was assumed. Hitler divided the 
country into thirty-four Gaue, based on electoral districts, each with 
a Gauleiter - whom he chose personally - and with seven additional 
Gaue for Danzig, the Saar, Austria and the Sudetenland, the objects 
of the first wave of future expansion. His party, like Lenin's, was 
highly centralized - in himself, in effect - but it was also 'participa- 
tory', as was his future regime: so there was a Hitler Youth, a Nazi 
Schoolchildren's League, a Union of Nazi Lawyers, a Students' 
League, a Nazi Teachers' Association, an Order of German Women, 
a Nazi Physicians' League and scores of other societies. Hitler's 
method was always to deny his followers any real share in decisions 
but to give them endless scope for furious activity (including 
violence). 

The violence came in increasing measure as Stalinism established 
itself in the international Communist movement and the once highly 
intellectual party of Rosa Luxemburg left the study and took to the 
streets. There, gleefully, the sa Brownshirts of Roehm joined them in 
bloody battles from which both parties derived benefit. The Com- 
munists used the violence to erode the Social Democrats (whom they 
called 'Social Fascists' and treated as the real enemy), presented by 
them as too weak and 'reformist' to stand up to the naked power of 



THE DEVILS 279 

the Right. But the Nazis were bound to be the ultimate gainers 
because, while using violence, they posed as the defenders of 'Aryan 
order', with Weimar being too weak to uphold it effectively, and as 
the only force in Germany capable of exorcizing the 'Red Terror' and 
giving innocent citizens the peace of real authority. It was the 
constant street warfare which prevented the Weimar Republicans 
from deriving any permanent benefit from the boom years. Those 
who rejected alike a Stalinist-type tyranny and a liberal-capitalist 
state which could not provide national self-respect or even elemen- 
tary security were always looking for a 'third way'. That, signifi- 
cantly, was the original title of Bruck's book The Third Reich. In the 
late 1920s 'third way' men included such influential figures as Carl 
Schmitt, Germany's leading jurist, who was in no way a Nazi but 
who argued and pleaded in a long series of widely read books that 
Germany must have a more authoritative constitution and system of 
government. 73 Another was Oswald Spengler, whose 'third way' 
embodied the Fuhrerprinzip of authority, the Fuhrer being a repre- 
sentative member of the race of the Volk, marked out by his 
charismatic leadership. 74 Once Hitler established himself as a major 
public figure, he and his party fitted this specification more closely 
than any other contender, especially after the rise of Stalin. Spengler 
had warned about the new epoch: 'It would be an age of cruel wars 
in which new Caesars would rise and an elite of steely men, who did 
not look for personal gain and happiness but for the execution of 
duties towards the community, would replace the democrats and 
humanitarians.' 75 The age had come: did not the very name 'Stalin' 
mean 'steel'; where was Germany's 'steely man'? 

Weimar Germany was a very insecure society; it needed and never 
got a statesman who inspired national confidence. Bismarck had 
cunningly taught the parties not to aim at national appeal but to 
represent interests. They remained class or sectional pressure-groups 
under the Republic. This was fatal, for it made the party system, and 
with it democratic parliamentarianism, seem a divisive rather than a 
unifying factor. Worse: it meant the parties never produced a leader 
who appealed beyond the narrow limits of his own following. The 
Social Democrats, that worthy but dull and obstinate body, were 
most to blame. They might have created an unassailable Left— Centre 
block by dropping their nationalization and taxation schemes; but 
they refused to do so, fearing to lose ground on the Left to the 
Communists. 

Only two Weimar politicians had multi-party appeal. One was 
Gustav Stresemann, Foreign Minister 1923-9, whose death at the 
age of fifty-one was a milestone to Hitler's victory. The other was 
Konrad Adenauer, Mayor of Cologne. By a tragic irony, Stresemann 



280 THE DEVILS 

destroyed Adenauer's chances. City administration, drawing on the 
solid bourgeois traditions of the medieval past, was the only successful 
political institution in Germany. Adenauer ran the most highly rated 
municipal administration in the country with the help of the Socialists. 
In 1926, when he was fifty, he was asked to form a governing coalition 
on similar lines. He was later to show himself one of the ablest and most 
authoritative democratic statesmen of the twentieth century, skilfully 
mixing low cunning and high principle. It is more than likely he could 
have made the Weimar system work, especially since he would have 
taken it over at what, from an economic viewpoint, was the best 
possible moment. But Adenauer was a strong 'Westerner', some said a 
Rhineland separatist, who wished to tie Germany firmly to the civilized 
democracies of Western Europe, and in particular to bring about what 
he secretly described as 'a lasting peace between France and Germany 
. . . through the establishment of a community of economic interests'. 
Stresemann, however, was an 'Easterner', true to the then predominant 
German belief in the Primat der Aussenpolitik. Working through Ernst 
Scholtz, leader of the People's Party, and much helped by Marshal 
Pilsudski's establishment of a fierce military dictatorship in Poland, 
which occurred during the crisis, Stresemann successfully torpedoed 
Adenauer's bid to form a coalition including the Socialists. So his 
opportunity, which might have radically changed the entire course of 
history, was missed; and Hitler, the greatest 'Easterner' of them all, was 
the beneficiary. 76 

Weimar prosperity, 1924-9, was not as impressive as it seemed to 
some. The British cigs, to judge by his reports, was terrified of 
Germany's growing industrial strength. 77 The inflation had cleared 
German industry's load of debt, and during the second half of the 1 920s 
Benjamin Strong's bank-inflation had provided the Ruhr with huge 
quantities of American investment finance. German exports doubled in 
the five years after 1924. Production passed the pre-war level in 1927 
and by 1929 it was 12 per cent higher per capita, Germany was 
investing a net 12 per cent of income. 78 But even in the best year incomes 
in real terms were 6 per cent below pre-war levels. Unemployment was 
high too. It was 18.1 per cent in 1926, dropped to 8.8 and 8.4 for the 
next two years, then passed the 3 million mark again in the winter of 
1928—9, reaching over 13 per cent long before the Wall Street crash 
brought to an end cheap American finance. After the Smoot-Hawley 
tariff it quickly jumped to well over 20 per cent: it was 33.7 per cent in 
1931 and an appalling 43.7 per cent at one point in 1932. That winter 
there were over 6 million permanently unemployed. 79 

Hitler was put into power by fear. In the 1928 elections the Nazi 
deputies fell from fourteen to twelve and he only got 2.8 per cent of the 
vote. Yet this election marked the turning-point for him, for it brought a 



THE DEVILS 281 

huge surge in Left, and especially Communist, support and thus 
created the climate of fear in which he could flourish. By 1929 his 
party had 120,000 members; by the summer of 1930 300,000; and 
by early 1932 almost 800,000. The sa grew too, numbering half a 
million by the end of 1932. 80 At each stage, Hitler's support among 
the student and academic population rose first, then was followed by 
a general increase. By 1930 he had captured the student movement; 
the recruitment of graduates was also a function of unemployment - 
the universities turned out 25,000 a year, adding to a total of 
400,000, of whom 60,000 were officially registered as unemployed. 
In 1933 one in every three of the Akademiker was out of a job. 81 

By 1929 Hitler was respectable enough to be taken into partner- 
ship by Alfred Hugenberg, the industrialist and leader of the 
Nationalist Right, who thought he could use the Nazis on his road to 
power. The effect was to give Hitler access to business finance, and 
thereafter he never lacked money. The party system was visibly 
failing. After the 1928 election it took a year to form a government. 
In 1930 the Centre Party leader, Heinrich Bruning, tried to invoke 
Article 48 to rule by Presidential decree, and when the Reichstag 
refused he dissolved it. As a result, the Nazis with 107 seats and the 
Communists with 77 became the second and third largest parties in 
the Reichstag. Bruning, terrified of inflation, deflated vigorously, 
thus helping both Nazis and Communists, and in the second half of 
1931 the international monetary system, and the era of economic 
co-operation, came to a startling end. Britain, followed by seventeen 
other countries, went off the gold standard. The tariff barriers went 
up everywhere. It was now every country for itself. America went 
completely isolationist for the first time. Britain retreated into 
protection and Imperial preference. Germany chose the weird combi- 
nation of savage government cuts to keep up the value of the mark, 
with decree-laws which fixed wages and prices and gave the govern- 
ment control of banking policy and through it of industry. As a 
result, Bruning forfeited the confidence of German industry. There 
began serious talk of bringing Hitler into some kind of right-wing 
coalition. Roehm held secret talks with General Kurt von Schleicher, 
the political head of the army. Hitler met Hindenburg for the first 
time, after which the President said that, while he would not make 
'this Bohemian corporal' Chancellor, he might employ him as 
Postmaster-General. 82 

Both Left and Right totally underestimated Hitler, right up to the 
second he stepped into the Chancellery. As we have seen, the Left 
was dependent on an antiquated Marxist-Leninist system of analysis 
which was pre-fascist and therefore made no provision for it. The 
Communists thought Hitler was a mere excrescence on capitalism, 



282 THE DEVILS 

and therefore a puppet of Hugenberg and Schleicher, themselves 
manipulated by Krupp and Thyssen. 83 Under the influence of Stalin, 
the German cp at this time made no real distinction between the 
Social Democrats ('Social Fascists') and Hitler. Their leader, Ernst 
Thalmann, told the Reichstag on 11 February 1930 that fascism was 
already in power in Germany, when the head of the government was 
a Social Democrat. Their principal intellectual organ, the Links- 
kurve, virtually ignored the Nazis, as did the only real Communist 
film, Kuhle Wampe (1932). The only notice the Communists usually 
took of the Nazis was to fight them in the streets, which was exactly 
what Hitler wanted. There was something false and ritualistic about 
these encounters, as Christopher Isherwood noted: 'In the middle of 
a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed 
and left bleeding on the pavement; in fifteen seconds it was all over 
and the assailants had disappeared.' 84 In the Reichstag, Thalmann 
and Goering combined to turn debates into riots. Sometimes colla- 
boration went further. During the November 1932 Berlin transport 
strike thugs from the Red Front and the Brownshirts worked 
together to form mass picket-lines, beat up those who reported for 
work, and tear up tramlines. 85 One of the reasons why the army 
recommended the Nazis be brought into the government was that 
they thought they could not cope with Communist and Nazi 
paramilitary forces at the same time, especially if the Poles attacked 
too. Blinded by their absurd political analysis, the Communists 
actually wanted a Hitler government, believing it would be a farcical 
affair, the prelude to their own seizure of power. 

The Right shared the same illusion that Hitler was a lightweight, a 
ridiculous Austrian demagogue whose oratorical gifts they could 
exploit — 1932 was his annus mirabilis when he made his finest 
speeches - while 'managing' and 'containing' him. 'If the Nazis did 
not exist,' Schleicher claimed in 1932, 'it would be necessary to 
invent them.' 86 In fact the exploitation was all the other way round. 
The events immediately preceding Hitler's accession to power are 
curiously reminiscent of Lenin's rise - albeit the first used the law 
and the second demolished it - in that they both show how 
irresistible is clarity of aim combined with a huge, ruthless will to 
power. Schleicher, seeking to separate Hitler from his thugs, had had 
the sa banned. In May 1932 he got Briining turned out and replaced 
by his own candidate, the slippery diplomat Franz von Papen. 
Hoping to get Hitler's co-operation, Papen lifted the ban on the sa 
and called fresh elections. Hitler gave him nothing in return and 
denounced his government as 'the cabinet of the barons'. On 17 July 
he provoked a riot in Altona, and Papen used this as an excuse to 
take over the Prussian state government, with its police force, the last 



THE DEVILS 283 

remaining Social-Democratic stronghold. He thought by this act to 
strengthen the hand of central government, but in fact it marked the 
end of the Weimar Republic and directly prepared the way for a 
government of illegality. 

At the elections, Hitler doubled his vote to 37.2 per cent, and he 
and the Communists now held more than half the seats in the 
Reichstag. When Hindenburg refused to make him Chancellor, Hitler 
sent his men into the streets, and on 10 August five stormtroopers 
beat to death a Communist Party worker in front of his family. Hitler 
wrote an article justifying the murder and making it perfectly clear 
what a Nazi government meant. At yet another election in November 
the Nazi vote fell to 33 per cent, but the big gainers were the 
Communists, who now had 100 seats (the Nazis 196) in the 
Reichstag, so the result, paradoxically, was to make the Right more 
anxious to get Hitler into the government. Schleicher replaced Papen 
as Chancellor, hoping to tame the Nazis by splitting the Strasser 
wing (by now unimportant) from Hitler himself. The effect was to 
goad Papen into intriguing with Hindenburg to form a Papen-Hitler 
coalition, with General Werner von Blomberg brought in as Defence 
Minister as further 'containment'. The details of this manoeuvre are 
exceedingly complicated — a totentanz or 'dance of death' — but the 
essence is simple: on one side shifting and divided aims, and an 
inability to focus on the real essentials of power; on the other, an 
unwavering aim and a firm grasp of realities. 

After two days of Byzantine negotiations, Hitler emerged as 
Chancellor on 30 January 1933. There were only three Nazis in a 
cabinet of twelve, and Hitler was thought to be further boxed in by 
Blomberg on the one side of him, and his 'pupper-master', Hugen- 
berg, on the other. But Hitler, Goering and Frick, the three Nazi 
ministers, had the three posts that mattered: the Chancellorship, 
with permission to use Article 48; the Prussian Ministry of the 
Interior; and the National Interior Ministry. Apart from the army, 
the only force in the country capable of handling the half-million 
Brownshirts was the Prussian police. This had already been taken out 
of the hands of the Social Democrats, and was now given to Goering! 
Blomberg could not be expected to fight both. As for Hugenberg, he 
had been secretly betrayed by Papen, who had agreed that Hitler 
should have new elections (which he could now manage), certain to 
cut Hugenberg down to size. 87 

30 January 1933, therefore, was a point of no return, for Germany 
and indeed for the world. As Goebbels remarked, 'If we have the 
power we'll never give it up again unless we're carried out of our 
offices as corpses.' 88 The moment he set foot in the Chancellery Hitler 
acted with the same speed as Lenin in October 1917. He immediately 



284 THE DEVILS 

moved 25,000 men into the ministerial quarter of Berlin. That night 
a massed torchlight parade of his men took place, marching through 
the Brandenburg Gate and in front of the Chancellery for nearly six 
hours, while Hitler's own police 'specials' kept a vast, cheerful crowd 
in order. At one of the illuminated windows, the excited figure of 
Hitler could be seen. At another was the impassive shape of 
Hindenburg, the Wooden Titan, pounding his cane in time to the 
military beat of the band. 89 

The crowd was cheerful because politics were unpopular with 
most Germans and Hitler had promised to end them and substitute a 
one-party state. The great theme of his speeches throughout the 
previous year was that 'politicians had ruined the Reich'. Now he 
would use politics to wage war on politicians, his election was an 
election to end elections, his party a party to end parties: 'I tell all 
these sorry politicians, "Germany will become one single party, the 
party of a great, heroic nation."' What he was proposing was a 
revolution for stability, a revolt against chaos, a legal putsch for 
unity. As such he was in a powerful German tradition. Wagner had 
presented politics as an immoral, non-German activity. Thomas 
Mann had denounced 'the terrorism of politics'. 90 Hitler offered 
what the Marxist writer Walter Benjamin called 'the aestheticization 
of polities', the art without the substance. In 1919 the Surrealists had 
called for a 'government of artists'. Now they had one. Of the Nazi 
bosses, Hitler was not the only 'Bohemian', as Hindenburg put it. 
Funk wrote music, Baldar von Schirach and Hans Frank poetry, 
Goebbels novels; Rosenberg was an architect, Dietrich Eckart a 
painter. Hitler gave the Germans the unifying side of public life: 
spectacle, parades, speeches and ceremony; the divisive side, the 
debates, voting and decision-making, was either abolished com- 
pletely or conducted by a tiny elite in secret. The parade on 
30 January was a foretaste of the first, which Hitler did better than 
anyone else and which was the first aspect of his regime Stalin began 
to imitate. 

The second began the next morning with Goering's take-over of 
the Prussian state machine, marked by massive changes in personnel, 
especially of senior police-officers, and the issue of orders for the 
rapid expansion of the state Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) under 
Nazi officers. Four days later Hitler issued a decree, using his powers 
under Article 48, 'For the Protection of the German People', which 
gave the government complete discretion in banning public meetings 
and newspapers. On 22 February Goering created an additional 
'auxiliary police', 50,000 strong, composed entirely from Nazi units. 
The idea was to break up any non-Nazi organizations capable of 
resisting. As he put it: 'My measures will not be qualified by legal 



THE DEVILS 285 

scruples or by bureaucracy. It is not my business to do justice. It is 
my business to annihilate and exterminate — that's all!' He said to his 
police: 'Whoever did his duty in the service of the state, whoever 
obeyed my orders and took severe measures against the enemy of the 
state, whoever ruthlessly made use of his revolver when attacked, 
could be certain of protection .... If one calls this murder, then I am 
a murderer.' 91 

Goering's task was made much easier by the burning of the 
Reichstag on 28 February, now generally seen as indeed the work of 
the feeble-minded Martinus van der Lubbe, but in any event mighty 
convenient to the new regime. The same day Hitler put through the 
Emergency Decree of 28 February 1933, 'For the Protection of the 
People and the State', supplemented by another 'Against Betrayal of 
the German People and Treasonable Machinations'. They formed 
the real basis of Nazi rule, since they enabled the police to bypass the 
courts completely. 92 The key passage reads: 

Articles 114-18, 123—4 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich 
are for the time being nullified. Consequently, curbs on personal liberty, on 
the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of 
associations, and of assembly, surveillance over letters, telegrams and 
telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscations of as well 
as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible beyond the limits 
hitherto established by law. 

This decree gave Hitler everything he needed to set up a totalita- 
rian state and was indeed the basis of his rule, remaining in force 
until 1945. But following the elections of 5 March, which gave the 
Nazis 43.9 per cent of the votes (288 seats), Hitler brought in an 
Enabling Act, which he got debated and passed by the Reichstag 
(sitting temporarily in the Kroll Opera House, surrounded by sa and 
ss units) on 23 March. The first article transferred the right to 
legislate from the Reichstag to the administration, the second gave 
the latter power to make constitutional changes, the third passed the 
right to draft laws from the president to the chancellor, the fourth 
extended the act to treaties and the fifth limited it to four years (it 
was extended in 1937, 1941 and again in 1943). It was, in effect, an 
act for the abolition of the constitution and legal government - and 
Hitler never saw the need, or took the trouble, to replace the old 
Weimar Constitution with one of his own. It really added nothing to 
the 28 February decree, except in a metaphysical sense. It was 
actually debated, the only political debate Hitler as ruler ever 
allowed, just like Lenin with the solitary meeting of the Provisional 
Assembly. The parallels are almost uncanny, except that Hitler, 
unlike Lenin, took part in the debate himself - furiously retorting to 



286 THE DEVILS 

a speech on behalf of the Social Democrats, who opposed the bill 
(twenty-six of them and eighty-one Communists were already under 
arrest or in flight). But the Right and Centre parties voted for the 
bill, which was carried 441—94, so this act of abdication marked 
the moral death of a republic which had died in law already on 
28 February. 

Resistance was feeble or non-existent. Some of the Communist 
leaders, who only a few weeks before had believed Hitler's entry 
into office would be an ephemeral prelude to their own triumph, 
were simply murdered. Others fled to Russia where the same fate 
soon awaited them. The great mass of the Communist rank-and-file 
humbly submitted and nothing more was heard of them. The 
unions surrendered without the least hint of a struggle. On 10 May 
the Social Democrats, insisting that the Nazis were merely 'the last 
card of reaction', allowed all their property and newspapers to be 
taken from them. A week later their deputies actually voted for 
Hitler's foreign policy, so that Goering was able to declare: The 
world has seen that the German people are united where their fate 
is at stake.' In June all the non-Nazi parties of Right, Left and 
Centre, together with their paramilitaries, were declared dissolved. 
At the end of the month, Hugenberg, the great 'container' of Hitler, 
was ignominiously pitched out of his office. Finally in July the 
National Socialists were declared the only legal party. It had taken 
Hitler less than five months to destroy German democracy com- 
pletely, about the same time as Lenin. Not a soul stirred. As Robert 
Musil put it: 'The only ones who give the impression of absolutely 
refusing to accept it all - although they say nothing - are the 
servant-girls.' 93 

With the mature Soviet model to guide him, Hitler set up the 
apparatus of terror and the machinery of the police state even more 
quickly than Lenin - and soon on a scale almost as large as Stalin's. 
The initial agent in this endeavour was Goering, using the Prussian 
police and his newly created Gestapo of sa and ss men, operating 
from its Berlin hq on Prinz Albrechtstrasse. It was Goering who 
destroyed the Communist Party in the space of a few weeks by a 
policy of murder — 'A bullet fired from the barrel of a police-pistol 
is my bullet' was the assurance he gave his men — or internment in 
the concentration camps he began setting up in March. The breath- 
taking brutality of Goering's campaign, conducted without the 
slightest regard for legality, goes a long way to explain the silence 
or compliance of those groups who might have been expected to 
oppose the new regime. They were simply afraid. It was known that 
people the Nazis disliked simply disappeared without trace: mur- 
dered, tortured to death, buried in a camp. All opposition was 



THE DEVILS 287 

enveloped in the blanket of fear, and that was precisely the effect 
Goering wished to create. Hitler praised his work as 'brutal and 
ice-cold'. 94 

It was Hitler's custom, however, to duplicate or double-bank all 
his agencies, so that he could back one against another, if need be, 
and rule through division. He had never quite trusted the sa, now a 
million strong, which was Roehm's creation. After his release from 
Landsberg he had created, from within the sa, a personal bodyguard 
of Schutzstaffel (ss), or security units. In 1929, when the black- 
shirted ss numbered 290, Hitler entrusted it to the twenty-nine-year- 
old Heinrich Himmler, the well-connected son of a former tutor to 
the Bavarian royal family. Despite his prim appearance and habits 
(his diaries record when he shaved, took a bath or had a haircut, and 
he kept all receipts and ticket stubs), Himmler was a Freikorps thug 
and violent anti-Semite, who wore his rimless pince-nez even when 
duelling. He had been a surveyor of the secret arms dumps hidden in 
the countryside to deceive the Allied Control Commission, and his 
army and social connections allowed him to raise the tone of the ss 
above that of the sa. Some of its unit commanders were noblemen. It 
included many doctors. Senior civil servants and industrialists were 
among its honorary members. Himmler, unlike Roehm, would not 
recruit the unemployed. 95 

With Hitler's encouragement, Himmler expanded the ss rapidly, 
so that it numbered 52,000 at his accession to power. Hitler's 
personal ss guard, the Leibstandarte, was a whole division. Himmler 
was never one of Hitler's intimates. He was treated as a functionary 
who could be filled with the loyalty of awe and terror; and it is a 
curious fact that Himmler, the one man who could have destroyed 
Hitler, feared him right to the end. Hitler regarded the ss as his own 
instrument of power, and he gave it special tasks. From 1931 it had a 
Race and Settlement Office, charged with practical applications of 
Nazi race theory, keeping stud books of party members and the 
drawing up of race-laws. The ss thus became the natural instrument 
to carry through Hitler's gigantic eastern extermination and set- 
tlement policy when the time came. At the same time, Himmler 
recruited a former naval officer, Reinhard Heydrich, whom he saw 
as the ideal Aryan type, to take charge of a new security and 
intelligence service, the Sicherheitsdienst (sd), which Hitler instructed 
him to set up to watch Roehm's sa. 

Hence, when Hitler took power, Himmler was able quickly to 
expand his organization into a complete security system, with its 
own military units (the Waff en ss), and an organization called the 
Totenkopfverbande (Death's Head Units) to run concentration 
camps and for other special duties. The last included many criminals, 



288 THE DEVILS 

such as Adolf Eichmann and Rudolf Hess, who had already served a 
sentence for murder. 96 Himmler's initial job was merely as police 
chief in Munich, and he required the permission of the Catholic 
Prime Minister of Bavaria, Heinrich Held, to set up his first 
concentration camp at Dachau, an announcement duly appearing in 
the press: 

On Wednesday 22 March 1933, the first concentration camp will be opened 
near Dachau. It will accommodate 5,000 prisoners. Planning on such a 
scale, we refuse to be influenced by any petty objection, since we are 
convinced this will reassure all those who have regard for the nation and 
serve their interests. 

Heinrich Himmler, 
Acting Police-President of the City of Munich. 97 

Himmler's earliest 'protective custody' orders read: 'Based on 
Article 1 of the Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of 
People and the State of February 28 1933, you are taken into 
protective custody in the interests of public security and order. 
Reason: suspicion of activities inimical to the state.' Unlike Goering, 
Himmler, at this stage, showed himself anxious to observe the 
formalities of the Nazi state, such as they were. But the camp 
regulations he compiled indicated from the very start the horrifying 
comprehensiveness of the powers Himmler and his men enjoyed and 
the unrestricted use of terror: 

The term 'commitment to a concentration camp* is to be openly announced 
as 'until further notice' .... In certain cases the Reichfuhrer ss and the Chief 
of the German Police will order flogging in addition .... There is no 
objection to spreading the rumour of this increased punishment ... to add 
to the deterrent effect. The following offenders, considered as agitators, will 
be hanged: anyone who . . . makes inciting speeches, and holds meetings, 
forms cliques, loiters around with others; who for the purpose of supplying 
the propaganda of the opposition with atrocity stories, collects true or false 
information about the concentration camps. 98 

Himmler's impeccable bureaucratic paperwork and his genuflec- 
tions to legality (when he sent his aged parents for drives in his 
official car he always noted the cost and had it deducted from his 
salary") were fraudulent, as was the similar pseudo-legal framework 
under which the ogpu worked in Soviet Russia. Hans Gisevius, a 
Gestapo official, later testified: 'It was always a favourite ss tactic to 
appear in the guise of a respectable citizen and to condemn vigor- 
ously all excesses, lies or infringements of the law. Himmler . . . 
sounded like the stoutest crusader for decency, cleanliness and 
justice.' 100 He was anxious to distance his men from the ruffianly sa 



THE DEVILS 289 

street- fighters and Goering's Gestapo. Inside the camps, however, 
there was no difference: all was unspeakable cruelty, often sadism, 
and the negation of law. 

A typical case-history, one of many thousands, was that of the 
Jewish poet Erich Muhsam. He had taken part in Eisner's reckless 
Bavarian Socialist Republic, and served six years in prison for it, 
being amnestied in 1924. Immediately after the Reichstag fire, 
fearing arrest, he had bought a ticket to Prague, but had then given it 
to another intellectual who was even more frightened than he was. 
He was pulled in and taken to Sonnenburg camp. They began by 
smashing his glasses, knocking out his teeth and tearing out chunks 
of his hair. They broke both his thumbs so he could not write, and 
beating about the ears destroyed his hearing. He was then moved to 
Cranienburg camp. There, in February 1934, the guards had posses- 
sion of a chimpanzee which they found in the home of an arrested 
Jewish scientist. Assuming it was fierce, they loosed it on Muhsam, 
but to their fury the creature simply flung its arms round his neck. 
They then tortured the animal to death in his presence. The object 
was to drive Muhsam to suicide. But he would not comply; so one 
night he was beaten to death and hanged from a beam in a latrine. 
Muhsam had become wise in the ways of totalitarianism, and before 
his arrest had given all his papers to his wife, with express instruc- 
tions on no account to go to Moscow. Unfortunately, she disobeyed 
him and took the papers with her; and as soon as the Soviet 
authorities got their hands on them they arrested her. She spent the 
next twenty years in Soviet camps as a 'Trotskyite agent', and the 
papers are to this day under lock and key in the so-called 'Gorky 
Institute for World Literature' in Moscow. 101 

The lawlessness of Hitler's Germany, beneath a thin veneer of legal 
forms, was absolute. As Goering put it, 'The law and the will of the 
Fuhrer are one.' Hans Frank: 'Our constitution is the will of the 
Fuhrer.' Hitler worked entirely through decrees and ordinances, as 
opposed to law, here again resembling Lenin, who never showed the 
slightest interest in constitution-making. 102 In any matters which 
were of interest to the Nazis, the Ministry of Justice did not function. 
Its boss Franz Guertner, who in 1924 as Bavarian Justice Minister 
had granted Hitler's early release, was a nonentity who claimed he 
stayed on to fight Hitlerism but in fact was never allowed to talk to 
Hitler on any subject except novels. Shortly before his death in 1941 
he told Frank: 'Hitler loves cruelty. It pleases him . . . when he can 
torment someone. He has a diabolical sadism. Otherwise he simply 
could not stand Himmler and Heydrich.' 103 Hitler himself said: 'It 
was only with the greatest difficulty that I was able to persuade Dr 
Guertner ... of the absolute necessity of exercising the utmost 



290 THE DEVILS 

severity in cases of treason.' 104 But this was just talk. In fact Hitler 
frequently altered what he saw as 'lenient' sentences, imposing the 
death-penalty instead. He changed the 1933 Civil Service Law, adding 
paragraph 71, which empowered him to dismiss a judge if 'the manner 
of his official activities, in particular through his decisions . . . shows 
that he finds the National Socialist Weltanschauung alien' (an 
example cited was giving the minimum sentence for 'racial de- 
filement'). 105 

But Hitler did not even like removable or subservient judges. Like 
Marx and Lenin, he hated lawyers - 'a lawyer must be regarded as a 
man deficient by nature or deformed by experience', he said - and he 
eventually superimposed on the ordinary juridical system the Nazi 
'People's Courts', a Leninist device which achieved its sombre apogee 
under the ferocious Roland Freisler in 1944-5. 106 No protection 
against Nazi encroachments on the rule of law or civil liberties was 
ever offered by the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick, who was a Nazi 
himself. In 1930-2 Frick was seen by outsiders as second only to 
Hitler in the movement, but in fact he was a weak man and since his 
Ministry had lost actual control of the police, neither he nor it counted 
for anything. The only important contribution it made to Hitler's rule 
was the drafting (under Dr Hans Globke, later to serve Dr Adenauer) 
of the 1935 Nuremberg Laws for the Jews. It remains an argument to 
this day whether the code had the effect of diminishing the appalling 
acts of violence carried out against Jews by local Nazis, as Globke 
claimed, or whether it gave moral and legal authority to systematic 
persecution. 107 

The manner in which Hitler ran internal security, using three 
competing systems (ss, sa, and Goering's police and Gestapo) and 
two ministries which did not function on important matters, was 
characteristic. As the state had no constitution (other than the 
anaesthetized Weimar one) so it had no system of government. Or 
rather it had several. There was the party system of forty or so 
Gauleiters, a powerful collegiate body, whom Hitler could make or 
break individually but whom he did not choose to defy as a group. The 
Diisseldorf Gauleiter, Florian, claimed he had never invited Himmler 
into his Gau and had forbidden his men to co-operate with the 
Gestapo. The actual party leader, as Hitler's deputy, was Rudolph 
Hess. But Hess was an ineffectual mystic. More important was Martin 
Bormann, a convicted murderer and a hard-working, Stalin-like party 
bureaucrat, who waged constant battles against the Gauleiters, on the 
one hand, and Goering and Goebbels on the other. 108 

Hitler did not object to these internal battles; on the contrary, he 
promoted them. 'People must be allowed friction with one another,' 
he said. 'Friction produces warmth, and warmth is energy.' He called 



THE DEVILS 291 

it 'institutionalized Darwinism'. If Hitler met resistance from any 
ministry, he created a duplicate. He called the Foreign Ministry, still 
stuffed with aristocrats, 'an intellectual garbage heap', and from 1933 
set up a rival organization under Joachim von Ribbentrop, which often 
stole the ministry's mail and answered it. 109 The Ministry of Labour, 
under Franz Seldte, was particularly obstructive. So Hitler appointed 
one of his Gauleiters, Fritz Sauckel, General Plenipotentiary for Work 
Mobilization. no Again, frustrated on the economic and financial front, 
Hitler created a duplicate economics ministry, called the Four Year 
Plan, under Goering. By 1942, in addition to the quota of ministries he 
had inherited from Weimar, Hitler had created fifty-eight Supreme 
Reich Boards, plus many other extra-governmental bureaux. Overlap- 
ping was universal and deliberate. It suited Hitler that Ribbentrop and 
Goebbels, for instance, should fight each over for control of external 
propaganda, down to the point where their men had pitched battles 
over radio equipment. Then both would appeal to him to arbitrate. 

Any authoritarian system which abandons constitutional pro- 
cedures and the rule of law is bound to contain an element of anarchy. 
Stalin's regime was not dissimilar, though he was more methodical than 
Hitler. The term 'Bohemian', which Hindenburg used of Hitler, was 
apt. He hated settled hours. After Hindenburg's death he combined the 
offices of Chancellor and President, and used this as an excuse to 
destroy the formal working of both. An old-fashioned civil servant 
called Dr Hans Lammers kept up a semblance of order in the 
Chancellery office, and he and his staff of ten to twelve Beamten 
answered Hitler's mail of about 600 letters a day. Hitler never seems to 
have written a letter or signed any official documents. As soon as he was 
in power he did his best to have all documents which mentioned him 
(including tax records) destroyed, and thereafter he was extraordi- 
narily reluctant to issue any written directives. About the only 
documentary holograph of Hitler's we possess dates from before the 
First World War. 

When Hitler first became Chancellor he got to his desk at 10 am, but 
he soon tired of routine and gradually took to working at night. He 
moved constantly around the country, like a medieval monarch, and 
even when in Berlin often refused to take decisions, claiming he was not 
a dictator. 111 He disliked cabinet meetings precisely because they were 
an orderly decision-making procedure. He held them at ever-growing 
intervals; even when they did take place, the really important business 
was done elsewhere. Thus when Hitler fired Hjalmar Schacht he 
appointed Walter Funk Minister of Economics during an interval at the 
opera, and introduced him without warning at the next cabinet meeting 
(4 February 1938), the last he ever held. 112 There is no doubt whatever 
that all important decisions were taken by Hitler personally, as a rule in 



292 THE DEVILS 

bilateral meetings with individual ministers or bosses, but they are 
never reflected in the records, except indirectly. Hitler's orders were 
always oral, often emerging incidentally in the course of long 
harangues, and sometimes given on the spot to whoever happened to be 
around. 113 

Hitler's state was not corporatist because corporatism implies a 
distribution of power between different bodies, and Hitler would share 
power with no one. He did not mind senior members of the gang 
running little private empires, subject to his ultimate power to break 
them. But Lammers testified at Nuremberg that he would not allow 
them to meet together, even informally, so they were never able to 
resolve their differences in collegiate fashion. Hitler's regime, therefore, 
was marked by constant bilateral and multilateral struggles between its 
component parts, what Hobbes called 'a perpetual and restless desire 
for power after power, that ceaseth only in death'. 114 Goering tapped 
his colleagues' telephones from his 'research office' and acquired such 
useful treasures as a set of love-letters from Alfred Rosenberg to a 
comely Jewess. 115 Bormann spied on all. So, of course, did Himmler 
and Heydrich. Virtually everyone was in a position to blackmail 
everyone else, and as each sought to win Hitler's goodwill by betraying 
what he knew of the others, the Fuhrer was kept well informed. 

No government run in this fashion could hope to pursue consistent 
and carefully thought out policies, and Hitler naturally failed to do so, 
even on matters about which he felt most passionately. He promised to 
help small businesses, the peasants, the agricultural sector, to cut the big 
cities down to size, to bring womenfolk back from the factories into the 
home, to take back industry from the capitalists, the land from the 
Junkers, the army from the 'vons', the administration from the 
'Doktors\ He did none of these things. On the contrary: the cities, big 
business and industry flourished, and peasants and women continued 
to flock into the workshops. 116 Army, business, the civil service 
remained much the same. 

Even on Jewish policy, which to Hitler was the most important issue 
of all, there was inconsistency and hesitation. In the first flush of Nazi 
triumph, many Jews were murdered or put in camps, or stripped of their 
property by the sa and allowed to flee. Some Nazi leaders wanted a 
policy of enforced emigration, but no systematic and effective measures 
were ever taken to bring this about. Nor did Hitler smash the big Jewish 
department stores, something he had promised countless times to do: 
Schacht persuaded him that 90,000 jobs would thereby be lost. 117 The 
Economics Ministry opposed attacks on Jewish business chiefly 
because it believed they would lead to attacks on big business in general, 
and it set up a special bureau to stop Nazi harassment. 118 The 
Nuremberg Laws themselves were drawn up in a hurry. Hitler 



THE DEVILS 293 

announced them as the 'final settlement of the position of the Jews'. 
In fact many ambiguities remained, even in his own mind. He 
authorized signs 'Jews Not Welcome' outside towns, which were 
theoretically illegal, but conceded Jews could not actually be forbid- 
den to enter. In 1936 the Interior Ministry even discussed banning 
Der Sturmer, the anti-Semitic Nazi paper. Anti-Semitism became 
more violent in 1938, probably because Hitler was adopting a more 
isolationist economic policy. The Interior Ministry produced the 
'name decree', obliging all Jews to adopt Israel or Sarah as a middle 
name. 119 This was followed by the terrifying violence of the Kris- 
tallnacht on 9 November 1938, incited by Goebbels. But it is not 
clear whether Goebbels acted on his own initiative or, more likely, 
on Hitler's orders, given quite casually. 120 Only with the coming of 
war did Hitler fix upon the real 'final solution': he had had it in 
mind all along but needed war to make it possible. On his world 
aims, as opposed to domestic policy, he was always clear, consistent 
and resolute, as we shall see. 

Hitler had no economic policy. But he had a very specific 
national policy. He wanted to rearm as fast as possible consistent 
with avoiding an Allied pre-emptive strike. He simply gave German 
industry his orders, and let its managers get on with it. Before he 
came to power, Otto Strasser had asked him what he would do 
with Krupp, and was told: 'Of course I would leave him alone. Do 
you think I should be so mad as to destroy Germany's 
economy?' 121 Hitler thought that Lenin's greatest economic mistake 
had been to order party members to take over the running of 
industry, and kill or expel its capitalist managers. He was deter- 
mined that the Brownshirts and other party elements would not get 
their hands on business, and warned Major Walter Buch, judge of 
the Party Court, in 1933: 'It is your task as the highest judge within 
the party to put a brake on the revolutionary element.' The unwill- 
ingness to do this had led to the destruction of other revolutions, he 
said. 122 

There is no evidence whatever that Hitler was, even to the 
smallest degree, influenced by big business philosophy. He bowed 
to business advice only when convinced that taking it would 
forward his military and external aims. He regarded himself as a 
socialist, and the essence of his socialism was that every individual 
or group in the state should unhesitatingly work for national policy. 
So it did not matter who owned the actual factory so long as those 
managing it did what they were told. German socialism, he told 
Hermann Rauschning, was not about nationalization: 'Our social- 
ism reaches much deeper. It does not change the external order of 
things, it orders solely the relationship of man to the state .... Then 



294 THE DEVILS 

what does property and income count for? Why should we need to 
socialize the banks and the factories? We are socializing the 
people.' 123 Presenting his Four Year Plan (which, like Stalin's, was a 
mere propaganda exercise), he said that it was the job of the Ministry 
of Economics merely to 'present the tasks of the national economy' 
and then 'the private economy will have to fulfil them'. If it shrank 
from them 'then the National Socialist state will know how to solve 
these tasks'. 124 

Thus Hitler kept Germany's managerial class and made them 
work for him. Firms flourished or not exactly in accordance with the 
degree to which they carried out Hitler's orders. Of course he 
extracted money from them: but it was a blackmail— victim relation- 
ship, not that of client and patron. A case in point was the chemical 
firm I.G.Farben, originally caricatured by the Nazis as 'Isidore 
Farben' because of its Jewish directors, executives and scientists. It 
won Hitler's favour only by ridding itself of Jews (for instance the 
Nobel prize-winner Fritz Haber) and by agreeing to give absolute 
priority to Hitler's synthetics programme, the heart of his war- 
preparedness scheme, in a secret treaty signed 14 December 1933. 
Thereafter Farben was safe, but only at the cost of slavery to Hitler. 
Far from big business corrupting his socialism, it was the other way 
round. The corruption of I.G.Farben by the Nazis is one of the most 
striking individual tragedies within the overall tragedy of the Ger- 
man nation. 125 

Not having an economic policy was an advantage. Hitler was 
lucky. He took over a month before Roosevelt, and like him 
benefited from a recovery which had already begun shortly before. 
Unlike Roosevelt, however, he did not tinker with the economy by 
systematic public works programmes, though they existed. At a 
meeting on 8 February 1933 he said he rejected any such pro- 
grammes which had no bearing on rearmament. He started autobahn 
construction in September 1933 chiefly because he wanted fast 
motor-roads and thought he had discovered an organizing genius to 
create them in Fritz Todt (he had). 126 Briining had pursued an 
excessively deflationary policy because he had a paranoid fear of 
inflation. Hitler scrapped it. He sacked Dr Hans Luther, the Reich- 
bank President, and replaced him by Hjalmar Schacht, whom he also 
made Economics Minister. Schacht was by far the cleverest financial 
minister any country had between the wars. He was a market 
economist but an empiric who believed in no theory and played every 
situation by ear. 

Hitler hated high interest-rates and tight credit not because he was 
a pro-Keynesian but because he associated them with Jews. He told 
Schacht to provide the money for rearmament and Schacht did so, 



THE DEVILS 295 

breaking the Reichbank's rules in the process. Inflation was avoided 
by Bruning's strict exchange-controls (which Hitler, in his pursuit of 
autarchy, made still more fierce), taxation (tax revenues tripled 
1933-8) and general belt-tightening: German living standards were 
scarcely higher in 1938 than a decade earlier. The Germans did not 
mind because they were back at work. Over 8 million had been 
unemployed when Hitler took over. The number began to fall very 
quickly in the second half of 1933, and by 1934 there were already 
shortages in certain categories of skilled labour, though 3 million 
were still out of work. By 1936, however, there was virtually full 
employment, and by 1938 firms were desperate for labour at a time 
when Britain and the USA were again in recession. 

Germany was thus the only major industrial country to recover 
quickly and completely from the Great Depression. The reason 
undoubtedly lies in the great intrinsic strength of German industry, 
which has performed phenomenally well from the 1860s to this day, 
when not mutilated by war or bedevilled by political uncertainty. 
Weimar had provided a disastrous political framework for business, 
which puts a stable and consistent fiscal background as the precondi- 
tion of efficient investment. Weimar always had difficulty in getting a 
budget through the Reichstag and often had to administer financial 
policy by emergency decree. Its inherent political instability grew 
worse rather than better. After the 1928 election it became increas- 
ingly difficult to form a stable government, and by March 1930 it 
was clear the regime would not last, with a risk that a Marxist system 
might replace it. Hitler's coming to power, therefore, provided 
German industry with precisely what it wanted to perform effec- 
tively: government stability, the end of politics and a sense of 
national purpose. It could do the rest for itself. Hitler was shrewd 
enough to realize this. While he allowed the party to invade every 
other sphere of government and public policy, he kept it out of 
industry and the army, both of which he needed to perform at 
maximum efficiency as quickly as possible. 127 

By the mid- 1930s Hitler was running a brutal, secure, conscience- 
less, successful and, for most Germans, popular regime. The German 
workers, on the whole, preferred secure jobs to civil rights which had 
meant little to them. 128 What did become meaningful to them were 
the social organizations which Hitler created in astonishing numbers, 
under the policy he termed 'belonging'. He also had the policy of 
co-ordination, which emphasized the unity of the state (under the 
party, of course). The Third Reich was a 'co-ordinated' state to 
which ordinary Germans 'belonged'. This concept of public life 
appealed to more Germans than the party politics of Weimar. The 
mood might not have lasted indefinitely, but it was still strong when 



296 THE DEVILS 

Hitler destroyed his popularity by getting Germany into war again. It 
was probably strongest among the humblest and poorest (though not 
among some Catholic peasants, who refused to give Nazi salutes and 
greetings, and bitterly resented attacks on Christianity). 

Hitler also appealed to the moralistic nature of many Germans, 
that is, those who had a keen desire for 'moral' behaviour without 
possessing a code of moral absolutes rooted in Christian faith. 
Himmler, the conscientious mass-murderer, the scrupulous torturer, 
was the archetype of the men who served Hitler best. He defined the 
virtues of the ss, the embodiment of Nazi 'morality', as loyalty, 
honesty, obedience, hardness, decency, poverty and bravery. The 
notion of obeying 'iron laws' or 'a higher law', rather than the 
traditional, absolute morality taught in the churches, was a Hegelian 
one. Marx and Lenin translated it into a class concept; Hitler into a 
race one. Just as the Soviet cadres were taught to justify the most 
revolting crimes in the name of a moralistic class warfare, so the ss 
acted in the name of race - which Hitler insisted was a far more 
powerful and central human motivation than class. Service to the 
race, as opposed to the Marxist proletariat, was the basis of Nazi 
puritanism, marked by what Rudolf Hoess, commandant at 
Auschwitz, termed the 'cold' and 'stony' attitude of the ideal Nazi, 
one who 'had ceased to have human feelings' in the pursuit of 
duty. 129 

By early 1933, therefore, the two largest and strongest nations of 
Europe were firmly in the grip of totalitarian regimes which preached 
and practised, and indeed embodied, moral relativism, with all its 
horrifying potentialities. Each system acted as a spur to the most 
reprehensible characteristics of the other. One of the most disturbing 
aspects of totalitarian socialism, whether Leninist or Hitlerian, was 
the way in which, both as movements seeking power or regimes 
enjoying it, they were animated by a Gresham's Law of political 
morality: frightfulness drove out humanitarian instincts and each 
corrupted the other into ever-deeper profundities of evil. 

Hitler learnt from Lenin and Stalin how to set up a large-scale 
terror regime. But he had much to teach too. Like Lenin, he wished 
to concentrate all power in his single will. Like Lenin he was a 
gnostic, and just as Lenin thought that he alone was the true 
interpreter of history as the embodiment of proletarian determinism, 
so Hitler had confidence only in himself as the exponent of the 
race-will of the German people. The regime he set up in January 
1933 had one major anomaly: the sa. Hitler did not fully control it, 
and Roehm had visions which did not fit into Hitler's plans. The sa, 
already very large before the take-over, expanded rapidly after it. By 
the autumn of 1933 it had a million active, paid members, and 



THE DEVILS 297 

reserves of 3.5 million more. Roehm's object was to make the sa the 
future German army, which would overthrow the Versailles settle- 
ment and secure Germany's expansionist aims. The old army, with 
its professional officer class, would be a mere training organization 
for a radical, revolutionary army which he himself would take on a 
voyage of conquest. Hitler was determined to reject this Napoleonic 
scheme. He had a high opinion of the regular army and believed it 
would put through rearmament quickly and with sufficient secrecy 
to carry the country through the period of acute danger when the 
French and their allies were still in a position to invade Germany and 
destroy his regime. Even more important, he had not the slightest 
intention of sharing power with Roehm, let alone surrendering it to 
him. 

From March 1933, when he began to assist the rise of Himmler, 
who had a secret phone-link to him, it is clear that Hitler had a 
gigantic crime in mind to resolve the dilemma which Roehm's sa 
presented to him. He prepared it with great thoroughness. From 
October 1933, Himmler was authorized by Hitler to acquire in 
plurality the offices of chief of political police in all the German 
states, in addition to the city of Munich. This process, naturally seen 
by Himmler's enemies as empire-building, required Hitler's active 
assistance at every stage both because it was illegal (Frick had to be 
kept in the dark) and because it involved negotiations with the 
Gauleiters, whom Hitler alone controlled, in each Gaue. The process 
was completed on 20 April 1934 when Heydrich's sd revealed a 
'plot' to murder Goering, which his own Gestapo had failed to 
uncover. Hitler then ordered Himmler to take over Goering's police 
(officially as his deputy). The ss organization, big in itself, now 
controlled all Germany's political police and was in a position to 
strike at even the gigantic, armed sa. 

Hitler's motives for destroying the sa's leadership and indepen- 
dence had meanwhile been increasing. Its brutal, open street-violence 
alienated Hitler's supporters at home and was the chief source of 
criticism of his regime abroad. When Sir John Simon and Anthony 
Eden visited him on 21 February 1934, he had promised to demobi- 
lize two-thirds of the sa and permit inspection of the rest: 'short of 
the actual dissolution of the force,' wrote Eden, '. . . he could 
scarcely have gone further.' 130 Equally important was the hostility of 
the army. By spring 1934 the aged Hindenburg was clearly nearing 
the end. Hitler wished to succeed him, uniting presidency and 
chancellorship in one. The army and navy commanders agreed that 
he should do this, provided he emasculated the sa and destroyed its 
pretensions, and it is typical of the naivety they always showed in 
negotiating with Hitler that they gave him something vital in return 



298 THE DEVILS 

for a 'concession' which he needed to make anyway, and in which 
army co-operation was essential. 

Hitler went ahead with his purge, an act of pure gangsterism, as 
soon as Himmler had achieved monopoly of the political police. He 
determined to murder all his immediate political enemies at once 
(including settling some old scores), so that the 'evidence' of conspi- 
racy, manufactured by Heydrich's intelligence bureau, produced 
unlikely conjunctions worthy of a Stalin show-trial. Himmler and 
Heydrich prepared the final list, Hitler simply underlining in pencil 
those to be shot; Heydrich signed the warrants, which read simply: 
'By order of the Fiihrer and Reich Chancellor, — is condemned to 
death by shooting for high treason.' At a comparatively late stage 
Goering was brought into the plot. The Defence Minister Blomberg, 
together with his political assistant, General von Reichenau, were 
made accomplices, army units being ordered to stand by in case sa 
units resisted. Early on 30 June 1934 Hitler himself shook Roehm 
awake at the sanatorium of the Tegernsee, and then retired to the 
Munich Brownhouse. The Bavarian Justice Minister was not pre- 
pared to order mass shootings on the basis of a mere typed list, and 
Roehm and his associates were not actually murdered until 2 July, 
the political police carrying it out. In Berlin, meanwhile, according to 
the eye-witness account of the Vice-Chancellor, von Papen, the 
accused were taken to Goering's private house in the Leipzigerplatz, 
where he and Himmler identified them, ticked them off the list and 
ordered them to be taken away and shot immediately; Goering's 
private police provided the squads. Two days later, Hitler arrived 
from Munich at the Templehof. Himmler and Goering met him on 
the tarmac, under a blood-red sky, the three men then studying the 
lists of those already shot or about to be shot, a Wagnerian scene 
described by the Gestapo officer Hans Gisevius. Frick, the Interior 
Minister, was told to go home: the matter did not concern him. 
According to Gisevius, Frick said, 'My Fiihrer, if you do not proceed 
at once against Himmler and his ss, as you have against Roehm and 
his sa, all you will have done is to have called in Beelzebub to drive 
out the devil.' 131 That shows how little he understood his master. 

Many of those murdered had nothing to do with the sa. They 
included the former Bavarian Prime Minister, Gustav von Kahr, who 
had declined to take part in the 1923 putsch ; Hitler's old colleague 
and party rival, Gregor Strasser; the slippery old brass-hat who was 
going to 'contain' him, General von Schleicher, plus his wife and his 
close associate, General von Bredow; the Berlin Catholic leader, 
Ernst Klausener, and many other inconvenient or dangerous people, 
probably about 150 in all. 132 

This act of mass murder by the government and police was a moral 



THE DEVILS 299 

catastrophe for Germany. The code of honour of the German 
generals, such as it was, was shattered, for they had connived at the 
killing of two of their friends and colleagues. Justice was ridiculed for 
a law was passed on 3 July, authorizing the deeds ex post facto. Hitler 
was received in state at Hindenburg's deathbed, where the confused 
old man, who had once dismissed him as the 'Bohemian corporal', 
greeted him with the words 'Your Majesty'. After the Wooden Titan 
died on 2 August, Hitler assumed the succession by virtue of a law he 
had issued the day before, making him 'leader and Reich Chancellor'. 
The same day all officers and men of the army took a sacred oath to 
him, beginning: 'I will render unconditional obedience to the Fuhrer 
of the German Reich and people.' The arrangement then went to a 
plebiscite and in August the German people rewarded the murderer- 
in-chief with a verdict of 84.6 per cent. 133 Not the least significant 
aspect of this turning-point was the presentation, to the ss men who 
had carried out the murders, of daggers of honour. Here was the 
shameless symbolism of moral relativism. The ss was thus launched 
upon its monstrous career of legalized killing. The Roehm affair, with 
the state openly engaged in mass murder, with the connivance of its 
old military elite and the endorsement of the electorate, directly 
foreshadowed the extermination programmes to come. 

It was the sheer audacity of the Roehm purge, and the way in which 
Hitler got away with it, with German and world opinion and with his 
own colleagues and followers, which encouraged Stalin to consolidate 
his personal dictatorship by similar means. Hitherto, the party elite 
had permitted him to murder only ordinary Russians. Even to expel a 
senior party member required elaborate preparations. In 1930, Stalin 
had been openly criticized by Syrtsov, a Politburo candidate, and 
Lominadze, a Central Committee member. He had wanted both of 
them shot but the most he managed was their expulsion from the cc. 
Two years later he had called for the shooting of Ryutin, who had 
circulated privately a two-hundred-page document criticizing his 
dictatorship. Sergei Kirov, who had succeeded Zinoviev as boss of 
Leningrad, had insisted that Ryutin be spared and sent to an 'isolator', 
or special prison for top party men. 134 By summer 1934, Kirov's 
influence was still growing, and he appeared to be the man most likely 
to succeed Stalin - or oust him. The success of the Roehm purge 
inspired Stalin to do away with internal party restraints once and for 
all, and in the most ingenious manner: by having Kirov murdered, and 
using the crime as an excuse to strike at all his other enemies. 135 

Kirov was shot in mysterious circumstances on 1 December 1934, 
in the middle of the Smolny Institute, the former girls' school from 
which Lenin had launched his putsch and which had remained party 
hq in Leningrad ever since. It was a heavily guarded place and it was 



300 THE DEVILS 

never explained how the assassin, Leonid Nikolaev, got through the 
security cordon. What is even more suspicious is that, a few days 
before, Kirov's bodyguard had been removed on the orders of 
Yagoda, the nkvd head. In 1956 and again in 1961 Khrushchev 
hinted strongly that Stalin was responsible, and the circumstantial 
evidence seems overwhelming. 136 

Stalin reacted to the news of the murder with great violence but in 
a manner which suggests premeditation. He took the night train to 
Leningrad, and as dawn was breaking he was met at the Moscow 
station by Medved, head of the Leningrad police. Without a word, 
Stalin struck him heavily in the face. He then commandeered a floor 
of the Smolny Institute and took personal charge of the investiga- 
tions. He sat behind a table, flanked by his own flunkeys: Molotov, 
Voroshilov, Zhdanov and others, with the Leningrad party officials 
on one side, the security men on the other. When Nikolaev was 
brought in, and Stalin asked him why he shot Kirov, the creature fell 
on his knees and shouted, pointing at the security men, 'But they 
made me do it.' They ran to him and beat him unconscious with 
pistol butts; then he was dragged out and revived in alternate hot and 
cold baths. Stalin had Borisov, the head of Kirov's bodyguards, 
beaten to death with crowbars; Medved was sent to a camp and 
murdered three years later; Nikolaev was executed on 29 December 
after a secret trial. More than a hundred so-called 'Whites' were 
shot; 40,000 Leningraders put in camps. Soon, anyone who knew 
the facts of the Kirov case was either dead or lost for ever in the 
Gulag Archipelago. 137 

That was only the beginning. Two weeks after Kirov's murder, 
Stalin had Zinoviev and Kamenev arrested. He formulated the 
charges against them in the minutest detail and revised the testimony 
they were to give down to the last comma. It took months to rehearse 
them, Stalin threatening nothing would be spared 'until they came 
crawling on their bellies with confessions in their teeth'. 138 They came 
up for trial in 1936, following a deal in which they agreed to confess 
everything provided their families were left alone and they them- 
selves spared. In fact they were both shot within a day of their trial 
ending. The way in which Zinoviev begged for mercy was made the 
subject of a gruesome imitation, with strong anti-Semitic overtones, 
given at Stalin's intimate parties by K.V.Pauker, a former theatre- 
dresser promoted to be head of Stalin's personal nkvd guard and the 
only man permitted to shave him. Pauker performed this act 
regularly until he, too, was shot as a 'German spy'. 139 

Immediately Zinoviev and Kamenev were dead, Stalin ordered 
Yagoda to execute more than 5,000 party members already under 
arrest. This was the beginning of the Great Terror. Soon after this 



THE DEVILS 301 

was done, Stalin sent from Sochi, where he was on holiday, the 
sinister telegram of 25 September 1936: 'We deem it absolutely 
necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be nominated to the post 
of People's Commissar for Internal Affairs. Yagoda has definitely 
proved himself to be incapable of unmasking the Trotskyite- 
Zinovievite block. The ogpu is four years behind in this matter.' 140 
This was followed by a systematic purge of the secret police, carried 
out by teams of two to three hundred party zealots secretly recruited 
by Yezhov. 141 Next Stalin eliminated his old Georgian friend Ordz- 
honikidze, the last Politburo member allowed to call him by his 
nickname 'Koba' or to argue with him: he was given the choice of 
shooting himself or dying in the police cells. After February 1937 
Stalin could kill anyone, in any way he wished. At the cc plenum at 
the end of the month, it 'instructed' Stalin to arrest Bukharin and 
Rykov. Bukharin pleaded tearfully for his life. Stalin: 'If you are 
innocent, you can prove it in a prison cell!' The CC: 'Shoot the 
traitor!' The two men were taken straight off to prison and death; 
Yagoda was later heard to mutter, 'What a pity I didn't arrest all of 
you before, when I had the power.' 142 (It made no difference: of the 
140 people present, nearly two-thirds would shortly be murdered.) 

From the end of 1936 to the second half of 1938, Stalin struck at 
every group in the regime. In 1937 alone he killed 3,000 senior secret 
police officers and 90 per cent of the public prosecutors in the 
provinces. He had been in secret negotiations with Hitler since 1935. 
The following year he persuaded the Nazi government to concoct 
forged evidence of secret contacts between the Soviet army comman- 
der, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and Hitler's generals; it was done by 
the Gestapo and transmitted by one of its agents, General Skoblin, 
who also worked for the nkvd. 143 Stalin's first military victim was a 
cavalry general, Dmitry Shmidt, who had apparently abused him in 
1927; Shmidt was arrested on 5 July 1936, tortured and murdered. 
Tukhashevsky and seven other senior generals followed on 11 June 
1937, and thereafter 30,000 officers, about half the total, including 
80 per cent of the colonels and generals. 144 Most officers were shot 
within twenty-four hours of arrest. In every group, the aim was to 
kill the most senior, especially those who had fought in the Revolu- 
tion or who had known the party before Stalin owned it. The purge 
of the party itself was the most prolonged and severe. In Leningrad, 
only two out of its 150 delegates to the seventeenth Party Congress 
were allowed to live. The losses in the Moscow party were as great. 
About one million party members were killed in all. 145 

The crimes committed in these years have never been atoned for, 
properly investigated or punished (except by accident), since the 
successive generations of party leaders who ruled after Stalin were all 



302 THE DEVILS 

involved in their commission. Yezhov, the principal assassin, was 
murdered himself by Stalin after the purges were over. His successor 
as head of the secret police, Lavrenti Beria, was gunned down by his 
Politburo colleagues immediately after Stalin's own death. Georgi 
Malenkov, who ruled Russia 1953-6, was the chief purger in 
Belorussia and Armenia. Khrushchev, who succeeded him and ruled 
1956—64, was in charge of the purge both in Moscow and (together 
with Yezhov himself and Molotov) in the Ukraine. The Leningrad 
purge was under Zhdanov, one of his assistants (and one of the very 
few survivors) being Aleksei Kosygin, Prime Minister in the 1970s 
until his death. Kaganovich, who held high office until the 1960s, 
was the destroyer of the party in the Smolensk region. Leonid 
Brezhnev, an abetter and survivor of the Ukraine purge, ruled Russia 
from 1964 until his death in 1982. 

All these men, who governed Russia in the thirty years after 
Stalin's death, worked from a blend of self-aggrandizement and fear, 
under Stalin's direct and detailed instructions. An nkvd man who 
had been in Stalin's bodyguard testified that Yezhov came to Stalin 
almost daily in the years 1937-9, with a thick file of papers; Stalin 
would give orders for arrests, the use of torture, and sentences (the 
last before the trial). Stalin carried out some interrogations himself. 
He annotated documents 'arrest'; 'arrest everyone'; 'no need to 
check: arrest them'. At the 1961 twenty-second Party Congress, 
Z.T.Serdiuk read out a letter from Yezhov: 'Comrade Stalin: I am 
sending for confirmation four lists of people whose cases are before 
the Military Collegium: List One, general; List Two, former military 
personnel; List Three, former nkvd personnel; List Four, wives of 
former enemies of the people. I request approval for first-degree 
condemnation (pervaia kategoriia, i.e. shooting).' The list was signed 
'Approved, J.Stalin, V. Molotov'. Stalin's signature is appended to 
over 400 lists from 1937 to 1939, bearing the names of 44,000 
people, senior party leaders, officials of the government, officers and 
cultural figures. 146 

Foreign Communists who had sought asylum in Moscow were 
murdered too, in large numbers. They included Bela Kun and most of 
the Hungarian Communist leaders, nearly all the top Polish Com- 
munists; all the Yugoslav party brass except Tito, the famous 
Bulgarians Popov and Tanev, heroes of the Leipzig trial with 
Dimitrov (who escaped by sheer luck: Stalin had a file on him); all 
the Koreans; many Indians and Chinese; and Communist leaders 
from Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Bessarabia, Iran, Italy, Finland, 
Austria, France, Romania, Holland, Czechoslovakia, the United 
States and Brazil. Particularly hard hit were the Germans who had 
taken refuge from Hitler. We know the names of 842 of them who 



THE DEVILS 303 

were arrested, but in fact there were many more, including wives and 
children of the leaders, such as Karl Liebknecht's family. Some of the 
Germans who survived were later able to display the marks of 
torture of both the Gestapo and the nkvd, and were thus living 
symbols of the furtive contacts which the security services of Nazi 
Germany and Soviet Russia maintained throughout this period. On 
the whole, European Communists were safer in their own fascist 
homelands than in the 'Socialist mother-country'. Roy Medvedev, 
the independent Soviet Marxist historian, noted: 'It is a terrible 
paradox that most European Communist leaders and activists who 
lived in the USSR perished, while most of those who were in prison 
in their native lands in 1937-8 survived.' 147 That Stalin exchanged 
lists of 'wanted' activists with the Nazis is certain, and he may have 
done so with other totalitarian regimes which his propaganda 
assailed with mechanical ferocity. He took a close interest in the fate 
of the foreign Communists he dealt with. But then he took a close 
interest in all aspects of his terror. At one point during the trial of his 
old comrade and victim Bukharin, an arc-light briefly revealed to 
visitors the face of Stalin himself, peering through the black glass of a 
small window set high under the ceiling of the court. 148 

Arthur Koestler's brilliant novel, Darkness at Noon (1940), gave 
the impression that Stalin's leading victims, trapped in their own 
Marxist theology, and the relative morality they shared with him, 
were induced to collaborate in their own mendacious testimony - 
even came to believe it. Nothing could be further from the truth. 
While leading 'conspirators', whose evidence was needed to build up 
the basic structure of the fantasy, were brought to confess by a 
mixture of threats to kill or torture wives and children, promises of 
leniency, and physical violence, for the overwhelming majority of 
those who were engulfed, Stalin's methods differed little from Peter 
the Great's, except of course in scale, which precluded any subtlety. 

During these years something like 10 per cent of Russia's vast 
population passed through Stalin's penitential machinery. Famous 
Tsarist prisons, such as the Lefortovskaia, which had been turned 
into museums and peopled with waxwork figures, were put into 
service again, the wax replaced by flesh and blood. Churches, hotels, 
even bathhouses and stables were turned into gaols; and dozens of 
new ones built. Within these establishments, torture was used on a 
scale which even the Nazis were later to find it difficult to match. 
Men and women were mutilated, eyes gouged out, eardrums per- 
forated; they were encased in 'nail boxes' and other fiendish devices. 
Victims were often tortured in front of their families. The wife of 
Nestor Lakoba, a strikingly beautiful woman, preferred to die under 
torture, even when faced with her weeping fourteen-year-old son, 



304 THE DEVILS 

rather than accuse her husband. Many faced a horrible death with 
similar stoicism. The nkvd's plan to stage a show-trial of the Youth 
Movement was frustrated by the fact that S.V.Kovarev and other 
leaders of the Komsomol Central Committee all preferred to die 
under torture rather than confess to a lie. Large numbers of army 
officers were killed in this fashion: in extremis they might sign their 
own 'confessions' but they would not implicate others. According to 
Medvedev, nkvd recruits, aged eighteen, 'were taken to torture- 
chambers, like medical students to laboratories to watch 
dissections'. 149 

That Hitler's example helped to spur Stalin to his great terror is 
clear enough, and his agents were always quick to learn anything the 
Gestapo and the ss had to teach. But the instruction was mutual. The 
camps system was imported by the Nazis from Russia. Himmler set 
them up with great speed; there were nearly one hundred Nazi camps 
before the end of 1933. But at all stages, even at the height of the ss 
extermination programme in 1942-5, there were many more Soviet 
camps, most of them much larger than the Nazi ones, and containing 
many more people. Indeed, the Soviet camps, as Solzhenitsyn and 
others have shown, constituted a vast series of substantial territorial 
islands within the Soviet Union, covering many thousands of square 
miles. Like the Nazi camps, which ranged downwards from Dachau, 
the 'Eton' or 'Groton' of the system, the Soviet camps were of many 
varieties. There was, for instance, a special camp for the widows, 
orphans and other relatives of slaughtered army officers; and there 
were prison-orphanages for the children of 'enemies of the people', 
who were themselves liable to be tried and sentenced, as was 
Marshal Tukhachevsky's daughter Svetlana, as soon as they were old 
enough. 150 

Most of the camps, however, served a definite economic purpose, 
and it was their example which inspired Himmler, from 1941 
onwards, to seek to create a substantial 'socialized sector' of the 
Germany economy. The Soviet Union did not engage in a deliberate 
and systematic policy of genocide, though Stalin came close to it 
when dealing with the Soviet 'nationalities' in the Second World 
War. But the Soviet camps were (and are) 'death camps' all the same. 
The sign in iron letters over the camps in the Kolyma region, among 
the very worst, which read 'Labour is a matter of honour, valour and 
heroism', was as misleading as the Nazi imitation of it, hung over the 
entrance to Auschwitz: Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Wins Freedom). 
Within these camps the nkvd frequently carried out mass- 
executions, using machine-guns: 40,000 men, women and children 
were thus killed in the Kolyma camps alone in 1938. The 'special 
punishment' and gold-mine camps were the worst killers. Lenin and 



THE DEVILS 305 

later Stalin built up the world's second-largest gold industry (after 
South Africa's) and huge gold reserves, on the backs of men working 
a sixteen-hour day, with no rest days, wearing rags, sleeping often in 
torn tents, with temperatures down to sixty degrees below zero, and 
with pitifully small quantities of food. Witnesses later testified that it 
took twenty to thirty days to turn a healthy man into a physical 
wreck in these camps, and some claimed that conditions were 
deliberately planned to achieve a high death-rate. Savage beatings 
were administered by the guards, and also by the professional 
criminal element, who were given supervisory duties over the masses 
of 'politicals' - another feature of the camps imitated by the Nazis. 

In these circumstances, the death-rate was almost beyond the 
imagining of civilized men. Medvedev puts the figure of the great 
terror victims summarily shot at 4—500,000. He thinks the total 
number of victims in the years 1936—9 was about 4.5 million. Men 
and women died in the camps at the rate of about a million a year 
during this and later periods, and the total of deaths caused by 
Stalin's policy was in the region of 10 million. 151 Just as the Roehm 
purge goaded Stalin into imitation, so in turn the scale of his mass 
atrocities encouraged Hitler in his wartime schemes to change the 
entire demography of Eastern Europe. In social engineering, mass 
murder on an industrial scale is always the ultimate weapon: Hitler's 
'final solution' for the Jews had its origins not only in his own 
fevered mind but in the collectivization of the Soviet peasantry. 

Granted their unprecedented nature, the atrocities committed by 
the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes in the 1930s had remarkably 
little impact on the world, though the nature (if not the scale) of 
both, and especially the former, were reasonably well known at the 
time. More attention was focused on Hitler's crimes, partly because 
they were nearer the West, partly because they were often openly 
vaunted, but chiefly because they were publicized by a growing 
emigre population of intellectuals. As a self-proclaimed enemy of 
civilization, as opposed to Kultur, Hitler was a natural target for the 
writers of the free world even before he became Chancellor; once in 
power he proceeded to confirm his image as a mortal enemy of the 
intelligentsia. His public book-burning started in March 1933 and 
reached a climax in Berlin that May, with Goebbels presiding, 
quoting the words of Ulrich von Hutten: 'Oh century, oh sciences, it 
is a joy to be alive!' Exhibitions of 'degenerate art' were held at 
Nuremberg (1935) and Munich (1937). Museums were bullied into 
disposing of some of their paintings: thus, at a sale in Lucerne in June 
1939, works by Gauguin and Van Gogh went for derisory prices, and 
Picasso's Absinthe-Drinker failed to find a buyer. Regular lists of 
emigres deprived of their German citizenship were published. They 



306 THE DEVILS 

included Leon Feuchtwanger, Helmut von Gerlach, Alfred Kerr, 
Heinrich Mann, Kurt Tucholsky, Ernst Toller (August 1933), Robert 
Becher, Einstein, Theodor Plievier (March 1934), Bruno Frank, Klaus 
Mann, Piscator (November 1934), Friedrich Wolf, Berthold Brecht, 
Paul Bekker, Arnold Zweig, Thomas Mann (1935-6), and scores of 
other famous figures. 152 These, and thousands of Jewish and anti-Nazi 
university professors and journalists, who were prevented from making 
a living in Germany and were virtually obliged to emigrate, swelled the 
chorus of those who sought to expose conditions within Hitler's Reich. 

All the same, Hitler had his vocal admirers. They included Lloyd 
George, the Duke of Windsor and Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily 
Mail. Major Yeats-Brown, author of the famous Lives of a Bengal 
Lancer, testified that it was his 'honest opinion that there is more real 
Christianity in Germany today than there ever was under the Weimar 
Republic'. Among those who expressed qualified approval of fascism in 
its various forms were Benedetto Croce, Jean Cocteau, Luigi Piran- 
dello, Giovanni Gentile, James Burnham, W.B.Yeats, T.S.Eliot and 
Filippo Marinetti, as well as actual pro-fascist intellectuals like Charles 
Maurras, Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ezra Pound, Oswald Spengler and 
Martin Heidegger. 153 

The overwhelming majority of intellectuals, however, veered to the 
Left. They saw Nazism as a far greater danger, both to their own order 
and to all forms of freedom. By the mid-Thirties, many intelligent 
people believed that fascism was likely to become the predominant 
system of government in Europe and perhaps throughout the world. 
There were quasi-fascist regimes in Germany, Italy, Spain, Portugal, 
Poland, Hungary, Austria, Turkey, Greece, Romania, Japan and many 
other states ; and flourishing fascist parties virtually everywhere else. To 
them the Soviet Union appeared to be the only major power wholly 
committed to opposing, and if necessary fighting, fascism. Hence many 
of them were not only prepared to defend its apparent virtues but to 
justify the manifest ruthlessness of the Stalin regime. Very few of them, 
at any rate at that stage, were aware of the true nature of the regime. 
Jewish writers, in particular, knew little or nothing of Stalin's violent 
anti-Semitism. It was not known that he sent over 600 writers to the 
camps, many (including Isaac Babel and Osip Mandelstam) to their 
deaths; that he almost certainly murdered Maxim Gorky; and that he, 
like Hitler, took millions of books out of circulation and burnt them, 
though not publicly. 154 

Yet Western intellectuals knew enough about Soviet severity to 
oblige them to adopt a double standard in defending it. Lincoln Steffens 
set the tone: Treason to the Tsar wasn't a sin, treason to Communism 
is.' 155 Shaw argued: 'We cannot afford to give ourselves moral airs 
when our most enterprising neighbour . . . humanely and judiciously 



THE DEVILS 307 

liquidates a handful of exploiters and speculators to make the world 
safe for honest men.' 156 Andre Malraux argued that 'Just as the 
Inquisition did not affect the fundamental dignity of Christianity, so 
the Moscow trials have not diminished the fundamental dignity of 
Communism.' Many intellectuals, including some who knew what 
totalitarian justice meant, defended the trials. Brecht wrote: 'Even in 
the opinion of the bitterest enemies of the Soviet Union and of her 
government, the trials have clearly demonstrated the existence of 
active conspiracies against the regime', a 'quagmire of infamous 
crimes' committed by 'All the scum, domestic and foreign, all the 
vermin, the professional criminals and informers . . . this rabble ... I 
am convinced this is the truth.' 158 Feuchtwanger was present at the 
1937 Pyatakov trial (which led up to the Bukharin and other trials) 
and wrote an instant book about it, Moscow 1937, which declared: 
'there was no justification of any sort for imagining that there was 
anything manufactured or artificial about the trial proceedings.' Stalin 
immediately had this translated and published in Moscow (November 
1937) and a copy of it was pressed on the wretched Bukharin on the 
very eve of his own trial, to complete his despair. 159 

The nkvd, indeed, made frequent use of pro-Stalin tracts by 
Western intellectuals to break down the resistance of their prisoners. 
They were assisted, too, by pro-Stalin elements in the Western 
embassies and press in Moscow. Ambassador Davies told his govern- 
ment that the trials were absolutely genuine and repeated his views in a 
mendacious book, Mission to Moscow, published in 1941. Harold 
Denny, of the New York Times, wrote of the trials: 'in the broad sense, 
they are not fakes' (14 March 1938). His colleague, Walter Duranty, 
the paper's regular Moscow correspondent, was one of the most 
comprehensive of Stalin's apologists. As Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: 
'There was something vigorous, vivacious, preposterous about his 
unscrupulousness, which made his persistent lying somehow absorb- 
ing.' His favourite expression was 'I put my money on Stalin'. 160 Of 
the Pyatakov trial he wrote: 'It is unthinkable that Stalin and 
Voroshilov and Budyonny and the court martial could have sentenced 
their friends to death unless the proofs of guilt were overwhelming.' 161 
To suggest the evidence was faked, echoed Ambassador Davies, 
'would be to suppose the creative genius of Shakespeare'. 162 

The attempt by Western intellectuals to defend Stalinism involved 
them in a process of self-corruption which transferred to them, and so 
to their countries, which their writings helped to shape, some of the 
moral decay inherent in totalitarianism itself, especially its denial of 
individual responsibility for good or ill. Lionel Trilling shrewdly 
observed of the Stalinists of the West that they repudiated politics, or 
at least the politics of 'vigilance and effort': 



308 THE DEVILS 

In an imposed monolithic government they saw the promise of rest from the 
particular acts of will which are needed to meet the many, often clashing, 
requirements of democratic society . . . they cherished the idea of revolution 
as the final, all-embracing act of will which would forever end the 
exertions of our individual wills. 163 

For America, the development was particularly serious because the 
Stalinists then formed the salient part of the new radical movement; 
and as Trilling also noted: 

In any view of the American cultural situation, the importance of the radical 
movement of the Thirties cannot be overestimated. It may be said to have 
created the American intellectual class as we now know it in its great size 
and influence. It fixed the character of this class as being, through all 
mutations of opinion, predominantly of the Left. 164 

This was the class which shaped the thinking of the liberal- 
Democratic political establishment, which was to hold power in the 
most powerful nation on earth until virtually the end of the 1970s. 
The ramifying influence of Thirties totalitarian terror was, there- 
fore, immense, in space and time. But at that epoch, the ultimate 
consequences of Hitler and Stalin seemed unimportant. What mat- 
tered was what their regimes would do in the immediate future, not 
merely to their helpless subjects, but to their neighbours near and far. 
The advent of Stalin and Hitler to absolute power dealt a decisive 
blow to a world structure which was already unstable and fragile. 
Both had limitless territorial aims, since both subscribed to imminent 
eschatologies, one of class, one of race, in the course of which their 
rival power-systems would become globally dominant. Hence the 
arrival of these two men on the scene introduced what may be 
termed the high noon of aggression. 



NINE 

The High Noon of Aggression 



During the 1920s, the civilized Western democracies had maintained 
some kind of shaky world order, through the League on the one 
hand, and through Anglo-American financial diplomacy on the 
other. At the beginning of the 1930s, the system - if it could be called 
a system - broke down completely, opening an era of international 
banditry in which the totalitarian states behaved simply in accor- 
dance with their military means. The law-abiding powers were 
economically ruined and unilaterally disarmed. The French economy 
passed its peak in 1929 and thereafter went into steady decline, not 
recovering its 1929 levels until the early 1950s. Its unemployment 
figures remained comparatively low simply because the dismissed 
workers went back to the peasant farms on which they had been 
born, and migrants were ejected. France retreated into isolation and 
began to build her Maginot Line, itself a symbol of defeatism. The 
Americans and the British were obsessed by economy. In the early 
1930s, the American army, with 132,069 officers and men, was only 
the sixteenth largest in the world, smaller than those of Czecho- 
slovakia, Poland, Turkey, Spain and Romania. 1 The Chief of Staff, 
MacArthur, had the army's only limousine. Ramsay MacDonald, 
Britain's Labour Prime Minister, who had no car of his own and 
none provided by the state, had to trot to the end of Downing Street 
and hail a bus or taxi when he went about the nation's business. 2 In 
1930, the Americans persuaded the semi-pacifist Labour government 
to sign the London Naval Treaty, which reduced the Royal Navy to a 
state of impotence it had not known since the seventeenth century. 
The Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson, a Methodist Utopian who 
talked of 'mobilizing a democracy of diplomacy', defended the 
decision to cease work on the projected Singapore base, and to cut 
Britain's cruisers to a mere fifty, on the grounds that Japan 'had 
definitely pledged herself to settle her disputes by peaceful means'. 3 
Ironically it was the 1930 London Naval Treaty, which they had 

309 



310 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

reluctantly signed, that finally persuaded the Japanese to break with 
the West and pursue their own self-interest. The 1930 Smoot- 
Hawley tariff, which destroyed their American trade (15 per cent of 
their exports) and the other tariffs which followed in retaliation, 
seemed to them sufficient moral reason to return to the law of the 
jungle. On 10 September 1931 sailors at the British naval base at 
Invergordon, angered by a 10 per cent pay cut, mutinied and 
immobilized some of Britain's main fleet units. Eight days later, the 
Japanese Army High Command engineered a crisis in Manchuria, 
leading to invasion, against the express commands of the civilian 
cabinet in Tokyo. 4 The cabinet surrendered and endorsed the army 
coup, declaring a new puppet state of Manchukuo. 

Britain could, and did, do nothing. Its Tokyo ambassador, Sir 
Francis Lindley, reported that he found himself 'in the unpleasant 
position of seeking assurances from a government which had not the 
power to make them good'. 5 Britain got a League of Nations inquiry 
set up, under Lord Lytton, which in due course produced a report 
critical of Japan. The only consequence was that Japan left the 
League on 27 March 1933. League enthusiasts, like Lord Robert 
Cecil, pressed for 'action' against Japan. But they were the same men 
who had insisted on disarmament. On 29 February 1932 Sir 
Frederick Field, the First Sea Lord, said Britain was 'powerless' in the 
Far East; Singapore was 'defenceless'. The ten-year-rule was now 
quietly scrapped, but it was too late. 6 As Stanley Baldwin put it: 'If 
you enforce an economic boycott you will have war declared by 
Japan and she will seize Singapore and Hong Kong and we cannot, as 
we are placed, stop her. You will get nothing out of Washington but 
words, big words, but only words.' 7 

In fact, even with their existing forces, Britain and America in 
combination could have deterred and contained Japan. Pearl Harbor 
could only be defended by sea-power. Reinforced with British units, 
the American Pacific fleet might have made the base secure. Singa- 
pore harbour could be defended by adequate air power alone. With 
American air reinforcements, that too might have been rendered 
defensible. 8 A strong line with Japan would then have been feasible. 
But such joint planning was ruled out by America's growing isola- 
tionism — a feature of the 1930s much more than the 1920s. America 
was moving towards the 1935 Neutrality Act. When Roosevelt took 
over from Hoover he made matters worse. Hoover had helped to 
plan a world economic conference, to be held in London June-July 
1933. It might have persuaded the 'have-not' powers that there were 
alternatives to fighting for a living. On 3 July Roosevelt torpedoed it. 
Thereafter no real effort was made to create a stable financial 
framework within which disputes could be settled by diplomacy. In 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 311 

the 1920s the world had been run by the power of money. In the 
1930s it was subject to the arbitration of the sword. 

A careful study of the chronology of the period reveals the extent 
to which the totalitarian powers, though acting independently and 
sometimes in avowed hostility towards each other, took advantage 
of their numbers and their growing strength to challenge and outface 
the pitifully stretched resources of democratic order. Italy, Japan, 
Russia and Germany played a geopolitical game together, whose 
whole object was to replace international law and treaties by a new 
Realpolitik in which, each believed, its own millennarian vision was 
destined to be realized. None of these wolf-like states trusted the 
others; each deceived when it could; but each took advantage of the 
depredations of the rest to enlarge its booty and strengthen its 
position. There was therefore a conspiracy in crime, unstable and 
shifting, sometimes open, more often covert. Competition in crime, 
too: the process whereby one totalitarian state corrupted another 
internally now spread to foreign dealings, so that a Gresham's Law 
operated here, too, driving out diplomacy and replacing it by force. 

These predator-states practised Realpolitik in different ways and 
at different speeds. Stalin's Russia was the most Bismarckian, 
content to seize opportunity merely when it offered and patient 
enough to move according to geological time-scales, convinced all 
would be hers in the end. Germany was the most dynamic, with an 
imminent eschatology which Hitler felt must be realized in his 
lifetime. Mussolini's Italy was the jackal, following in the wake of 
the larger beasts and snatching any morsel left unguarded. Japan was 
the most unstable, haunted by the vision of actual mass-starvation. 
The world recession had cut the prices of her principal export, raw 
silk, by 50 per cent and she was now short of currency to buy rice. 
Yet by 1934 she was spending 937 million yen out of a total budget 
of 2,112 million, nearly half, on her army and navy. 9 All these 
totalitarian regimes suffered from internal predation too, the 
Hobbesian 'war of every man against every man'. But at least 
Germany, Russia and Italy had gangster dictatorships. In Japan, 
nobody was in charge. 

The 1931 Manchurian conspiracy showed that the military could 
usurp decision-making and remain unpunished. The 1932 murders 
of the prime minister, finance minister and leading industrialists 
marked the effective end of government by parliamentary means. In 
December 1933 the Tenno himself was nearly murdered, and 
thereafter he went in terror. The most influential single figure in 
Japan in the period 1931-4 was the War Minister, General Sadao 
Araki, a ferocious bushido ideologue, who ran a Hitler-style youth 
movement and was one of the leading exponents of the new 



312 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

totalitarian Shinto. In a European country he would almost certainly 
have become a dictator, and thus created a centralized focus of 
decision-making and responsibility. But in a country which, in 
theory, was ruled by a living god-man, individual leadership was 
reprobated and punished by assassination. Even the most authorita- 
rian of the Japanese, indeed especially the most authoritarian, 
subscribed to clan or group rule, small oligarchies meeting and 
arguing in secret and taking collective decisions which shrouded 
individual responsibility. 10 It was a system which encouraged at one 
and the same time both physical recklessness and moral cowardice, 
and which stifled the personal conscience. It made the Japanese 
ruling elites peculiarly susceptible to the collectivism preached, albeit 
in different accents, by Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler and especially to 
the central proposition, about which all three were unanimous, that 
the rights of the individual were subsumed in the rights of the state, 
which were total and unqualified. Since the 1860s, the British and 
Americans had tried hard to inculcate a different tradition; and with 
some success. It was upheld by and personified in Professor Tatsuk- 
ichi Minobe, an authority on constitutional law at the Imperial 
University since 1902, and a peer of Japan by imperial nomination. 
His three major works on the Japanese constitution made him the 
mentor of Japanese parliamentary liberalism, and were objects of 
peculiar hatred to the devots of totalitarian Shinto. Attacks on the 
old professor, who argued that the law existed to protect the 
individual in society, and that it was greater than the state, mounted 
steadily as Japan's own lawlessness went unpunished and, still more, 
when Hitler triumphantly emerged in Germany to rule without 
constitutional law and to defy international agreements. On 
19 December 1934 Japan denounced the London Naval Treaty and 
followed Hitler in unrestricted rearmament. On 16 March 1935 
Hitler repudiated the Versailles Treaty. On 25 April leading mem- 
bers of the Japanese armed services carried Tatsukichi's books to the 
roof of the Tokyo Military Club and burned them publicly. 

This symbolic repudiation of the rule of law was rapidly followed 
by the adoption of what might be termed a crude Japanese form of 
Hegelianism, which became government doctrine and was taught in 
the services and the schools. It was summarized officially by the 
Ministry of Justice: 

To the Japanese mind there has been no conception of the individual as 
opposed to the state .... Underlying western types of ideas exists an 
individualistic view of life which regards individuals as absolute, indepen- 
dent entities ... the standard of all values and themselves the highest of all 
values. [But] human beings, while having their independent existence and 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 313 

life, depend in a deeper sense on the whole and live in co-ordinated 
relationship with each other. They are born from the state, sustained by the 
state and brought up in the history and traditions of the state. Individuals 
can only exist as links in an infinite and vast chain of life called the state; 
they are links through whom the inheritance of ancestors is handed down to 
posterity .... Individuals participate in the highest and greatest value when 
they serve the state as part of it. 11 

The statement was mendacious because the philosophy in this form 
was an import from Europe, and misleading because those in Japan 
who most emphatically subscribed to it were the first to disobey and 
assault the state when its policies were not wholly subject to their 
control. In any case, the state was not an entity but a collection of 
warring factions, with murder as the arbiter. Putting military men in 
charge of ministries did not solve any problems: they were just as 
liable to be assassinated as civilians. Taking decisions collectively 
was no protection either: the gunmen developed the technique of 
collective assassination. Besides, the military were as divided as the 
civilian parties. The navy wanted a 'Southern' policy, expanding into 
the Far Eastern colonies and islands of the Dutch, French and British, 
rich in the raw materials, especially oil, which Japan lacked. The 
army wanted expansion into the Asian mainland. But they, too, were 
divided into 'Northerners', who wanted to build up Manchuria and 
strike at Russia; and 'Southerners', who wanted to take the Chinese 
cities and push up its great river valleys. None of these men, or the 
civilian politicians who sided with them, thought through their plans 
to their ultimate consequences. They were all brilliant tacticians; 
none was a strategist. Everyone had striking ideas about beginning a 
war; but from first to last, from 1931 to the hour of the bitter defeat 
in 1945, no Japanese, civil or military, worked out realistically how 
the war was likely to end. How could that be? To be known to argue 
that, in certain circumstances, defeat was possible, was to risk death. 
When debate was inhibited by physical fear, and changes of political 
direction brought about by slaughter, cold-blooded calculation - the 
essence of Realpolitik - became impossible. The truth is, as the 
1930s progressed, Japan was ruled and her policies determined not 
by any true system of government but by an anarchy of terror. 

The watershed was 1935-6. On 12 August 1935, the faction- 
fighting spread to the armed forces, when General Tetsuzan Nagata, 
Chief of the Military Affairs Bureau, was hacked to death by a 
radical colonel, Saburo Aizawa. Aizawa declared at his trial: 'I failed 
to dispatch Nagata with one stroke of my sword, and as a fencing 
instructor I am bitterly ashamed.' 12 But he was ashamed of nothing 
else and used his protracted trial to make violent anti-establishment 



314 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

war propaganda. It was still going on when the elections of 20 Fe- 
bruary 1936 saw a recovery of parliamentary liberalism - for what it 
was worth. Five days later there was an evening party at the house of 
the American Ambassador, Joseph Grew. Grew was deaf, and it is 
characteristic of the difficulties of working with Japan that, during 
his audiences with the Tenno, he could not hear a word of what the 
interpreter said as it was an unforgivable offence to speak above a 
whisper in the Emperor's presence. 13 But Grew's wife, a grand- 
daughter of the famous Commander Perry, spoke perfect Japanese, 
and their house was a caravanserai of Japanese constitutionalism. 
That evening their guests included Admiral Makoto Saito, the Privy 
Seal, and Admiral Kantaro Suzuki, the Chamberlain. After dinner 
Grew showed them the Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald film 
Naughty Marietta, which was much relished, the Japanese wives 
weeping copious tears of appreciation. 14 

Early the next morning, 1,500 men of the Tokyo garrison, 
including the Guards, two crack infantry regiments and artillery 
units, staged a putsch. They took the law courts, the Diet building, 
and the headquarters of the army, navy and police; and they 
surrounded the Imperial Palace. Assassination squads, armed with 
swords (for honour) and Thomson sub-machine-guns (for efficiency), 
were sent to the residences of the leading members of the govern- 
ment. Saito was murdered. So was the head of Military Education, 
and the Finance Minister. Suzuki, though injured, was saved by the 
heroism of his wife. The Prime Minister, Admiral Okada, a prime 
target since he had just announced that the elections meant a return 
to constitutional rule, was also saved by his wife, who locked him in 
a cupboard, and the hit-squad gunned down his brother by mistake. 
The ultimate object of the plot was to murder and replace the 
Emperor; but he survived too, and the navy and imperial guards 
forced the mutineers to surrender four days later. Thirteen leading 
rebels were tried hastily and executed in secret - only two committed 
hara-kiri, though all were given the chance to do so. It was notable 
that throughout this grisly episode, nobody concerned — the victims, 
their colleagues, the Emperor, senior army and navy officers, police, 
bodyguards, and least of all the murderers themselves — behaved 
with anything other than cowardice and pusillanimity. The only 
exceptions were the despised womenfolk, the wives and maid- 
servants of the ministers, who showed extraordinary courage and 
resourcefulness. 15 

The attempted putsch was widely interpreted as pro-Nazi, but it is 
more probable that its authors were, in some cases wittingly in others 
unwittingly, servants of Soviet policy. Their manifesto denounced 
the 'many people whose chief aim and purpose have been to amass 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 315 

personal material wealth disregarding the general welfare and pro- 
sperity of the Japanese people .... The Genro, the senior statesmen, 
military cliques, plutocrats, bureaucrats and political parties are all 
traitors who are destroying the national essence.' 16 The young 
officers involved were quite prepared to introduce a form of Com- 
munism into Japan, through a mixture of Marxism and Kodo (the 
'Imperial Way') with a Communist puppet-Emperor. This was the 
view of the Soviet agent Richard Sorge, who worked from within the 
Nazi embassy. He guessed, and so informed his masters in Moscow, 
that the mutiny would favour Soviet policy since it would mark a 
movement away from the 'Northern' tactic of confrontation with 
Russia along the Manchukuo border, and towards the further 
penetration of China. That was doubly welcome to Stalin since an 
all-out war between China and Japan would not only rule out an 
attack on his vulnerable eastern bases but, in all probability, force 
Chiang and the Kuomintang to drop their differences with the 
Chinese Communists, form a Popular Front, and thus hasten the 
moment when the whole of China would join the Soviet bloc. 17 

That, indeed, is exactly what happened. The mutineers had 
wanted a more active Japanese military policy, favouring a 'Nor- 
thern' outlet for it. The Japanese military establishment, having 
hanged the mutineers, promptly and cravenly adopted their activism, 
but - as Sorge had guessed — gave it a 'Southern' twist. There is no 
evidence, however, that Japan ever willed an all-out war with China. 
Rather the contrary. It was her policy to pose as China's fellow- 
oriental 'protector' and 'brother', and gain her ends by trade, 
diplomacy, pressure and propaganda. The only great power with an 
interest in a Sino— Japanese war was Soviet Russia; and the only 
element within China which stood to gain from one was the ccp. 

The chronology of events is suggestive. By the summer of 1934, 
the Communist armies in China, of which Chou En-lai was political 
commissar, were close to destruction at the hands of Chiang's kmt 
forces and their German advisers, von Seeckt and von Falkenhausen. 
In the autumn the Communist war-lords decided to begin what later 
became known as 'the Long March', ostensibly to fight the Japanese 
in the north; in fact to get away from Chiang's encircling block- 
houses and barbed-wire. The details of the March, which began in 
October 1934 and ended in Yenan in December 1936, are Maoist 
legend, and may be believed or not according to taste. 18 The salient 
point is that during the course of it Mao, for the first time, got 
control of the main Communist forces. The nominal commander, 
Chang Kuo Tao, split off and took his men to Sikiang, and so was 
branded with the heresy of 'flightism'. Henceforth, as supreme 
Communist war-lord (with Chou as his political Merlin), Mao could 



316 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

accuse any Communist competitor of 'war-lordism' and concentrate 
all power, military and political, in himself. 19 

By the time this process of Communist concentration was complete 
and the March was over, towards the end of 1936, Stalin was pushing 
his 'Popular Front' policy of getting the ccp and the kmt to act 
together in war with Japan. Mao was at first reluctant: he thought 
Chiang should be shot. But during a visit to the northern front late in 

1936, Chiang was arrested in a mysterious episode known as the 'Sian 
Incident'; his papers were searched and Chou En-lai got access to his 
diaries revealing the fierceness of his anti-Japanese feelings. 20 As a 
result Mao allowed himself to be persuaded; and by 1 March 1937 he 
had reverted to his earlier nationalism, telling a visitor, Agnes 
Smedley: 'The Communists absolutely do not tie their viewpoint to 
the interests of a single class at a single time, but are most passionately 
concerned with the fate of the Chinese nation.' 21 

To be pursued successfully, a nationalist line required a full-scale 
'patriotic war'. On 5 July 1937, the Chinese Communists and the kmt 
signed a working agreement. Two days later, on the night of 7 July, 
came the first 'incident' between kmt and Japanese forces at Marco 
Polo Bridge outside Peking, the first shots coming from the Chinese 
side. It was this escalating episode which led to full-scale war. It is 
significant that the opposing commanders, Sung Chi-yuen, kmt 
Commander-in-Chief in North China, and the Japanese c-in-c 
General Gun Hashimoto, were on friendly terms and did everything in 
their power to damp down the affair. But repeated and inexplicable 
acts of violence make it clear that somebody was deliberately seeking a 
full-scale conflict. General Ho Ying-chin, the kmt Minister of War in 

1937, believed to his dying day that it was the work of the Japanese 
military radicals, the same group who had staged the Tokyo mutiny 
the year before. But Japanese officers present during the Bridge affair 
thought at the time that the violence was the work of subversive 
elements in the Chinese forces, and after Mao's post-war triumph they 
were convinced that his agents, acting on Soviet instruction, provoked 
the war. The Japanese Soviet expert, General Akio Doi, said in 1967: 
'We were then too simple to realize that this was all a Communist 
plot.' What is quite clear is that the Marco Polo affair was not a 
repetition of the Manchurian Incident of 1931. There was no 
conspiracy in the Japanese army. The Chinese behaved with rather 
more intransigence and arrogance than the Japanese once the 
incident took place, and they took the initiative in spreading the 
war. 22 

What is equally clear is that Russia was the great beneficiary of the 
Sino— Japanese war. The Japanese had been the last to abandon the 
attempt to crush the Bolshevik regime by force. Their frontier with the 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 317 

Soviets remained tense, and in the late 1930s there were several very 
serious military encounters: in 1937 on the Amur River; in 1938 at 
Changkufeng, seventy miles from Vladivostok; and in May-June of 
1939 on the Mongolian— Manchukuo border — the last being a 
large-scale armoured engagement, foreshadowing the vast tank- 
battles of the Second World War. Without the China war, Japan 
would undoubtedly have been able to engage the Russians in 
full-scale conflict, and drive them from the Far East. As it was, she 
could not divert sufficient forces; and the 1939 battle, in which 
General Zhukov made his reputation, was a Soviet victory and the 
first defeat the Japanese forces had suffered in modern times. 23 

The other gainer was Mao. In the autumn of 1937, with the war 
now raging uncontrollably, he told his generals: 

The Sino-Japanese conflict gives us, the Chinese Communists, an excellent 
opportunity for expansion. Our policy is to devote 70 per cent of our effort 
to this end, 20 per cent to coping with the government, and 10 per cent to 
fighting Japanese. This policy is to be carried out in three stages. During the 
first stage we are to work with the kmt to ensure our existence and growth. 
During the second stage we are to achieve parity in strength with the kmt. 
During the third we are to penetrate deep into parts of China to establish 
bases for counter-attack against the kmt. 24 

This policy was carried out to the letter. Chiang retired to Chung- 
king, deep in the interior. Mao remained in the north-west, avoiding 
large-scale engagements with the Japanese but fighting a low-key 
guerrilla war and creating a military and political empire among the 
peasants. 

For Japan, the war was a moral, political and ultimately a military 
and economic disaster. The Americans had always been basically 
pro-Chinese. The 'China lobby' already existed. Roosevelt was 
violently anti-Japanese. On 5 October 1937 in a speech in Chicago, 
he equated Japan with the Nazis and the fascists and signalled her 
moral isolation: 'When an epidemic of physical disease starts to 
spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the 
patients.' 25 In the conduct of Japanese policy, the military were now 
in the saddle, the civilian ministers being no longer consulted, or even 
informed, of decisions. And military control was itself shaky, as the 
debased doctrine of totalitarian Shinto and bushido took over the 
army. The Chinese capital, Nanking, fell in December 1937. The 
Japanese commander, General Iwane Marsui, had entered China 
declaring: 'I am going to the front not to fight an enemy but in the 
state of mind of one who sets out to pacify his brother'; he ordered 
his men to 'protect and patronize the Chinese officials and people as 
far as possible'. In fact once the army entered Nanking, the radical 



318 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

officers took over. For four weeks the streets of the city were given 
over to one of the largest-scale massacres in history. Men, women 
and children, said an eye-witness, 'were hunted like rabbits. Every- 
one seen to move was shot.' Some 20,000 male Chinese civilians of 
military age were marched out into the countryside and killed by 
bayoneting and machine-guns - foreshadowing the Soviet massacres 
of the Poles in 1941 at Katyn and elsewhere. The killings went on 
until 6 February 1938, and by then between 200,000 and 300,000 
Chinese were dead. Even an official Nazi embassy report described 
the scenes as 'the work of bestial machinery'. The atrocities got wide 
coverage in world newspapers. The Emperor and civilians in the 
cabinet claimed later that they knew nothing of these events until 
after the war. 26 

By now Japan had total censorship. In March 1938 the Diet 
abdicated, passing a Military Law which placed all power in the 
hands of the generals and admirals. But there was not much police 
terror: it was unnecessary. The Japanese appeared united behind the 
war policy. At all events there was no open opposition. The British 
ambassador, Sir George Sansom, reported: 'The difference between 
the extremists and the moderates is not one of destination but of the 
road by which that destination is to be reached and the speed at 
which it is to be travelled.' 27 Already, by early 1938, Japan had a 
total war economy including control of labour, of prices and wages, 
and of all major industrial decisions. Many firms were in fact run by 
state boards, often under military men. As the army occupied the big 
Chinese towns and moved up the rivers, rapidly appropriating all 
industrial China, a board, mainly of army officers, was formed to 
run the Chinese economy. But these men did not know how to end 
the war or win it; or indeed what the war was for. Was it to bring 
Japan prosperity? It did the reverse. The New York Times correspon- 
dent in Tokyo, Hugh Byas, reported (31 July 1938): 'Japan has 
reached the point where the length of a matchstick and the skin of a 
rat represent important economic factors in continuing the war with 
China.' Rationing and shortages were now,- he said, more severe than 
in Germany in 1918. Rat skins were being tanned to find a 
leather-substitute. Major commodities such as raw cotton, cloth, 
chemical, leather, metals, oil, wool and steel had been removed from 
the market. It was impossible to buy toothpaste, chocolate, chewing- 
gum, golf balls, frying-pans. Anything made of iron, he wrote, 'is 
scarcer than gold'. 28 Long before the European war broke out, Japan 
was a tense, underfed, increasingly desperate totalitarian country, 
which had alienated all its neighbours, abolished its constitutional 
and democratic system, abandoned the rule of law, had no long-term 
strategy which made any sense, and had adopted the expedient of 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 319 

using force to smash its way out of its difficulties, which were 
increasingly self-created. Here, at the end of the 1930s, was one 
exemplar of relative morality in practice. 

Another was Italy. Here again we see the process of mutual 
corruption at work. Mussolini's putsch had been inspired by Lenin's. 
From his earliest days as a political activist, Hitler had cited 
Mussolini as a precedent. His study in the Munich Brown House 
contained a large bust of Mussolini, and in a pamphlet published in 
1935 Goebbels acknowledged in elaborate detail the debt of the 
Nazis to Italian fascism. 29 Such compliments were not reciprocated - 
at first. Mussolini, who saw himself with some justice as an educated 
and civilized man, regarded Hitler as a vulgar mountebank and a 
dangerous gangster. Italy had a small, well-integrated and much 
respected Jewish community. Mussolini owed a lot to Jews, espe- 
cially to one of his socialist mentors, Angelica Balabanov, to Enrico 
Rocca, founder of Roman fascism, and to Gino Arias, a theorist of 
Italian corporatism. 30 Hence Hitler's racism was at first repugnant to 
Mussolini, and he perceived the potential dangers of the Nazi regime 
earlier than even the French, let alone the British. In 1934 he 
described it as 'one hundred per cent racism. Against everything and 
everyone: yesterday against Christian civilization, today against 
Latin civilization, tomorrow, who knows, against the civilization of 
the whole world.' He thought the regime 'drunk with a stubborn 
bellicosity'. 31 Italy had always feared invasion from the Teutonic 
north. Her hereditary enemy was Austria: and Hitler's policy of 
Anschluss must involve German backing for Austrian attempts to 
recover Italy's gains at Versailles. Italy had as much to lose from the 
unravelling of the Treaty as anyone; and when Hitler repudiated 
Versailles on 16 March 1935, Mussolini agreed to meet with Britain 
and France at Stresa (April 11-14) to form a 'front' against Nazi 
aggression. 

But by this point Mussolini was already in the process of corrup- 
tion. The audacity of the Roehm purge, and the lack of response to 
this state crime from any quarter, had impressed him; as had Hitler's 
apparent success in raising the German birth-rate. He noted that 
Japan's Manchurian conquest remained unpunished and that her 
repudiation of the 1930 London Naval Treaty, which meant she was 
building capital-ships and aircraft-carriers as fast as she could, had 
brought no urgent response from Britain. What he did not know, 
though he might have surmised, was that on 19 March 1934 the 
British cabinet had decided that Germany must be treated as 'the 
ultimate potential enemy against whom our "long-range" Defence 
policy must be directed'. As a result desperate consideration was 
given to the possibility of making friends again with Japan; but the 



320 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

idea was dropped as hopeless because of implacable American 
hostility. 32 Mussolini did not know this. But he could look at a map; he 
could count. He knew it was inconceivable that Britain could maintain 
adequate naval and air power at home to contain Germany, in the Far 
East to contain Japan, and in the Mediterranean too. He felt that Britain 
and France ought to be willing to pay some price to reward his 
continuing friendship. In the spirit of totalitarian Realpolitik he wanted 
a free hand to deal with Abyssinia, where incidents on the Italian 
Somaliland and Eritrean borders had occurred on 5 December 1934. 
Two months before the Stresa Front was formed he had moved out 
troops. He had a case. Abyssinia was itself an empire, ruling subject and 
often migratory populations by force and terror, behind shifting or 
indeterminate frontiers. Most of the local issues of 1935 were to be 
resurrected in the post-colonial period, in the late 1970s - though by 
that time Abyssinia had found a more resolute, if sinister, ally, the Soviet 
Union, and so kept her independence and empire. In 1935 the crisis did 
not revolve around the local issues but the credibility of the League, of 
which Abyssinia was a member and to which she vociferously appealed 
when Italy attacked on 3 October 1935. Five days later the League 
declared Italy the aggressor and on 19 October it imposed 'sanctions'. 
The handling of the Abyssinian crisis, in which Britain was effectively 
in charge, is a striking example of how to get the worst of all possible 
worlds. Abyssinia was a primitive African monarchy which practised 
slavery; not a modern state at all. It should not have been in the League. 
The notion that the League had to guarantee its frontiers was an 
excellent illustration of the absurdity of the covenant which led Senator 
Lodge and his friends to reject it. The League should have been scrapped 
after the 1931 Manchurian fiasco. However, if it was felt worth 
preserving, and if the integrity of Abyssinia was a make-or-break 
issue, then Britain and France should have been prepared to go to war; 
in which case Italy would have backed down. The two Western powers 
would have lost her friendship, aroused her enmity indeed; but the 
League would have shown it had teeth, and could use them; and the 
effects might have been felt elsewhere, in central Europe particularly. 
But to impose sanctions was folly. Sanctions rarely work: they damage, 
infuriate and embitter but they do not deter or frustrate an act of 
aggression. In this case they made no sense because France would not 
agree to oil sanctions (the only type likely to have any impact on events) 
and America, the world's greatest oil producer, would not impose 
sanctions at all. Britain would not agree to close the Suez Canal or 
impose a naval quarantine: the First Sea Lord, Chatfield, reported only 
seven capital-ships were available. 33 While the cabinet argued about 
whether or not to try and impose oil sanctions, Hitler remilitarized the 
Rhineland on 7 March, making nonsense of both Versailles and the 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 321 

Locarno pact. On this date Britain had only three battleships in home 
waters, scarcely sufficient to neutralize Germany's 'pocket battle- 
ships'. Mussolini took Addis Ababa on 5 May and annexed the 
country four days later. On 10 June the Chancellor of the Exchequer, 
Neville Chamberlain, described the sanctions policy as 'the very 
midsummer of madness', and a week later the cabinet scrapped 
them. 34 

The only effect of the sanctions policy was to turn Mussolini into 
an enemy. From mid- 193 6 the Germans began to court him. There 
were visits to Rome by Frank, Goering, Himmler and Baldar von 
Shirach. On 1 November Mussolini spoke of the 'Rome-Berlin 
Axis'. By 22 February 1937, a review by the British Chiefs of Staff 
noted, 'The days are past when we could count automatically on a 
friendly and submissive Italy.' 35 That meant existing plans to rein- 
force the Far East fleet in the event of a crisis with Japan by sending 
ships through the Mediterranean and Suez were impractical. Britain 
now had three major potential naval enemies: in home waters, the 
Mediterranean, and the Pacific-Indian Ocean theatre. There was 
also the possibility that they might operate in concert. Three weeks 
after Mussolini spoke of the Axis, Japan and Germany signed the 
Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed at Russia but signalling the possibility 
of groups of totalitarian powers acting in predatory wolf-packs. On 
27 September 1937, Mussolini was in Berlin. He found Hitler's 
admiration irresistible. Hitler called him 'the leading statesman in the 
world, to whom none may even remotely compare himself'. 36 No 
longer content with Abyssinia, he began to imitate Hitler in the 
search for targets of expansion, manufacturing claims to Nice, 
Corsica, Tunis and Albania. He reversed his previous opposition to 
race-policy and in November 1938 produced his own version of the 
Nazi Nuremberg Laws. 37 He had already joined the Anti-Comintern 
Pact (6 November 1937) and left the League (11 December). In April 
1939 he began a career of European aggression, invading and 
annexing Albania, and the process of corruption culminated the next 
month (22 May) when he signed the 'Pact of Steel' with the man he 
had considered a potential 'enemy of civilization' only five years 
before. 

By this time Mussolini and Hitler had collaborated together in the 
first of the ideological proxy-wars. Their 'opponent' in this cynical 
ritual was Stalin. The theatre selected for their devastating perfor- 
mance was Spain, which had been virtually outside the European 
power-system since the early nineteenth century and which now 
became its agonized focus. This was itself extraordinary: Spain was 
aloof, self-contained, xenophobic, the European country most resis- 
tant to the holistic principle, the least vulnerable to the foreign 



322 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

viruses of totalitarianism, of Left or Right, social engineering, 
relative morality. That is what makes the Spanish Civil War so 
peculiarly tragic. The infection entered through the Socialist Party 
(psoe) and then spread. As Salvador de Madariaga put it, 'what 
made the Spanish Civil War inevitable was the civil war within the 
Socialist Party'. 38 In the 1920s, the Spanish Socialists had been 
sensible, pragmatic reformists. Their most important figure, the 
union leader Francino Largo Caballero, worked within the Spanish 
republican tradition. If he looked abroad at all, he admired the 
British Fabians. He thought the formation of the first Labour 
government in 1924 'the most important event in the entire history 
of international socialism'. 39 He even worked, on a give-and-take 
basis, with the dozy, unadventurous dictatorship of Primo de Rivera 
(1923-30). He argued that regimes and dictators might come and go, 
but the object of socialism was to improve the material and moral 
conditions of the workers within capitalism. 40 Socialist moderation 
made it possible to end the dictatorship without bloodshed and, the 
following year, to effect a peaceful transition from monarchy to 
republic. 

To begin with, Caballero served the Republic well. Violence or 
illegality by the Left, he insisted, would provoke the army and lead to 
another military dictatorship. He prevented his followers from 
burning down the house of General Mola, cynosure of the militant 
Right. He helped to shape the reformist constitution, which permit- 
ted nationalization but within a strict framework of law and subject 
to proper compensation. His great pride was in building schools. 
Whereas only 505 a year had been put up, on average, in the period 
1908-30, in the first year of the Republic over 7,000 had been 
built. 41 That was what socialist ministers were for. He insisted that 
political strikes incited by the anarchists and the small Communist 
Party, and violent rural unrest, be put down, if necessary by the use 
of artillery. 42 Hence a military coup by the Right (August 1932) was 
a fiasco. A modest agrarian reform bill was passed. For a brief, 
hopeful moment, it looked as though Spain might achieve republican 
stability on a firm basis of gradual, humane modernization. 

Then the vision fell to pieces. Caballero was the first victim of 
'entryism' - the furtive penetration of party and union cadres by 
the organized ultra-Left. He lost control of the chief union 
federation (ugt), and began to move to the Left to regain it. Foreign 
analogies began to play their sinister role. Hitler's triumph, the ease 
with which the German Social Democrats were destroyed, pointed 
the lesson that moderation did not pay: by July 1933 Caballero was 
asserting that the Socialists would seize power rather than accept 
fascism. Early in 1934 the Austrian Catholic Chancellor Dollfuss 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 323 

smashed his local Socialist Party, bombarding its stronghold, the 
Karl Marx Hof, with field-guns. Comparisons were drawn with 
Spain. Warnings by central Europe socialists such as Otto Bauer and 
Julius Deutsch filled the Spanish socialist press. 43 The infection of 
extremism struck deepest in the Socialist Youth, which began to 
form street-mobs and engage in systematic violence. They flattered 
Caballero by calling him 'the Spanish Lenin'. The old reformer, 
rejuvenated by their adulation, allowed the militants to lead him by 
the nose deeper down the path of violence, enchanted by the term 
given to the new trend, Caballerismo. 44 If Mussolini was corrupted 
towards the Right, Caballero was corrupted towards the Left. 

The process was accelerated by the gathering crisis on the land, hit 
by the end of emigration (100,000 were forced to return in 1933), 
falling prices, and controversy over the land-reform, which the 
landowners thought revolutionary, the anarchists a fraud, and which 
could not be enforced. In the countryside, 'the poor were maddened 
by hunger, the rich were maddened by fear'. 45 The landowners' 
slogan for the hungry was Corned Republica! - Let the Republic feed 
you! The civil guards used what was termed 'preventive brutality' to 
put down peasant risings led by anarchists. In November 1933 the 
Socialists lost the election, moved out of government and embarked 
on direct action. 

This change of tactics could not succeed and was certain to destroy 
the republican system. It represented a denial of everything that 
Caballero had once represented. In May 1934 he encouraged the 
agricultural workers to strike. It failed: the Interior Ministry de- 
ported thousands of peasants at gunpoint and dropped them from 
lorries hundreds of miles from their homes. In October Caballero 
pulled out all the stops. In Madrid there was a half-hearted general 
strike. In Barcelona an 'Independent Catalan Republic' lasted pre- 
cisely ten hours. In the Asturias, a Workers' Commune*, with 
Socialist backing, survived a fortnight, the miners resisting fiercely 
with dynamite. But with the workers of Barcelona and Madrid 
refusing to rise, its suppression was inevitable. It was carried out by 
Spain's ablest general, Francisco Franco, using four columns of 
regular and colonial troops. 

Franco had hitherto opposed military risings and he continued to 
do so. But he now saw Spain threatened by a foreign disease: 'The 
fronts are socialism, communism and the other formulae which 
attack civilization to replace it with barbarism.' 46 In 1935 he 
discovered that 25 per cent of army conscripts belonged to the Left 
parties, and that organizing and leafleting them was the primary task 
of Left cadres. In August 1935, at the seventh meeting of the 
Comintern, Dimitrov introduced the 'Popular Front' conception 



324 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

with the words: 'Comrades, you will remember the ancient tale of 
the capture of Troy .... The attacking army was unable to achieve 
victory until, with the aid of the famous Trojan Horse, it managed to 
penetrate to the very heart of the enemy camp.' 47 Franco feared that 
once the army was divided or neutralized there would be nothing to 
prevent a take-over by the extreme Left, leading to all the horrors of 
Lenin's Russia and, not least, a Stalinist forced collectivization of the 
peasants. Early in February 1936, with a Popular Front formed and 
on the eve of the elections, he told the Spanish military attache in 
Paris that the army must be prepared to act 'if the worst came to the 
worst'. But he thought the crisis would blow over, and no military 
intervention was planned. 48 Even after the Popular Front victory on 
16 February, he thought that the army without respectable civil 
backing would lack 'the moral unity necessary to undertake the 
task'. 49 

That the army got this backing was entirely the work of the 
Socialist and other Left extremists. The Left had been the first to 
desert democracy for violence in 1934. 50 The result was to set up a 
frenzy of fear in the main democratic right-wing grouping, the ceda 
(Confederacion Espafiola de Derechas Autonomas), led by Gil 
Robles. Robles was a genuine republican; he was hated by the 
monarchists and fascists as much as by the socialists. 51 His party was 
a mass-movement of the middle class which did not need to use force 
to obtain what it could obtain through the ballot - security. Yet 
totalitarian corruption was present in the ceda too. Its youth 
movement, the Juventudes de Accion Popular (jap), responded 
eagerly to the violence of the Leftist youth organizations. It greeted 
Robles himself with cries of 'Jefe, Jefe, Jefe!' and the slogan 'The Jefe 
is always right'. It called the Left 'anti-Spain'. It proclaimed: 'Either 
Accion Popular smashes Marxism or Marxism will destroy Spain. 
With the Jefe or against the Jefel There can be no dialogue with 
anti-Spain. Us and not Them. Let us annihilate Marxism, free- 
masonry and separatism so that Spain may continue her immortal 
road!' Some of Robles's followers fought the 1936 election on a 
panic-programme: victory for the Left would be 'the arming of the 
rabble; burning of private houses and banks; distribution of private 
goods and lands; wild looting and the common ownership of 
women'. 52 

When the Left took office after the elections, it proceeded to 
confirm most of these fears. Although the Popular Front parties won, 
they actually got less than 50 per cent of the votes cast. The Left 
improved its position by 1 million votes; but the Right added an 
extra 750,000 votes too. 53 These figures dictated caution. Instead the 
Left brushed aside constitutional niceties, such as waiting for the 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 325 

second-round run-off, and formed a government the day after the 
first ballot. That night the first burnings of churches and convents 
took place; in Orvieto the gaol was opened. In parliament the Left 
began an immediate campaign to deprive ceda deputies of their 
seats for alleged 'irregularities', and to attack the President, Alcala 
Zamora, who was a perfectly decent republican. 

The most alarming development was the rapidly growing influence 
of the Communists. They had succeeded in electing only seventeen 
deputies — including Dolores Ibarruri, 'La Pasionaria\ said to have 
cut a priest's throat with her teeth — but on 5 April they staged a 
coup. Thanks to the efforts of a skilful Comintern agent, Vittorio 
Codovilla, and the treachery of the Socialist Youth leader, Santiago 
Carrillo (who had already been attending meetings of the Com- 
munist Party Central Committee), the Socialist and Communist 
Youth Movements were amalgamated, which meant that 40,000 
militants were swallowed by the Communists. 54 Ten days later a 
full-blooded Popular Front programme was announced, making no 
concession to the narrowness of the electoral victory or the even 
division of the country. When he heard its terms, Robles warned the 
Cortes: 'Half the nation will not resign itself to die. If it cannot 
defend itself by one path, it will defend itself by another .... Civil war 
is being brought by those who seek the revolutionary conquest of 
power . . . the weapons have been loaded by ... a government which 
had not been able to fulfil its duty towards groups which have stayed 
within the strictest legality.' 55 

The forcing of a revolutionary programme through the Cortes 
would not of itself have provoked a military rising. The determining 
factor was the failure of the Popular Front to control its own 
militants or indeed to form any kind of stable government. The 
Socialists were hopelessly split as to what path to pursue. The leader 
of the moderates, Indalecio Prieto, hated Caballero and refused even 
to be in the same room with him: 'Let Caballero go to hell!' When he 
warned that Socialist violence would provoke the military he was 
accused of 'menopausal outbursts'. 56 The result was the worst of 
both worlds: a combination of weak government and strong rheto- 
ric, mainly supplied by Caballero. The activities of the Popular Front 
youth movement on the streets of the cities, and of the anarchists 
organizing peasant take-overs in the country and anti-government 
strikes in the factories, made the rhetoric seem serious to the already 
frightened middle and artisanal classes, and ordinary army and 
police officers. The militant Left, meaning the youth movement street 
gangs, the anarchists, the newly formed revolutionary Marxist party, 
the poum (Partido Obrero de Unification Marxista) and the 'Syndi- 
cos Libres' took the lead in the violence, to which emergent fascist 



326 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

gangs responded with enthusiasm. Attempts later made to attribute 
Left violence to fascist 'agents provocateurs' are not plausible. 57 The 
Popular Front youth gangs undoubtedly bred sadistic killers, who 
later became the worst agents of the Stalinist terror during the Civil 
War. 

In May the anarchist and poum strikers began to take over 
factories, the peasants to occupy large properties (especially in 
Estremadura and Andalusia) and divide up the land. The Civil Guard 
was confined to its barracks. Most of the army was sent on leave. 
The new republican riot-police, the Assault Guards, sometimes 
joined in the violence, or stood watching while crops were burned. In 
June the violence became worse. On 16 June, Robles, in a final 
warning, read out to the Cortes a list of outrages and atrocities: 160 
churches burned, 269 (mainly) political murders, 1,287 cases of 
assault, 69 political offices wrecked, 113 'general strikes', 228 
partial strikes, 10 newspaper offices sacked. He concluded: 'A 
country can live under a monarchy or a republic, with a parliamen- 
tary or a presidential system, under Communism or Fascism! But it 
cannot live in anarchy.' 58 It was the failure of the government to 
respond to this plea which gave the conservative army leaders the 
'respectable civil backing' they regarded as the precondition of a 
take-over. The last straw came on 11 July when the body of the 
right-wing parliamentarian, Calvo Sotelo, was discovered, murdered 
by Assault Guards in reprisal for the killing of two of them by a 
right-wing gang. 59 Two days later Robles publicly accused the 
government of responsibility. Civil war broke out on the 17 July and 
Robles, unwilling to be a party to a putsch, went to France. 60 

The Civil War occurred because the indecisive February election 
reflected accurately a country which was almost equally divided; 
foreign intervention prolonged the war for two-and-a-half years. No 
episode in the 1930s has been more lied about than this one, and 
only in recent years have historians begun to dig it out from the 
mountain of mendacity beneath which it was buried for a generation. 
What emerges is not a struggle between good and evil but a general 
tragedy. The insurgent generals quickly established control of the 
south and west. But they failed to take Madrid, and the government 
continued to control most of the north and east until well into 1938. 
Behind the lines thus established, each side committed appalling 
atrocities against their opponents, real or imaginary. 

For the Republicans, the Catholic Church was the chief object of 
hatred. This is curious. The clergy were anti-liberal and anti- 
socialist; but they were not fascists. Most of them were monarchists, 
if anything. The Cardinal-Primate, Archbishop Pedro Segura of 
Toledo, was anti-fascist; he was also pro-British. It is true there were 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 327 

too many clergy: 20,000 monks, 60,000 nuns, 35,000 priests, out of 
a population of 24.5 million. But the clergy had lost their lands in 
1837, being compensated in cash; and though the Church was 
supposed to be rich, the ordinary parish priest certainly was not. It 
was very rare for peasants to kill their own priest; but they might 
help to kill one from a different village. They were anti-clerical in 
general; but not in particular. Just as the Left intelligentsia of the 
towns were humanitarians in general; but not in particular. The 
Archbishop of Valladolid said of the peasants: These people would 
be ready to die for their local Virgin but would burn that of their 
neighbours at the slightest provocation.' 61 

Most of the Republican atrocities were carried out by killer gangs, 
formed from union militants, youth, political cadres, and calling 
themselves the 'Lynxes of the Republic', the 'Red Lions', 'Furies', 
'Spartacus', 'Strength and Liberty', etc. They claimed that insurgents 
had fired from church towers; but this was untrue, with the 
exception of the Carmelite Church in Barcelona's Calle Lauria. 62 In 
fact the Church did not take part in the rising, and the help some 
clergy subsequently gave to the nationalists was the result, not the 
cause, of the atrocities. Eleven bishops, a fifth of the total number, 
were murdered, 12 per cent of the monks, 13 per cent of the 
priests. 63 The slaughtered were revered in Paul ClaudePs famous 
poem, 'Aux Martyrs Espagnols': 

Soeur Espagne, sainte Espagne - tu as choisi! 

Onze eveques, seize-mille pretres massacres — et pas une apostasie! 

Some 283 nuns were killed, a few being raped before execution, 
though assaults on women were rare in Republican Spain. In the 
province of Ciudad Real, the mother of two Jesuits was murdered by 
having a crucifix thrust down her throat. The parish priest of 
Torrijos was scourged, crowned with thorns, forced to drink vinegar 
and had a beam of wood strapped to his back - then shot, not 
crucified. The Bishop of Jaen was murdered with his sister in front of 
2,000 people, the executioner being a ferocious militiawoman 
known as La Pecosa (the Freckled). Some priests were burned, others 
buried, alive; some had their ears cut off. 64 

The Republicans also murdered nationalist laity, chiefly the 
Falange. In Ronda 512 people were flung into the gorge which 
dramatically bisects the town, an episode used in Ernest Hem- 
ingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls. Lenin was the mentor; the Left 
murder-gangs were known as checas. But they used Hollywood 
argot: dar un paseo was 'taking for a ride'. There were dozens of 
these gangs in Madrid alone. The worst was led by the Communist 
youth boss, Garcia Attadell, who ran the much-feared 'dawn patrol' 



328 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

and murdered scores of people. He lived in a palace, amassed 
quantities of loot, tried to make off to Latin America with it, but was 
captured and garotted in Seville prison, after being received back into 
Mother Church. 65 Many of these killers graduated into the Soviet- 
imposed secret police organization in Barcelona. In all, the Left 
appears to have murdered about 55,000 civilians (the National 
Sanctuary at Valladolid lists 54,594), including about 4,000 women 
and several hundred children. 66 

The Nationalist killings behind the lines were on a similar scale, 
but army units carried them out for the most part. The method was 
Leninist: to destroy the Left as an organized political force by killing 
all its activists, and to impose abject fear on its supporters. As 
General Mola put it, in Pamplona (19 July 1936): 'It is necessary to 
spread an atmosphere of terror. We have to create this impression of 
mastery .... Anyone who is overtly or secretly a supporter of the PR 
must be shot.' 67 Arrests took place at night and shootings in the 
dark, sometimes after torture. The Church insisted all must be 
confessed first (10 per cent refused) and this made secret murders 
difficult. But there were some blasphemous atrocities: one man was 
stretched out in the form of a cross and had his arms and legs 
chopped off while his wife was forced to watch - she went insane. 
Priests who attempted to intervene were shot. 68 The killings in 
Majorca were described by Georges Bernanos in his novel Les 
Grands cimitieres sous la lune. But Arthur Koestler, in The Invisible 
Writing, also described how fascist atrocities were manufactured in 
the lie-factory run by Otto Katz from the Comintern office in Paris. 69 

The most famous Nationalist victim was the poet Garcia Lorca, 
whose brother-in-law was the Socialist mayor of Granada. He was 
shot about 18 August 1936, but his grave has never been found. 
Some 571 were killed in the city the same month. An authoritative 
modern estimate of Nationalist killings lists about 8,000 in the 
province of Granada, 7-8,000 in Navarre, 9,000 in Seville, 9,000 in 
Valladolid, 2,000 in Saragossa, 3,000 in the Balearics. In the first six 
months of the war the Nationalists killed six generals and an 
admiral, virtually all the Popular Front deputies they captured, 
governors, doctors and schoolmasters - about 50,000 in all. 70 So the 
killings on both side were roughly equal, and both were of a 
totalitarian nature - that is, punishment was meted out on the basis 
of class, status and occupation, not individual guilt. 

Foreign intervention was important from the start. Without it the 
military putsch would probably have failed. The rising was a fiasco 
in five out of the six biggest cities. The government had a large 
numerical superiority on land, soon increased by political militias. 
The navy murdered its officers: its two cruisers and two destroyers 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 329 

prevented the Army of Africa from crossing the straits by sea. The 
Nationalists had air superiority at first, but too few planes to 
transport more than 200 men a day into Spain. General Mola, who 
commanded the rising from Burgos, had too little ammunition and 
seriously thought of giving up and escaping. 71 Franco's first act, 
when he arrived at Tetuan from the Canaries on Sunday 19 July 1936, 
was to send to Rome for a dozen bombers; three days later he asked 
the Germans for air-transports. The German aircraft arrived in 
Tetuan on 28 July, the Italian two days later. Early in August Franco 
flew 600,000 rounds of ammunition to Mola, and got 3,000 men 
across the Straits in a single day. That turned the tide. The armies of 
the north and south linked up on 1 1 August and the following month 
Franco, who had achieved a stunning propaganda success by reliev- 
ing the officer cadet academy in the Toledo Alcazar, was appointed 
Chief of State and Generalissimo, 'with all powers in the new 
state'. 72 He hoped that Republican morale would now collapse and 
he could take Madrid. But the arrival of French and Russian aircraft 
gave the government air-control over most of the front — the great 
lesson of the war was the importance of tactical air-support - and the 
appearance of Russian tanks in Madrid ruled out its capitulation. 
Thus foreign aid prevented a quick decision by either side. 

The outcome of the war, however, was not determined by great 
power intervention, which cancelled itself out, nor by the non- 
intervention policy of Britain and France, since arms could always be 
obtained for gold or hard currency. The Germans provided a 
maximum of 10,000 men at any one time, including 5,000 in the 
Condor Legion, an experimental tank-and-aircraft unit, and suffered 
300 killed. They also provided instructors, who performed a valu- 
able service in the rapid training of army officers and pilots, 200 
tanks, 600 aircraft and superb 8 8 -millimetre anti-aircraft guns, 
which neutralized Republican air-superiority early in 1937. The Italian 
contribution was much bigger: 40-50,000 men at any one time (of 
whom 4,000 were killed), 150 tanks, 660 aircraft, 800 pieces of 
artillery, some of them of very high quality, and masses of 
machine-guns, rifles and other supplies. They claimed they shot 
down 903 aircraft and sunk 72,800 tons of Republican shipping. 
The Nationalists also had the help of several thousand Portuguese, 
600 Irishmen under General O'Duffy, and a few French, White 
Russians, British, Americans and Latin-Americans, plus of course 
75,000 Moroccan troops classed as Volunteers'. 73 

The Russians supplied the Republic with 1,000 aircraft, 900 tanks, 
300 armoured cars, 1,550 pieces of artillery and vast quantities of 
military equipment of all kinds. The French supplied about 300 
aircraft. In quantity, the Republic received as much materiel from 



330 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

abroad as the Nationalists. But it was more variable in quality, was 
much less effectively used and far too much of it was left on the 
battlefield when Republican units retreated. The Russian tanks were 
heavier, better armed, faster and in every way superior to the 
German and Italian models - as the Japanese were to find in 1939 
and Hitler in 1941-2 - but these too were under-exploited and easily 
abandoned: by the end of the war the Nationalists had an entire 
regiment equipped with Russian armour. 74 

The Russians also sent 1,000 pilots and about 2,000 other 
specialists, but no large units. They regarded Spain mainly as an 
international propaganda exercise, and their effort went into orga- 
nizing the international brigades. Altogether 40,000 foreigners 
fought for the Republic, 35,000 in the brigades, though never more 
than 18,000 at any one time. In addition there were 10,000 doctors, 
nurses and civilian specialists. The largest contingent, about 10,000, 
came from France, followed by 5,000 Germans and Austrians, 5,000 
Poles, 3,350 Italians, about 2,500 each from Britain and the United 
States, 1,500 each from Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, 1,000 each 
from Scandinavia, Canada and Hungary, and smaller contingents 
from over forty other countries. Casualties were very high, though all 
the figures are matters of dispute. One calculation, for instance, puts 
the British contribution as 2,762, of whom 1,762 were wounded, 
543 killed. About 900 Americans died. 75 

Foreign aid and intervention did not tip the military balance either 
way. The Nationalists won primarily because of the capacity and 
judgement of Franco. Though Franco was an unlovable man and is 
unlikely ever to win the esteem of historians, he must be accounted 
one of the most successful public men of the century. His cold heart 
went with a cool head, great intelligence and formidable reserves of 
courage and will. His father was a drunken naval officer, his younger 
brother a record-breaking pilot and hell-raiser; Franco embodied all 
the self-discipline of the family. He was not interested in women, 
drinking or cards. His passion was maps. At twenty-two he was the 
youngest captain in the army; at thirty-three the youngest general in 
Europe. He saw a great deal of desperate fighting in Morocco, 
especially during the Rif War in the 1920s, when in 1925 he led the 
assault-wave of one of the biggest amphibious landings to date. His 
military views were very advanced for the time; he believed, like 
De Gaulle, in the 'war of movement'; in 1928 he reorganized the 
Spanish military academy and turned it into what the French War 
Minister, Andre Maginot, called 'the most modern centre of its kind 
in the world . . . the last word in military technique and 
instruction'. 76 

Franco's philosophy is worth examining briefly because it was 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 331 

so remote from all the prevailing currents of the age, both liberal 
and totalitarian. The soldier-statesman he most resembled was 
Wellington, a figure much admired in Spain. Franco thought war a 
hateful business, from which gross cruelty was inseparable; it might 
sometimes be necessary to advance civilization. He was in the 
tradition of the Romans, the crusaders, the conquistadors, the tercios 
of Parma. In Africa his Foreign Legionaries mutilated the bodies of 
their enemies, cutting off their heads. But they were under strict 
discipline: Franco was a harsh, but just and therefore popular, 
commander. He saw Spanish Christian culture as unarguably super- 
ior; he found 'inexplicable' the Moroccan 'resistance to civilization'. 
Later, putting down the Asturian miners, he was puzzled that, while 
'clearly not monsters or savages', they should lack 'that respect for 
patriotism or hierarchy which was necessary for decent men'. 77 His 
own motivation he invariably described as 'duty, love of country'. 

For Franco, the army was the only truly national institution, 
ancient, classless, non-regional, apolitical, incorrupt, disinterested. If 
it was oppressed, it mutinied, as it had done since the sixteenth 
century and as recently as 1917; otherwise it served. Everything else 
in Spain was suspect. The Church was soft. Franco was croyant - he 
made the sceptical Mola pray for ammunition supplies - and he 
deliberately courted the approval of the hierarchy by setting up an 
'ecclesiastical household', but he was in no sense a clericalist and 
never took the slightest notice of ecclesiastical advice on non- 
spiritual matters. 78 He hated politics in any shape. The Conserva- 
tives were reactionary and selfish landowners. The Liberals were 
corrupt and selfish businessmen. The Socialists were deluded, or 
worse. He exploited the two insurrectionary movements, the Falange 
and the Carlists, amalgamating them under his leadership, but their 
role was subservient, indeed servile. Franco was never a fascist or 
had the smallest belief in any kind of Utopia or system. At his 
headquarters only one politician had influence: his brother-in-law, 
Ramon Serrano Suiier, and he was a functionary. Franco said: 
'Spaniards are tired of politics and of politicians.' Again: 'Only those 
who live off politics should fear our movement.' He spent his entire 
political career seeking to exterminate politics. 79 

Franco made better uses of his human and material resources 
because he fought a military war, and the Republicans fought a 
political war. He was a master of the nuts and bolts of war: 
topography, training, infrastructures, logistics, signals, air control. 
No genius but very thorough and calm; he never reinforced failure 
and he learnt from mistakes. Having stamped out politics he had no 
one nudging his elbow and he possessed, virtually throughout, unity 
of command. Perhaps his greatest psychological asset was that he 



332 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

quickly established, and was seen to do so, complete independence of 
his foreign allies. There is a point here often overlooked. Although 
idealism was an element in the war at the level of the ordinary men 
and women who fought it, at a nation-to-nation level it was severely 
hard-headed. Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, and all other governments 
who supplied arms and services, expected to be paid. In one sense 
finance was the key to the war, and Franco and his advisers handled 
it shrewdly. Their greatest achievement was to maintain a respect- 
able paper currency without the benefit of the nation's gold reserves 
and central banking system. The Nationalist peseta remained stable 
between 70 and 80 to the pound-sterling. By contrast, the Republi- 
can peseta fell from 36 in June 1936 to 226 in December 1937, and 
thereafter collapsed. 79 From an early stage, Franco put the bite on 
the monarchy, British and other foreign businesses in Spain, tycoons 
like Juan March and Juan Ventosa. He made prodigious and 
increasingly successful efforts to maintain exports. As a result, he 
was able to stabilize the currency, raise loans within Spain and, most 
important of all, obtain virtually all his foreign arms on credit. Hence 
both Germany, which was owed $225 million, and Italy, whose final 
bill was agreed at $273 million in 1940, had a strong practical 
interest in ensuring that Franco won the war and so survived to pay 
them off — as he did. 

By contrast, the Republicans handled their finances with consum- 
mate folly. They started with one of the largest gold reserves in the 
world: 700 tons, worth £162 million (or $788 million). Instead of 
using this to raise loans, or for direct payments in the 'hard' arms 
markets of the capitalist countries of the West, while getting arms 
from the Russians on credit, they handed over more than two-thirds 
of their gold to Stalin. In return for arms of varying quality, which 
otherwise he might well have supplied on credit or for paper, Stalin 
swallowed up $500 million in gold, plus another $100 million 
earned in exports; and at the end of it all claimed he was still owed 
$50 million. In late 1938 he blandly told the Republic's negotiator 
that its credit was 'exhausted'. At no stage was Stalin owed large 
sums and therefore he never had a vested interest in ensuring that the 
Republic survived to pay him. 80 

Still more disastrous, from the Republic's point of view, was 
Stalin's insistence, while being paid in gold on the nail, on a political 
price for supplying arms at all. The moment the fighting started, and 
the need for arms became desperate, the influence of the Spanish cp 
rose dramatically. This might not have mattered so much if it had led 
an independent existence. In fact it was controlled through the 
Russian embassy, by nkvd and ogpu units under Alexander Orlov 
- who himself went in mortal terror of Yezhov - and by such 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 333 

Comintern figures as the French witch-hunter Andre Marty, whose 
face, wrote Hemingway, 'had a look of decay, as if modelled from the 
waste material you find under the claws of a very old lion'. 81 It is not 
clear to this day how anxious Stalin was to win the war; but in any 
event he was determined to control the Republican side. 

Caballero, who became Prime Minister in September 1936, though 
foolish and easily deceived, gave some resistance to the Stalinist 
take-over. He refused to allow the Communists to absorb the Socialist 
Party, as had happened in the youth movement, and in January 1937, 
having received a menacing letter from Stalin, and a demand to sack 
his best general, he threw the Soviet ambassador, Marcel Rosenberg, 
out of his office with the words 'Out you go! Out!' and in a voice so 
loud it could be heard outside. Spain might be poor, he said, but it 
would not tolerate that 'a foreign ambassador should try and impose 
his will on the head of the Spanish government'. 82 That was the end of 
Caballero (it was the end of Rosenberg too, who was immediately 
recalled and murdered by Stalin), though it took some time for the 
Soviet authorities to arrange a coup. It was decided at a meeting of the 
cp executive attended by the Soviet charge d'affaires, Marty, Orlov 
and other secret police officials. It is notable that the cp Secretary- 
General, Jose Diaz, opposed ousting Caballero on Stalin's instruction, 
and at one point shouted at Marty, 'You are a guest at meetings of the 
Spanish Communist Party. If our proceedings do not please you, there 
is the door!' But in the shouting and the vote that followed, only Diaz 
and Jesus Hernandez, the Minister of Education and our source for 
this meeting, voted against the coup; the other Spanish Communists 
were terrified of Orlov's men. 83 

Caballero's successor, Juan Negrin, had been picked by Stalin's 
agent, Arthur Stashevsky, the previous November, as the ideal 
puppet: a non-political, upper middle-class professor, with no union 
or working-class following, no Communist affiliations, and therefore 
'respectable' in the eyes of the foreign press, with gross personal 
habits, and therefore easily blackmailed. Instead of making arms 
purchases, he would drive across France in a fast sports-car chasing 
girls. His greed was spectacular: sometimes he would dine three times 
in a single evening. To his protest that he was not popular enough to be 
premier, Hernandez cynically replied, 'Popularity can be created' — 
propaganda was the one activity in which the Communists were 
without rival. 84 Behind Negrin's complaisant ignorance, the Com- 
munists - that is, Stalin's secret police - took over Republican Spain. 
The result was one of the major political tragedies of the century. 

It is clear that, if the army had not staged a putsch in July 1936, 
sooner or later Spain would have had to endure a civil war fought 
among the Left. It broke out in Barcelona in the spring of 1937, with 



334 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

the Communists fighting the poum and the anarchists. The imm- 
ediate pretext, as in the wider civil war, was a political murder, of a 
leading Communist, Roldan Cortada, shot on 25 April, possibly by 
an anarchist 'control patrol', possibly by the Comintern agent 
Erno Gero. Both sides had private armies, secret police forces, 
gangs of murderous thugs. The poum slogan was 'Before renounc- 
ing the revolution, we will die on the barricades'. The Communist 
chanted 'Before we capture Saragossa, we have to take Barcelona'. 
There were riots and large-scale fighting in May, followed by the 
intervention of the navy and 4,000 assault guards. 85 Caballero's 
refusal to disband the poum militias was the immediate pretext for 
his ousting. The moment Negrin was installed as nominal premier, 
the Communists took over the Interior Ministry and all the key 
police and paramilitary posts, and moved forward to a reglement 
des comptes. 

The purge coincided with Stalin's massacre of his own party in 
Russia, and it bore all the marks of his methods. The CP-controlled 
Madrid police forced two captured Falangists to prepare a fake 
plan for a Madrid rising by Franco's much-vaunted 'Fifth Column', 
and they forged a letter to Franco, on the back of this plan, from 
Andres Nin, the poum leader. A great mass of forged documents 
implicating the poum in a fascist betrayal was put in a suitcase left 
in Gerona, then 'discovered' by police. On 14 June, Orlov, as head 
of the Spanish nkvd, probably acting on direct instructions from 
Stalin, ordered the arrest of all poum leaders. This was despite the 
protests of the Communist members of the cabinet (the non- 
Communist members, least of all Negrin, were not even informed). 86 
The Commander of the 29th poum division was recalled from the 
front for 'consultations' and arrested too. The detained men were 
taken straight to carefully prepared interrogation-centres and tor- 
ture-chambers, most of them underground but including the former 
Barcelona convent of St Ursula, known as 'the Dachau of Republi- 
can Spain'. Efforts by the cabinet to secure Nin's release were quite 
unavailing. But Stalin's plans to make him the centre of a Spanish 
show-trial were frustrated, since Nin, the model for Orwell's hero 
Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four, preferred to die under torture 
rather than confess. (He was eventually murdered by Orlov in the 
park of El Pardo, later Franco's palace.) During the rest of 1937 
and well into 1938, many thousands of poum members, and 
indeed other Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured 
to death in Communist prisons. They included a large number of 
foreigners, such as Trotsky's former secretary, Erwin Wolff, the 
Austrian socialist Kurt Landau, the British journalist 'Bob' Smilie 
and a former lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, Jose Robles. 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 335 

Among those who just managed to escape were Orwell and Willy 
Brandt, the future German Chancellor. 87 

It was one of Spain's many misfortunes at this time that her Civil 
War coincided with the climax of Stalin's great terror. Many of the 
Barcelona murders had little to do with Spain's internal politics but 
were, rather, the backlash of events in Moscow and Leningrad. Thus 
Robles was executed because, as interpreter of General Jan Antono- 
vich Berzin, head of the Russian military mission to Spain, he knew 
too much about Berzin's recall and liquidation as part of Stalin's 
purge of the army. Stalin was having his leading agents killed all over 
the world in 1937—8. And, as in Russia, virtually all the creatures 
who helped him to take over the Left in Spain, and then to terrorize 
it, were murdered in turn. The head of the nkvd's foreign depart- 
ment was cornered in his own office in Paris in February 1938 and 
forced to take cyanide. Of those who organized arms supplies to 
Spain, Evhen Konovalek was killed in Rotterdam in May 1938, 
Rudolf Clement was found, a headless corpse, in the Seine, and 
Walter Krivitsky, boss of Soviet military intelligence in Western 
Europe, was chased for three years by Stalin's hit-men until they got 
him in Washington on 10 February 1941. 88 In addition to General 
Berzin, Stalin murdered Michael Koltzov, the famous Pravda Span- 
ish correspondent, Arthur Stashevky, head of the economic mission 
to Spain, and Antonov Ovseenko, Consul-General in Barcelona, 
who was told he was being recalled to Moscow to be made Minister 
of Justice, a joke characteristic of Stalin's gallows-humour. 89 The 
only man who escaped Stalin was the arch-killer Orlov himself, who 
defected, wrote an account of all he knew, informed Stalin that he 
had arranged to have it published immediately if he died violently, 
and so was left in peace, publishing his tale after Stalin's death. 90 

It may be asked: how was it that the atrocities against the Left in 
Barcelona did not cause a wave of revulsion against Stalinism 
throughout the world? One factor was luck. On 26 April 1937, the 
day after Cortada's murder in Barcelona detonated the internal 
crisis, forty-three aircraft of the Condor Legion bombed the historic 
Basque town of Guernica, whose famous oak tree had shaded the 
first Basque parliament. About 1,000 people were killed and 70 per 
cent of the buildings destroyed. It was not the first bombing of a 
town by either side, and Guernica was a legitimate target, though the 
object of the raid was terror. It was decided upon by Colonel 
Wolfgang von Richthofen, the Legion's Commander, in consultation 
with Colonel Juan Vigon, Mola's Chief of Staff. There is no evidence 
Mola knew about it beforehand; Franco certainly did not; and the 
Germans did not know of the town's historical significance. 91 For 
the Comintern propagandists - the best in the world - it was a stroke 



336 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

of uncovenanted fortune, and they turned it into the most celebrated 
episode of the entire war. Picasso, who had already been asked to do 
a large painting for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World Fair, 
leapt at the subject, and the result was later taken to the New York 
Metropolitan. Guernica helped to push a whole segment of Western 
opinion, including the magazines Time and Newsweek, over to the 
Republican side. 92 In the subsequent hullabaloo, the echoes of which 
could still be heard in the 1980s, when the painting was solemnly 
hung in the Prado, the sounds of mass-slaughter in Barcelona went 
unheard. 

The way in which Guernica was used to screen the destruction of 
the poum was typical of the brilliancy of Comintern propaganda, 
handled by two inspired professional liars, Willi Muenzenberg and 
Otto Katz, both later murdered on Stalin's orders. 93 Throughout the 
Spanish war, Stalinism was assisted not unly by superb public 
relations but by the naivety, gullibility and, it must also be said, the 
mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals, especially their 
willingness to overlook what W.H.Auden called 'the necessary 
murder'. When Orwell escaped and sought to publish an account of 
the poum scandal, 'Spilling the Spanish Beans', in the New States- 
man, its editor, Kingsley Martin, turned it down on the grounds that 
it would damage Western support for the Republican cause; he later 
argued that Negrin would have broken with the Communists over 
the poum affair if the West had been willing to supply him with 
arms. But when Orwell's exposure appeared in the New English 
Weekly, it attracted little notice. 94 The intellectuals of the Left did 
not want to know the objective truth; they were unwilling for their 
illusions to be shattered. They were overwhelmed by the glamour 
and excitement of the cause and few had the gritty determination of 
Orwell to uphold absolute standards of morality, or the experience 
of the horrors that occurred when relative ones took their place. 
Many of them treated 'the Party' with abject subservience. Thus the 
poet Cecil Day-Lewis, who joined it in 1936, apologized for not 
having done so before, priggishly confessing to a 'refinement of 
bourgeois subjectivism by which I was unwilling to join the party till 
I was making enough money to be able to assure myself that I was 
joining from disinterested motives, not as one of the lean and hungry 
who would personally profit by revolution.' He felt he had to ask the 
Party's permission even before he accepted an invitation to join the 
selection committee of the Book Society. 95 

Besides, the Communists controlled access to Republican Spain. To 
get there a British writer, for instance, needed a letter from the head 
of the CP, Harry Pollitt, who worked closely with Victor Gollancz, 
the leading left-wing publisher, whose Left Book Club dominated the 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 337 

market. The poet W.H. Auden was saved by his 'Pollitt letter' from a 
prison sentence when he was arrested for indecency in a Barcelona 
Park. 96 A visit to 'our' Spain was essential to the self-respect of a 
progressive intellectual. Just as the Germans, Russians and Italians 
used Spain to test their new military equipment - exploitation by 
hardware - so writers went there to acquire material for their next 
novel or poem, what might be termed exploitation by software. 
Andre Malraux, whose novel about the Chinese revolution, La 
Condition humaine (1932), had made him world famous, went to 
Spain hoping for a sequel, which duly appeared as L'Espoir (1938). 
He brought with him a squadron of slow Potex bombers, which 
created a noisy splash in the papers but did little damage to the 
nationalists, and anyway had to be crewed by Spaniards. The 
commander of the Republican fighters, Garcia Lacalle, wrote that 
Malraux's people were 'writers, artists, photographers, women, 
children and I don't know what - everything but aviators'. 97 Hem- 
ingway was in Spain too, 'researching' For Whom the Bell Tolls. 
Fancying himself hard-boiled and experienced in the cynicism of 
war, 'Papa' was easily duped. When his friend Dos Passos became 
worried about the disappearance of Robles, whom he knew well (he 
had in fact already been murdered), Hemingway was tipped off by 
his 'amigo' in counter-espionage, the sinister Pepe Quintanilla, that 
Robles was a spy, and at once assumed he was guilty. He attributed 
Dos Passos' 'continued belief in Robles's loyalty to the good-hearted 
naivety of a "typical American liberal attitude'" - but of course it 
was Hemingway who proved naive. 98 

To keep the intellectuals well-disposed, the Comintern circus- 
masters staged all-expenses-paid international gatherings. There was 
the 1937 International Peace Campaign in Brussels, run by the 
French cp leader Marcel Cachin, which invented a Peace Day, a 
Peace Fair, a Peace Penny and a Peace Oath. Kingsley Martin 
described it - though not at the time but thirty years later - as 'the 
murder of honesty, enthusiasm and faith' which induced in him 
'desperation'. 99 Still worse, the same year, was the Madrid Writers' 
Congress. Stephen Spender recorded that he and other guests were 
'treated like princes or ministers . . . riding in Rolls-Royces, ban- 
queted, feted, sung and danced to', though the climax of the 
proceedings was a vicious attack on Andre Gide, who had just 
published a critical book on Russia, Retour de I'URSS, and was now 
publicly excoriated as a 'fascist monster'. A burst of artillery fire 
restored a sense of reality: 

The next morning Andre Chamson (head of the French delegation) an- 
nounced that he and Julien Benda, author of La Trahisort des clercs, must 



338 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

leave Madrid at once. For if by any chance either of them were killed, 
France could not choose but declare war on Franco, and this action would 
lead to world war. Chamson refused to accept the responsibility for such a 
catastrophe. 100 

Spender himself was already a veteran of the front where, at a 
machine-gun emplacement, 

. . . the gunner in charge of it insisted that I should fire a few shots into the 
Moorish lines. I did this, positively praying that I might not by any chance 
hit an Arab. Suddenly the front seemed to me like a love relationship 
between the two sides, locked here in their opposite trenches . . . and for a 
visitor to intervene in their deathly orgasm seemed a terrible frivolity. 101 

Meanwhile the terrible frivolity behind the Republican lines 
continued. As Orwell pointed out, each of the Left factions was 
obsessed by the need to be in a strong military position after Franco 
was beaten, and allowed this to affect their tactics and conduct of the 
war. To keep up numbers they avoided casualties, and the Commun- 
ists often deliberately held up artillery or air support in order that 
poum or other units which they wanted weakened should be 
broken. 102 After the destruction of the poum, Republican morale 
declined steadily. In these circumstances, Franco opted for a war of 
attrition throughout the appalling winter of 1937-8, and in April he 
cut Republican Spain in two. Thereafter it was really a matter of time 
only, with Franco taking no chances and insisting on overwhelming 
superiority. By the autumn Stalin had tired of the war, had extracted 
the last ounce of propaganda value out of it, had completed his 
purges and was already thinking of a new deal, either with the 
Western democracies or, more likely, with Hitler. He had also got all 
the Republic's gold. So he cut off aid, and Franco was able to open 
his last Catalonian offensive, just before Christmas, confident that 
the end was near. Barcelona fell on 28 January 1939, and Madrid on 
28 March. Franco had fought the war without passion, and when he 
heard it was over he did not even look up from his desk. 103 

The day Madrid surrendered, Hitler denounced Germany's 1934 
treaty with Poland, having occupied the whole of Czechoslovakia a 
week before. It was obvious that a European war was inevitable and 
imminent. Franco's reaction was a brutal attempt to seal off Spain 
not only from the coming catastrophe but, as far as possible, from 
the whole of the twentieth century. Spain had a long tradition of 
crude social engineering and internal crusades. In the fifteenth and 
sixteenth centuries it had expelled in turn vast numbers of Moors, 
Jews and Protestants. By such macro-persecution it had avoided the 
Reformation and the horrors of the Wars of Religion. The failure to 



THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 339 

adopt similar methods of drastic extrusion had permitted the French 
Revolution to enter and thus crucified the country for fifteen years of 
civil war, as Goya's drawings bore eloquent testimony. Now the 
invasion by post-Christian totalitarian culture had brought another 
three years of martyrdom. On the Nationalist side, 90,000 had been 
killed in action; 1 10,000 Republican soldiers were dead; there were a 
million cripples; 10,000 had died in air-raids, 25,000 from malnutri- 
tion, 130,000 murdered or shot behind the lines; now 500,000 were in 
exile, half never to return. 104 The destruction of treasure had been 
immense, ranging from the famous library of Cuenca Cathedral to 
Goya's earliest paintings in his birthplace, Fuentodos. 

Franco determined to end the destructive process of corruption by 
amputating the agonized limb of Spanish collectivism. His feelings 
towards the Left anticipated those of the wartime Allies towards 
Nazism: he got unconditional surrender first, then de-Communized, 
but in a manner closer to the drumhead purges of liberated France than 
the systematic trials in Germany. It was not a Lenin-style totalitarian 
massacre by classes: the Law of Political Responsibilities of 9 February 
1939 dealt with responsibility for crimes on an individual basis (the 
only exception was Freemasons of the eighteenth degree or higher). 
Strictly speaking, there was no death penalty for political offences as 
such. 105 But there was a great rage in the conquerors - the Interior 
Minister, Suner, wanted revenge for his brothers who had been shot in 
Republican prisons, and he was typical of thousands - and it was not 
difficult to pin capital crimes on Republican officials of all degrees. 
Mussolini's son-in-law Ciano reported from Spain in July: Trials 
going on every day at a speed which I would call summary .... There 
are still a great number of shootings. In Madrid alone between 200 and 
250 a day, in Barcelona 150, in Seville 80. ' 106 Some tens of thousands 
thus died, but the figure of 193,000 sometimes given for the total is 
wrong, since many death-sentences passed by courts were commuted. 
Franco made it clear on 31 December 1939 that many long prison 
sentences (fifteen years was usual) would have to be served: 'It is 
necessary to liquidate the hatred and passions left us by our past war. 
But this liquidation must not be accomplished in the liberal manner, 
with enormous and disastrous amnesties, which are a deception rather 
than a gesture of forgiveness. It must be Christian, achieved by means of 
redemption through work accompanied by repentance and 
penitance.' 107 In 1941 the gaol population was still 233,375; scores of 
thousands of those who had run the Republic died in prison or in exile. 
Others were banned from a huge range of public or private occupations 
by a decree of 25 August 1939, which put the objectives of the purge 
before government efficiency or the interests of the economy. 108 Thus 
ancient and traditional Spain, led by a man who regretted every second 



340 THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION 

that had passed since the old world ended in 1914, sought to 
immunize herself from the present. The attempt did not succeed in 
the long run; but it gave Spain some protection from the pandemic 
which now overwhelmed Europe. 



TEN 

The End of Old Europe 



The age of aggression was bound to end in a world war. Neverthe- 
less, it is vital to understand precisely how and why this climax 
came about, for what happened in the 1930s determined the 
contours of our age in the 1980s. On 5 April 1940, four days 
before the Nazi invasion of Norway began the European phase of 
the war in earnest, Goebbels gave a secret briefing to selected 
German journalists, one of whom made a transcript. The key 
passage is as follows: 

Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark 
concerning Germany's real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes 
never saw where we were going or that our oath of legality was just a 
trick. We wanted to come to power legally, but we did not want to use 
power legally .... They could have suppressed us. They could have 
arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been that, the end. 
No, they let us through the danger zone. That's exactly how it was in 
foreign policy too .... In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I 
had been the French premier I would have said it): The new Reich 
Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Katnpf^ which says this and that. 
This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we 
march!' But they didn't do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the 
risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when 
we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the 
war! n 

This remarkable statement is, on the whole, an accurate summary 
of what happened in the 1930s. It was adumbrated by Hitler's 
secret briefing of his Service chiefs on 3 February 1933, his first 
meeting with them after his assumption of supreme power. He told 
them he was going to overthrow the Versailles settlement and make 
Germany the greatest power in Europe, and he emphasized: The 
most dangerous period is that of rearmament. Then we shall see 

341 



342 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

whether France has statesmen. If she does, she will not grant us time 
but will jump on us.' 2 

Everyone knew Hitler's aims were ambitious. The German masses 
believed they could and would be attained without war, by assertive 
diplomacy, backed by armed strength. The generals were told that 
war would almost certainly be necessary, but that it would be limited 
and short. In fact Hitler's real programme was far more extensive 
than the generals, let alone the masses, realized and necessarily 
involved not merely war but a series of wars. Hitler meant what he 
said when he wrote in Mein Kampf: * Germany must either be a 
world power or there will be no Germany.' When he used the term 
'world power' he meant something greater than Wilhelmine 
Germany, merely the dominant power in central Europe: he meant 
'world' in the full sense. The lesson he had learnt from the First 
World War and from Ludendorff's analysis of it was that it was 
essential for Germany to effect a break-out from its Central 
European base, which could always be encircled. 3 In Hitler's view, 
Ludendorff had just begun to attain this, at Brest-Litovsk, when the 
'stab in the back' by the Home Front wrecked everything. Hence his 
real plans began where Brest-Litovsk ended: the clock was to be put 
back to spring 1918, but with Germany solid, united, fresh and, 
above all, 'cleansed'. 

Hitler's aims can be reconstructed not merely from Mein Kampf 
itself, with its stress on the 'East Policy', but from his early speeches 
and the so-called 'Second' or Secret Book of 1928. 4 This material 
makes it clear that the 'cleansing' process - the elimination of the 
Jews — was essential to the whole long-term strategy. Being a 
race-socialist as opposed to a class-socialist, Hitler believed the 
dynamic of history was race. The dynamic was interrupted when 
race-poisoning took place. The poison came, above all, from the 
Jews. He admired Jews as 'negative supermen'. In his Table-Talk he 
said that if 5,000 Jews emigrated to Sweden, in no time at all they 
would occupy all the key positions: this was because 'blood purity', 
as he put it in Mein Kampf \ 'is a thing the Jew preserves better than 
any other people on earth'. The Germans, on the other hand, had 
been 'poisoned'. That was why they lost the First World War. Even 
he was poisoned: that was why he occasionally made mistakes - 'all 
of us suffer from the sickness of mixed, corrupt blood'. 5 Race- 
poisoning was a comparatively common obsession in the time of 
Hitler's youth, rather as ecological poisoning became an obsession of 
many in the 1970s and 1980s. The notion of ubiquitous poisoning 
appealed strongly to the same type of person who accepted conspi- 
racy theories as the machinery of public events. As with the later 
ecologists, they thought the race-poison was spreading fast, that total 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 343 

disaster was imminent, and that it would take a long time to reverse 
even if the right policies were adopted promptly. Hitler calculated it 
would need a hundred years for his regime to eliminate racial 
poisoning in Germany: on the other hand, if Germany became the 
first nation-race to do so successfully, it would inevitably become 
'lord of the Earth' {Mein Kampf). 

What distinguished Hitlerian race-theory was, first, this rooted 
belief that 'cleansing' could make Germany the first true superpower, 
and ultimately the first paramount power in the world; and, 
secondly, his absolute conviction that 'Jewish race-poison' and 
Bolshevism were one and the same phenomenon. In 1928, when he 
wrote his Second Book, he did not appreciate that old-style 'Jewish' 
Bolshevism had ceased to exist and that Stalin's Russia was in 
essentials as anti-Semitic as Tsardom had been. On the contrary, he 
believed that the Soviet Union was a Jewish cultural phenomenon. 
Hence the object of his policy was to combat 'an inundation of 
diseased bacilli which at the moment have their breeding-ground in 
Russia'. 6 Thus the 'cleansing' fitted in perfectly with the resumption 
of traditional German East policy, but on a far more ambitious scale. 

Hitler's full programme, therefore, was as follows. First, gain 
control of Germany itself, and begin the cleansing process at home. 
Second, destroy the Versailles settlement and establish Germany as 
the dominant power in Central Europe. All this could be achieved 
without war. Third, on this power basis, destroy the Soviet Union 
(by war) to rid the 'breeding-ground' of the 'bacillus' and, by 
colonization, create a solid economic and strategic power-base from 
which to establish a continental empire, in which France and Italy 
would be mere satellites. In the fourth stage Germany would acquire 
a large colonial empire in Africa, plus a big ocean navy, to make her 
one of the four superpowers, in addition to Britain, Japan and the 
United States. Finally, in the generation after his death, Hitler 
envisaged a decisive struggle between Germany and the United States 
for world domination. 7 

No one since Napoleon had thought in such audacious terms. In 
its gigantic scope the concept was Alexandrine. Yet until he was 
engulfed by the war he made, Hitler was always pragmatic. Like 
Lenin he was a superb opportunist, always ready to seize openings 
and modify his theory accordingly. This has led some historians to 
conclude he had no master-programme. In fact, while always adjust- 
ing the tactics to suit the moment, he pursued his long-term strategy 
with a brutal determination which has seldom been equalled in the 
history of human ambition. Unlike most tyrants, he was never 
tempted to relax by a surfeit of autocratic power. Quite the contrary. 
He was always raising the stakes on the table and seeking to hasten 



344 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

the pace of history. He feared his revolution would lose its dynam- 
ism. He thought himself indispensable, and at least four of his phases 
must be accomplished while he was still not only alive but at the 
height of his powers. It was his impatience which made him so 
dangerous in the short term and so ineffectual in the long term (the 
very reverse of the Soviet strategists). In a secret speech to German 
newspaper editors in November 1938,. after his great Munich 
triumph, he deplored the fact that his need to talk about peace had 
led the German nation to relax too much. He argued that for 
Germany to accept peace, and thus stability, as a permanent fact of 
international life was to accept the very spirit of defeatism. Violence 
was a necessity, and the public must be prepared for it. 8 

With such a monster at large, and in unfettered control of the 
world's second strongest economy - the first and indeed the only one 
to emerge fully from the Great Depression - what possibility was 
there of maintaining the old European system? The greatest of the 
legitimate powers, the United States, virtually cut itself off from 
Europe. It chose Protection in 1930 and the choice was reinforced 
after Roosevelt took power and made it clear, in breaking up the 
proposed world economic conference in July 1933, that his New 
Deal was incompatible with a negotiated world trading system: he 
stood for 'Capitalism in One Country' just as Stalin stood for 
'Socialism in One Country'. This isolation was formalized in 1935 
when a Democratic Congress passed the Neutrality Act. The same 
year, the young writer Herbert Agar epitomized the mood of many 
American intellectuals, repelled by what was happening in Europe, 
by bidding his countrymen to forget their European roots and be true 
to their own emergent culture. During six years living in Europe, he 
wrote, 'I learned that the best traits in American life are not the traits 
we have copied faithfully from Europe but the traits we have freely 
adapted or else originated - the traits which are our own.' 9 

Roosevelt saw himself, in some moods, as a citizen of the world, 
but his internationalism was essentially verbal - indeed rhetorical - 
rather than practical. He was not to blame for the state of unilateral 
disarmament in which he found America in 1933; but he did nothing 
to remedy matters in his first term and very little in the earlier part of 
his second. As George Kennan, one of the ablest of the younger 
diplomats, noted, Roosevelt's statements were made for their internal 
political effect rather than their impact on world events. 10 Sur- 
rounded by his young New Dealers, whose intentions towards 
Europe were benevolent but who were ignorant and hopelessly 
amateurish in foreign affairs and in any case obsessed by America's 
internal problems, Roosevelt was keen to appear high-minded and 
'progressive'. But his high-mindedness expressed itself chiefly in 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 345 

demanding that Britain stand firm for international order, and his 
progressiveness rated Soviet Russia, one of the totalitarian predators, 
as a bigger factor for world peace than Britain. 

Right up to his death in 1945, there was an incorrigible element of 
frivolity in Roosevelt's handling of foreign policy. It was character- 
istic that one of his principal sources of information about Britain, 
and on European events generally, in the later 1930s was The Week, 
the ultra-Left conspiracy-theory bulletin put out by the Daily Wor- 
ker journalist Claud Cockburn. 11 Some of Roosevelt's ambassado- 
rial appointments were exceptionally ill-judged. He sent the violently 
anti-British Joseph Kennedy to London, and the corrupt and gullible 
Joseph Davies to Moscow. The latter move was particularly destruc- 
tive because the US Moscow embassy was well-staffed and superbly 
informed, backed by a highly professional division of Eastern 
European affairs in the State Department. The Soviet Foreign 
Minister, Litvinov, admitted that this division had better records on 
Soviet foreign policy than the Soviet government itself. 12 Five 
months after Davies became ambassador in 1936, with instructions 
to win Stalin's friendship at all costs, the division was abolished, its 
library dispersed and its files destroyed. Kennan, in the Moscow 
embassy, thought this indicated 'the smell of Soviet influence . . . 
somewhere in the higher reaches of the government'. It certainly 
reflected a bitter power-struggle between the Secretary of State, 
Cordell Hull, and the Assistant-Secretary, the saturnine homosexual 
Sumner Welles. 13 Both men were anti-British, Hull believing that 
Britain's new system of imperial preference, itself a response to the 
avalanche of trade restrictions precipitated by the Smoot— Hawley 
tariff, was a bigger threat to world peace than any of the dictators. 

As the diplomatic papers abundantly testify, the Roosevelt admin- 
istration was never prepared to discuss specific military and diploma- 
tic backing for Britain and France against Germany. Roosevelt's 
condemnatory speeches, such as his 'quarantine' oration of October 
1937 or his absurd demand in April 1939 that Hitler give ten-year 
non-aggression guarantees to thirty-one named countries, were 
worse than useless. The second convinced Hitler that in no circum- 
stances would Roosevelt actually intervene militarily, and he replied 
to it on 28 April, in what turned out to be his last public speech in the 
Reichstag, with unconcealed contempt and derision. 14 

Britain and France, even without America, might conceivably have 
contained Hitler in 1933-4, had both been resolute and willing to act 
in concert. For a short time France actually possessed the physical 
means to do so. But after the departure of Poincare in 1929 there was 
never much chance of France carrying through a pre-emptive strike. 
Roosevelt's policy was bitterly anti-French, not merely in seeking to 



346 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

force her to disarm unilaterally but, after Roosevelt took America off 
the gold standard, in bringing pressure economically to break up 
France's pathetic attempt to create a 'gold block', which occupied 
her energies in 1933. Meanwhile, Hitler was consolidating himself 
and speeding up the secret rearmament which had been a feature of 
the last years of Weimar. The British were also anxious to emasculate 
the French army. Nothing was more likely to provoke a future war, 
the Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, told the Commons on 13 May 
1932, than a 'well-armed France' facing a disarmed Germany. Even 
after Hitler took over, it remained British policy to bring pressure on 
France to cut her army. The same afternoon Hitler's Enabling Bill 
went through the Reichstag, Anthony Eden, for the government, 
announced that it was British policy to get the French army cut from 
694,000 to 400,000, and rebuked Churchill for protesting against 
measures to 'secure for Europe that period of appeasement which is 
needed'. 'The House was enraged and in an ugly mood - towards Mr 
Churchill', noted the Daily Dispatch. 15 While terrified German 
socialists were being hunted through the streets by Goering's Ges- 
tapo squads, their British comrades sought to howl down Churchill's 
warning that Hitler had specifically stated in Mein Kampf that he 
would destroy France by securing British neutrality - but even the 
Fiihrer had not counted on Britain seeking to prevent the French 
from defending themselves. In France, Leon Blum's socialists were 
equally abject, campaigning desperately to prevent conscription from 
being extended from one to two years. On the French Right, 
anti-Semitism was reviving under the Nazi stimulus, and the new 
slogan was 'Rather Hitler than Blum'. So far as France was 
concerned, Hitler was probably through his 'danger zone' by the end 
of 1933; that was the view of the Poles, who the next month wrote 
off France as an effective ally and signed — for what it was worth — a 
bilateral non-aggression treaty with Hitler. 

Britain was not as demoralized as France in the 1930s. But there 
were ominous signs of decadence. Britain's weight in world affairs 
depended essentially on her Empire, and the Empire revolved round 
India. By 1931 the process set in motion by the Montagu reforms 
and the Amritsar debacle had gathered pace. The British Raj was 
palpably breaking up. Lord Birkenhead, the Secretary of State, had 
warned in 1925 that concessions to the Hindus would merely 
provoke the Muslims to demand separation (he saw the Muslims as 
the Ulstermen, the Hindus as the Irish Nationalists) and predicted: 
'All the conferences in the world cannot bridge over the unbridge- 
able, and between those two countries lies a chasm which cannot be 
crossed by the resources of modern political engineering.' 16 On 26 
January 1931 Churchill told the Commons there were now '60,000 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 347 

Indians in prison for political agitation'. Two months later, over 
1,000 Muslims were massacred by Hindus in Cawnpore, followed by 
communal riots all over the sub-continent. It was the pattern of the 
1930s. With no certain future, good British candidates no longer 
presented themselves for the Indian civil service, and Indians took the 
top places in the entrance examinations. 17 British investment was 
declining, and India's economic value to Britain fell steadily. 18 
Churchill, who loved India and probably felt more passionately 
about this issue than any other in his life, feared that weak British 
policy would lead India into a repetition of China's tragedy: disinte- 
gration and dismemberment, with the deaths of countless millions, 
the scores of millions of 'untouchables' being the first victims. 
'Greedy appetites', he noted on 18 March 1931, had already been 
'excited', and 'many itching fingers were stretching and scratching at 
the vast pillage of a derelict empire'. Britain, too, would be the loser. 
He thought the world was 'entering a period when the struggle for 
self-preservation is going to present itself with great intentness to 
thickly populated industrial countries'. Britain would soon be 'fight- 
ing for its life' and it would be essential to retain India (May 
1933). 19 

Churchill conducted the most concentrated and intense political 
campaign of his life against the 1935 India bill, 'a monstrous 
monument of shame built by pygmies', which gave India Federal 
Home Rule, of a type which benefited chiefly the professional 
Brahmin politicians, and which in practice proved unworkable. But 
despite his titanic efforts, he could arouse no mass public support in 
Britain. All his oratory was in vain. Indeed, he could not even arouse 
the British community in India: they had already written off the 
Empire. The Conservative backbenchers were apathetic and resigned 
to a gradual British withdrawal. Churchill was never able to persu- 
ade more than eighty-nine of them to vote against the bill, which 
passed by the huge majority of 264. The truth is, though the British 
Empire still occupied a quarter of the earth's surface, by 1935 
imperialism was dead in Britain, merely awaiting the obsequies. 
Churchill turned from India in despair to concentrate on rearming 
Britain for self-survival. 

That, too, looked a lost cause at times. The influence of Blooms- 
bury had reached upwards and downwards by the 1930s to embrace 
almost the entire political nation. Among the Left intelligentsia, the 
patriotism which Strachey had sought so successfully to destroy had 
been replaced by a primary loyalty to Stalin. In the 1930s the 
Apostles ceased to be a centre of political scepticism and became an 
active recruiting-ground for Soviet espionage. 20 While some Apostles 
like Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Leo Long were encouraged to 



348 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

penetrate British agencies to transmit information to Moscow, the 
Left as a whole, led by the Communists, sought to keep Britain 
disarmed, a policy Stalin maintained until Hitler actually attacked 
him in June 1941. In the 1920s, the British Communist Party had 
been working class, innovatory and independent-minded. Early in 
the 1930s, the middle-class intellectuals moved in, and the cp rapidly 
became cringingly servile to Soviet foreign policy interests. 21 British 
Marxists, who included political thinkers like G. D.H.Cole and 
Harold Laski, and scientists like Joseph Needham, J.B.S.Haldane 
and J.D.Bernal, accepted uncritically the crude and wholly mistaken 
reasoning that 'capitalist Britain' and 'fascist Germany' were ruled 
by the same international interests and that rearmament was merely 
designed to perpetuate imperialism and destroy socialism. The 
Labour Party took the same line in diluted form. In June 1933, at the 
East Fulham by-election, the Labour candidate received a message 
from the Labour Party leader, George Lansbury: 'I would close every 
recruiting station, disband the Army and disarm the Air Force. I 
would abolish the whole dreadful equipment of war and say to the 
world "do your worst".' 22 Clement Attlee, who was to succeed him 
as leader, told the Commons, 21 December 1933: 'We are unalter- 
ably opposed to anything in the nature of rearmament.' Labour 
consistently voted, spoke and campaigned against rearmament right 
up to the outbreak of war. 

Equally opposed to any policy of preparedness or firmness was the 
whole spectrum of British benevolence, what Shaw (who belonged to 
it) called 'the stage-army of the Good'. 'On every side', Trotsky 
wrote of it with venom, 'the slug humanitarianism leaves its slimy 
trail, obscuring the function of intelligence and atrophying emotion.' 
'They want an outward system of nullity,' echoed D.H.Lawrence 
before his death, 'which they call peace and good will, so that in their 
own souls they can be independent little gods . . . little Moral 
Absolutes, secure from questions .... It stinks. It is the will of a 
louse.' 23 The actual arguments used to justify a policy of quasi- 
pacifist inactivity were intellectually flimsy at the time and seem in 
retrospect pitiful. Hitler's savage persecution of the Jews was largely 
ignored. This was not so much because Britain was anti-Semitic. 
Unlike France, Jew-baiters like William Joyce, Henry Hamilton 
Beamish and Arnold Spencer Leese - who advocated mass extermin- 
ation and used the term 'final solution' - were in a tiny minority. 24 It 
was, rather, that Hitler's anti-Semitism was rationalized into the 
overall 'Versailles is to blame' explanation. As Lord Lothian, a key 
anti-rearmer of the 'soft' Right, put it, the murder of Jews was 
'largely the reflex of the external persecution to which Germans have 
been subjected since the war'. 25 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 349 

There was a general tendency (as with Stalin's atrocities) to ignore 
the actual evidence of Hitler's wickedness, which was plentiful 
enough, and to dismiss Hitler's ferocious statements as mere 'rheto- 
ric', which was 'intended for home consumption' {The Times, 
10 July 1934). Against all the evidence, the stage army persisted in 
believing that Hitler not only wanted peace but was a factor for it. 
Temple, the portly primate of York, thought he had made 'a great 
contribution to the secure establishment of peace'. 26 Clifford Allen 
wrote, 'I am convinced he genuinely desires peace.' 27 Keynes's 
'Carthaginian peace' argument had so captured the minds of both 
Left and Right that it was felt that for Hitler to smash the Treaty by 
force was itself a step to peace. Versailles was 'monstrously unjust' 
(Leonard Woolf), 'that wicked treaty' (Clifford Allen). In remilitariz- 
ing the Rhineland, said Lothian, the Germans had 'done no more 
than walk into their own backyard'. Shaw agreed: 'It was if the 
British had reoccupied Portsmouth.' 28 

Behind all this facile rationalization, however, was simple, old- 
fashioned fear; a dash of cowardice, indeed. As Harold Nicolson 
noted during the Rhineland crisis, 'the feeling in the House is terribly 
pro-German, which means afraid of war'. 29 Until the coming of 
radar in the late 1930s, even experts accepted the views of Giulio 
Douhet in The Command of the Air (1921), that fighter aircraft 
could do little to prevent mass bombing. Churchill warned par- 
liament on 28 November 1934 that up to 40,000 Londoners would 
be killed or injured in the first week of war. Baldwin thought the 
'man in the street' ought to 'realize that there is no power on earth 
that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell 
him, the bomber will always get through.' 30 In fact people told him 
nothing of the sort: quite the contrary. The brilliant H.G.Wells film, 
Things to Come (1936), presented a terrifying scene of total devasta- 
tion. The same year, Bertrand Russell (currently a pacifist) argued in 
Which Way to Peace? that fifty gas-bombers, using lewisite, could 
poison all London. General Fuller, another leading expert, predicted 
that London would become 'one vast, raving Bedlam', with the 
government 'swept away in an avalanche of terror'. 

In this highly emotional atmosphere, with an ostensible concern 
for humanity forming a thin crust over a morass of funk - so 
suggestive of the nuclear scares of the late 1950s and early 1980s - 
the real issue of how to organize collective security in Europe was 
never properly debated. The mood was set by a ridiculous debate in 
the Oxford Union, immediately after Hitler came to power, which 
voted 275-153 'That this House refuses in any circumstances to fight 
for King and Country' - 'that abject, squalid, shameless avowal ... a 
very disquieting and disgusting symptom', as Churchill called it. It 



350 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

was chiefly, and quite illogically, a protest against Britain's supine 
behaviour over Manchuria, as Michael Foot, then a Union officer (and 
a Liberal), explained. 31 The League of Nations Union, supposedly the 
hard-headed, well-informed collective security lobby group, never put 
the issues clearly before the public because it was unable itself to take a 
clear stand on when and how force could be legitimately employed in 
international affairs. 32 Its president and driving force, Lord Robert 
Cecil, knew that British abandonment of China was inevitable, but he 
was too devious to tell his supporters. 33 The clergy, seizing on the 
peace issue as a remedy for declining congregations and their own 
flagging faith (another precursor of the 1980s), saturated the discus- 
sion in a soggy pool of lacrymose spirituality. Three divines, the Revs 
Herbert Grey, Maude Royden and 'Dick' Sheppard, proposed to go to 
Manchuria and 'place themselves unarmed between the combatants', 
a ludicrous echo of Strachey's feeble witticism, but intended quite 
seriously. 34 The Rev. Donald Soper (Methodist) argued: 'Pacifism 
contains a spiritual force strong enough to repel an invader.' 35 Cosmo 
Gordon Lang, Archbishop of Canterbury, did not quite believe that, 
but he was confused enough both to oppose rearmament and to write 
to The Times wagging an admonitory finger at Mussolini. 

The pacifist wing of the clergy, led by Sheppard, founded a Peace 
Pledge Union to collect signatures to frighten off Hitler: among those 
who sponsored it were Aldous Huxley, Rose Macaulay, Storm 
Jameson, Vera Brittain, Siegfried Sassoon, Middleton Murry and 
other literary luminaries. Feeling the chill wind of competition from 
the Left, Cecil organized, in 1934-5, a nationwide 'Peace Ballot', 
which produced 87 per cent approval (over 10 million votes) of the 
League position, and appeared to refute both the pacifists and the 
pro-rearmament Tories like Churchill, but which in fact never asked 
the question whether Britain should rearm if the dictatorships did so 
first, and so confused the debate still further. 36 In fact public opinion 
was highly volatile. In 1933-4, East Fulham was one of six by- 
elections fought in part on the peace issue which registered huge 
swings against the government (as high as 50 per cent in October 
1934) and were interpreted as a public rejection of rearmament. But 
all these seats returned solidly to the Tory fold at the general election 
in 1935, just as virtually all those who voted against King and Country 
at Oxford fought for it when the time came. But Hitler could be 
excused for believing, at any rate until the end of 1938, that Britain 
would not oppose him by force. He therefore acted on that assump- 
tion. 

Hitler's conduct of foreign and military policy between his acces- 
sion to power and the end of 1938 was brilliantly forceful and — 
granted the complete absence of respect for any system of law and 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 351 

morals - faultless. He did not make a single error of judgement. At 
this stage his compulsive eschatology was an advantage: the need he 
felt for speed gave his moves a pace which continually wrong-footed 
his opponents and left them bewildered. 1933 and 1934 were 
devoted essentially to internal consolidation and rearmament. The 
action began on 13 January 1935 when Hitler won the Saar 
plebiscite; eleven days after the Saar reverted to Germany on 
7 March, Hitler repudiated the Versailles disarmament clauses, and 
on 18 June — despite the Stresa Front — the British cravenly accepted 
the fait accompli of a rearmed Germany by signing the Anglo- 
German Naval Treaty. This inexplicable surrender not only gave 
Germany the right to 35 per cent strength of Britain's surface fleet 
but granted her parity in submarines. It was the beginning of positive 
appeasement, as opposed to mere supine inactivity. 37 This conces- 
sion infuriated the French and contributed to the breakdown in 
Anglo— French policy marked by the Abyssinia crisis. Indeed, Abyssi- 
nia was an uncovenanted boon for Hitler: his one stroke of pure 
luck. 

It is of the essence of geopolitics to be able to distinguish between 
different degrees of evil. This was a gift Anthony Eden, now Foreign 
Secretary, did not possess. He could not differentiate between 
Mussolini, who was corruptible but open to civilized influences too, 
and Hitler, a man who had already murdered hundreds and placed 
scores of thousands in concentration camps, and who openly claimed 
his intention to transform Europe. 'My programme from the first 
was to abolish the Treaty of Versailles .... I have written it 
thousands of times. No human being has ever declared or recorded 
what he wanted more often than me': so Hitler said, and it was 
true. 38 Nor did Eden register that any threat from Italy, with her 
weak and already flagging economy, was not to be compared with 
the potential destructive power of Germany, with the world's second 
largest industrial economy, already booming again, and a military 
tradition of unparalleled ferocity. This extraordinary lack of perspec- 
tive was shared by British public opinion, or at any rate that section 
of it which made its voice heard. The uproar it raised over Italy's 
invasion was far noisier than the hostile reaction to any of Hitler's 
far more purposeful moves, then or later. The French were shaken by 
such frivolity, and made it clear they could not be a party to it. 

Thus Abyssinia not only destroyed the Stresa Front but created 
bitter Anglo-French antagonism and ruled out any possibility of 
securing joint agreement to a firm counter-move against Hitler. 
France would not back Britain over Abyssinia; therefore Britain 
would not back France over the Rhineland. It was the Abyssinia 
crisis which enabled Hitler to bring forward his plan to remilitarize 



352 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

the Rhine from 1937 to 1936, beautifully timed on 7 March at the 
height of Anglo— French confusion. Even so it was a risk. Hitler later 
admitted : * If the French had marched into the Rhineland we would have 
had to withdraw with our tails between our legs.' 39 The French had the 
physical power to act alone, as they had done in 1 923 . But the will to use 
it was lacking. 

Thereafter Hitler was in a position to resist invasion from the West. In 
1936—7 he benefited greatly from the turmoils in the world. First the 
Spanish Civil War, then the Sino-Japanese conflict burdened the 
guardians of legitimacy with a multitude of fast-changing problems 
they could not solve. Meanwhile Hitler rearmed steadily and streng- 
thened his alliances. The Rome-Berlin Axis of 1 November 1936, 
followed later that month by the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, 
altered the naval-air equations just as radically as the aircraft emerging 
from Hitler's new factories. By 1937 Germany had 800 bombers to 
Britain's forty-eight. By May that year it was calculated the German and 
Italian air forces could drop 600 tons of bombs a day. It was the 
obsession with air-raid terror, intensified by Soviet propaganda over 
Guernica after July 1937, which paralysed Allied diplomacy. 40 

On 5 November 1937 Hitler told his top military and foreign policy 
advisers that a period of active expansion could now begin, with 
Austria and Czechoslovakia the first targets. Von Blomberg, the War 
Minister, and the Army Commander, von Fritsch, protested: the 
French would still be too strong. 41 That was the end of them. Until this 
point Hitler had left the army alone, other than tell it to get on with 
rearmament as fast as possible. Now he decided the time had come to 
take it over, to clear the way for the dynamic phase of his programme. 
On 26 January 1938 Blomberg was dismissed: police files showed his 
new wife had been a prostitute and porn-model. Nine days later Fritsch 
went, charged with homosexuality on the evidence of a Himmler file. 
They were, in a sense, lucky: Stalin would have murdered them for less— 
he killed 200 generals in 1937—8 — or indeed for nothing at all. Some 
sixteen other German generals were retired, forty-four more trans- 
ferred. Hitler himself took over as War Minister and head of the armed 
forces; the weak von Brauchitsch was made head of the army; a pliable 
Nazi general, Wilhelm Keitel, was told to create a new operational high 
command. Thus the last bastion of the old order fell to Hitler, without a 
murmur from anyone. He threw out Schacht from the Economics 
Ministry and von Neurath from the Foreign Ministry at the same time. 
From now on the Nazis were in total control and all was on a war 
footing. 

A week after Fritsch was sacked, Hitler summoned the Austrian 
Chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to his mountain villa at Berchtes- 
gaden. No saloon-keeper dragged to a gangster's lair could have been 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 353 

treated more brutally. Following the tirade, the terrified man signed a 
series of concessions, including the appointment of a Nazi as his 
Interior Minister. Afterwards, driving back to Salzburg with von 
Papen, the latter remarked: 'Yes - that's the way the Fiihrer can be. 
Now you've seen it for yourself. But next time you'll find a meeting 
with him a good deal easier. The Fiihrer can be distinctly charming.' 42 
In fact the 'next time' for Schuschnigg was a summons to Dachau. 
Hitler's troops entered Austria thirty days after the meeting. 

Hitler's treatment of his Austrian opponents was brutal and bestial 
in the extreme. University professors were made to scrub the streets 
with their bare hands (a form of 're-education' imitated by Mao 
Tse-tung in the 1960s). 43 The invading Nazis stole anything they 
could lay their hands on. When they broke into Freud's flat in Vienna, 
his wife put her housekeeping money on the table: 'Won't the 
gentlemen help themselves?' It required intervention by Roosevelt and 
Mussolini - and a ransom of 250,000 Austrian schillings - to get the 
old man permission to leave. He had to sign a statement testifying he 
had been well-treated, to which he appended the words 'I can heartily 
recommend the Gestapo to anyone.' The Germans were delighted. 
The bitter joke was beyond them. So was pity. Freud's four aged sisters 
chose not to move: all died in the gas-ovens later. 44 

On 21 April, five weeks after he swallowed Austria, Hitler 
instructed Keitel to prepare an invasion plan for Czechoslovakia, and 
told the leader of the German minority there to set the crisis in motion. 
The previous month, on 21 March, the British Chiefs of Staff had 
presented the cabinet with a paper, 'The Military Implications of 
German Aggression Against Czechoslovakia'. Britain was now rearm- 
ing, but the paper told a fearful tale of delays and weaknesses, 
especially in the emotional area of air defence. 45 Two critical 
questions now arise. First, would the German army have overthrown 
Hitler if the Allies had made it clegr that war was the price of his Czech 
policy? This is one of the great 'ifs' of history, for if the answer is 'Yes', 
the Second World War — and its terrible consequences — would have 
been averted. 

It is true that some German generals believed that war over 
Czechoslovakia would be a disaster for Germany. A meeting con- 
vened by Brauchitsch in July 1938 agreed that the German people 
were against war and that the army was still too weak to defeat 'the 
powers'. 46 The Chief of Staff, Ludwig Beck, told the politician Ewald 
von Kleist-Schwenzin, who was going to Britain, 'Bring me back 
certain proof that England will fight if Czechoslovakia is attacked 
and I will put an end to this regime.' 47 Hitler assured his generals 
on 15 August that, so long as Chamberlain and Daladier were in 
power, there would be no Allied declaration of war — according to 



354 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

Rauschning he referred to the Appeasers scornfully as 'My Hugen- 
burgs\ This did not convince Beck, who declined responsibility and 
resigned on 27 August. There is some evidence other generals were 
prepared to overthrow Hitler when and if he gave the order to 
attack. 48 But one must remain sceptical. The German generals had 
acquiesced in 1934 when Hitler murdered two of their number. They 
had done nothing in January when he had broken and retired their 
leaders. Where in the intervening months would they have found the 
courage they had so signally failed to possess before — and exercised 
it in circumstances which Hitler would have presented as desertion 
and treachery in the face of the enemy? 

In any case, whatever the generals intended, they failed to convey 
the message to the British cabinet. At its decisive meeting on 30 
August, only one cabinet minister, Oliver Stanley, mentioned the 
belief of the German generals that their country was not ready for 
war. What Beck and his colleagues wanted was an ultimatum — a 
war-threat. What the cabinet decided was exactly the opposite. As 
Chamberlain summed up: 'The cabinet was unanimous in the view 
that we should not utter a threat to Herr Hitler, that if he went into 
Czechoslovakia we should declare war on him. It was of the utmost 
importance that the decision be kept secret.' Since publicity was of 
the essence of a firm line being effective, the cabinet decision is 
incomprehensible, except on the assumption that Chamberlain and 
others did not want Hitler overthrown. 

This raises an important point: the Hitler phenomenon cannot be 
seen except in conjunction with the phenomenon of Soviet Russia. 
Just as the fear of Communism put him in power, so it tended to keep 
him there. Chamberlain was not clear, at this stage, whether Hitler 
was a total menace or not; he was quite clear Stalin was. The British 
tended to underestimate the power of the Soviet army. But they 
rightly feared the political potential of Communist expansion. In an 
oblique manner Hitler had always underlined the consanguinity of 
the rival totalitarianisms. The moment the Nazi Party disappeared, 
he reiterated, 'there will be another 10 million Communist votes in 
Germany'. The alternative to him was not liberal democracy, he 
insisted, but Soviet collectivism. Chamberlain for one accepted this 
argument. When on 26 September, in the immediate prelude to 
Munich, General Gamelin gave him a more optimistic picture of 
Allied strength and they discussed the possibility of Hitler's over- 
throw, Chamberlain wanted to know: 'Who will guarantee that 
Germany will not become Bolshevistic afterwards?' Of course no one 
could give such a pledge. Daladier took a similar line: The Cossacks 
will rule Europe.' 49 So the two men chose the lesser of two evils (as 
they saw it): concessions to Germany. 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 355 

The second question is: would the Allies have been better advised 
to fight in autumn 1938 over Czechoslovakia, than in autumn 1939 
over Poland? This too is in dispute; but the answer is surely 'Yes'. It 
is true that the pace of Allied rearmament, especially of British 
air-power, was overtaking Germany's. But in this sense alone was the 
strategic equation better in 1939 than in 1938. It is important to 
grasp that the Munich Conference, which took place in the Brown 
House on 29—30 September, was not only a diplomatic surrender by 
Britain and France but a military disaster too. Mussolini, who 
appeared the star of the show — he was the only one who spoke all 
four languages — failed to note this point: he thought the only issue 
was German irridentism and that 'Hitler had no intention' of 
absorbing Czechoslovakia itself. 50 But the actual redrawing of the 
Czech frontiers at Munich was determined, at Hitler's insistence, as 
much on military as on racial grounds. No plebiscite was held. Some 
800,000 Czechs were absorbed into Germany, and 250,000 Ger- 
mans left behind as a fifth column. 51 The Czechs' elaborate frontier 
defences, built with French assistance, were taken over by the 
Germans. There was now no possibility whatever of the Czechs 
offering armed resistance to an outright invasion. That involved a 
massive shift in the strategic balance. As Churchill, who perceived 
the military significance of the capitulation better than anyone, 
pointed out in the Munich debate (5 October 1938), the annexation 
of Austria had given Hitler an extra twelve divisions. Now the 
dismantling of Czech military power released a further thirty 
German divisions for action elsewhere. 52 

In fact the shift was worse than this. The Czechs' forty divisions 
were among the best-equipped in Europe: when Hitler finally 
marched in he got the means to furnish equivalent units of his own, 
plus the huge Czech armaments industry. This 'turnaround' of 
roughly eighty divisions was equivalent to the entire French army. 53 
The surrender, as Churchill noted, also meant the end of France's 
system of alliances in the east and brought about a moral collapse in 
the Danube basin. Seeing the Czechs abandoned by the democracies, 
the small states scuttled for cover or joined, like jackals, in the feast. 
Poland was allowed to tear off Teschen, which she had coveted since 
1919. Hungary, too, got a slice of the Czech carcass. Throughout 
East-Central Europe and the Balkans, the friendship and favour of 
the Nazis was now eagerly courted by governments, and fascist 
parties swelled in influence and pride. German trade was everywhere 
triumphant. The German economy boomed. In the closing weeks of 
1938 Hitler, without firing a shot, appeared to have restored all the 
splendour of Wilhelmine Germany. Was he not the most successful 
German statesman since Bismarck? So it appeared. 



356 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

Yet the end of 1938 marked the watershed in Hitler's career, not 
least with the German people. He overestimated their will to power. 
They supported overwhelmingly his policy of German irridentism. 
They applauded the Anschluss: plebiscites showed 99 per cent 
approval in Germany and 99.75 per cent in Austria. 54 They wanted 
the Sudetenland back. But there is no evidence that they ever wanted 
to absorb large populations of non-Germans. There is ample 
evidence that most Germans did not want war. When on 27 
September 1938 Hitler deliberately ordered the 2nd Motorized 
Division to pass through Berlin on its way to the Czech border, less 
than two hundred people came out to watch him review it from the 
Reichskanzlerplatz. He marched back into the building disgusted. 55 
Thereafter, his brutal moves on the European chessboard, however 
successful or even triumphant, evoked no spontaneous applause 
from the German public. There was a total lack of elation when 
German troops marched into Prague. 

Hitler sensed this vacuum in German hearts. But he no longer 
sought to fill it. He would go forward with or without their 
enthusiasm. All he insisted on was their obedience. From 1939 he 
ceased to play the politician, the orator, the demagogue. He became 
a militarist, working from army headquarters, and by means of 
secret gangster-pacts. His methods of government began to approxi- 
mate to Stalin's, losing their public dimension of approbation and 
leadership. He ceased to woo: he now sought only to force and 
terrorize. His speech to the Reichstag on 1 September 1939, justify- 
ing his war on Poland, was short and flat; the streets were deserted as 
he drove to make it. Nor did the crowds turn out when the troops 
returned victorious. As George Kennan noted from the American 
embassy, the Berliners refused to cheer or even give the Nazi salute: 
'Not even the most frantic efforts of professional Nazi agitators 
could provoke them to demonstrations of elation or approval.' It was 
the same even when the German troops took Paris. 56 

As German opinion ceased to keep pace with Hitler's accelerating 
eschatology, so British opinion swung against appeasement. It was 
beginning to do so even at the time of Munich itself, to judge by such 
newspapers as the Manchester Guardian, News Chronicle, Daily 
Telegraph and Daily Herald. The Times, whose editor Geoffrey 
Dawson was Chamberlain's closest press confidant, supported 
Munich; so did the left-wing New Statesman, whose chairman was 
Keynes himself. 57 But their enthusiasm soon waned. The bestial 
wave of anti-Semitism which Goebbels unleashed in Germany during 
November completed the rout of the appeasers During the winter of 
1938-9, the mood in Britain changed to accept war as inevitable. 
The German occupation of Prague on 15 March 1939, followed 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 357 

swiftly by the seizure of Memel from Lithuania six days later, 
convinced most British people that war was imminent. Fear gave 
place to a resigned despair, and the sort of craven, if misjudged, 
calculation which led to Munich yielded to a reckless and irrational 
determination to resist Hitler at the next opportunity, irrespective of 
its merits. 

This of course was precisely the kind of hysterical response which 
Hitler's acceleration of history was bound to produce sooner or later. 
The result was to make nonsense of all his plans, and to lead him into 
irreparable error and the world into war. Less than a fortnight after 
the occupation of Prague, on 28 March, Hitler denounced his 1934 
pact with Poland, and preparations went ahead for its dismember- 
ment. Poland was to him an unfortunate geographical anomaly. It 
contained large subject German populations and territories he be- 
lieved ought to belong to him. But more important was that it barred 
his invasion route into Russia and so inhibited his plans to deal with 
the home of 'bacillus'. It had to submit to him or be destroyed. He 
saw no reason why the British and the French should resist his plans. 
If they were not prepared to fight over Czechoslovakia, which made 
some kind of military sense for them, why should they fight over 
Poland, which made no sense at all? In any case, why should not 
these capitalist countries welcome his decision to move Eastwards, 
ultimately against the heartland of Bolshevism? 

Instead, only three days later, the British gave Poland a guarantee 
that if 'action was taken which clearly threatened the independence 
of Poland so that Poland felt bound to resist with her national forces, 
His Majesty's Government would at once lend them all the support 
in their power.' 58 Chamberlain made this move without consulting 
the French government, although they were more or less bound to 
endorse it. The Times, briefed by Chamberlain, hastened to insist 
that the loosely worded pledge, one of the most ill-considered in 
British history, only guaranteed Poland's 'independence' not its 
'integrity' — thus leaving room for the alteration of the Versailles 
frontiers in Germany's favour. 59 That was Hitler's interpretation. 
What he assumed was that the guarantee would lead Britain to put 
pressure on the Poles, as once on the Czechs, to satisfy his demands, 
including invasion routes into Russia. He had no intention of 
provoking war with Britain. In January 1939 he had taken the 
decision to build a vast high seas fleet, of ten battleships, three 
battlecruisers, four aircraft-carriers and no less than 249 submarines, 
and he told Admiral Erich Raeder that war with Britain had to be 
avoided until the fleet was ready in the mid- 1940s. 60 He thought in 
fact that Britain, realizing Imperial preference was not working, was 
likely to be driven by economic factors to turn in conciliatory mood 



358 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

to Europe, now dominated by German trade; and this impression was 
confirmed in July by talks which Helmuth Wohlthat, Director of 
Goering's Four Year Plan staff, had in London - thus foreshadowing 
the move into Europe which did not in fact take place until the 1 970s. 61 

Yet the Polish guarantee did raise problems for Hitler, because the 
power to invoke it was placed in the hands of the Polish government, not 
a repository of good sense. Therein lay the foolishness of the pledge: 
Britain had no means of bringing effective aid to Poland yet it obliged 
itself to declare war on Germany if Poland so requested. The pledge, 
however, might become more meaningful if Britain allied herself with 
Russia. This had long been the aim of the European Left, which saw it as 
the solution to all their dilemmas - including their desire to resist Hitler 
while opposing rearmament. By mid- 1939 the British and French chiefs 
of staff favoured a Russian alliance in the sense that they favoured 
anything which might reduce the military odds they now faced. But 
following Stalin's military purges of 1938 they rated the Soviet army 
below Poland's, and if it came to a choice would opt for the latter. Since 
the Russians would not co-operate unless the Poles allowed passage of 
their troops, and since the Poles were no more willing to permit Soviet 
troops to pass through Poland to attack Germany than they were to 
allow German troops through to attack Russia, there was never much 
possibility of an Anglo— French-Russian military agreement. Never- 
theless, an Anglo— French mission set off for Russia on 1 August, by sea 
(appropriate air transport was not available, an interesting reflection 
on the present state of British air-power). 62 

This was enough to determine Hitler on a momentous, if temporary, 
renversement des alliances. Hitler had all along been convinced that 
war was unavoidable at certain stages of his programme. But at all costs 
he wanted to avoid the general, unlimited war of attrition and 
exhaustion which Germany had experienced in 1 9 1 4—1 8 . He wanted to 
revert to the short, limited but politically decisive wars which Bismarck 
had waged in the 1860s and 1870s. The Blitzkrieg, for which his army 
was being equipped and trained, was an integral part of his whole 
expansionist philosophy. In his view neither the German economy nor 
the German people could stand more than short, fierce campaigns, of 
overwhelming power and intensity but very limited duration. 63 The last 
of these lightning wars was to be the decisive one against Russia: 
thereafter, with a vast Eurasian empire to exploit, Germany could build 
up the strength to sustain long and global conflict. But until that 
happened she must be careful to take on enemies singly and above all 
avoid protracted campaigns on two or more major fronts. 

The result was what he privately termed 'a pact with Satan to drive 
out the devil'. 64 On 28 April, in his last big public oration, he savaged 
Roosevelt's windy proposal for non-aggression guarantees, and 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 359 

signalled in effect that all previous pacts, treaties or assumptions 
were now invalid. Henceforth his only guideline would be the 
interests of the German people, as he conceived them. Stalin's 
response to this speech was eager. He feared a German invasion 
more than any other development, internal or external. It was the 
absence of a German enemy in 1918—20 which alone had permitted 
the Bolshevik state to survive. At the Central Committee plenary 
session of 19 January 1925 he had laid down Soviet policy on war 
between capitalist states: 'Should [such a] war begin ... we will have 
to take part, but we will be the last to take part so that we may throw 
the decisive weight into the scales, a weight which should prove the 
determining factor.' Since May 1935, while publicly pursuing a 
Popular Front policy against 'international fascism', he had privately 
put out periodic feelers to persuade the Nazis to relinquish their 
anti-Soviet crusade and settle for a totalitarian brotherhood of 
mutual respect and divided spoils. Germany's evident decision, in 
March, to carve slices out of Poland provided a promising occasion 
to begin such a new relationship and the prospect of the democracies 
fighting for Poland was an added reason for coming to terms with 
Hitler and keeping out of the war - for the present. On 3 May Stalin 
sacked the Jew Litvinov and replaced him as Foreign Minister by 
Molotov: a clearance of the decks for talks with Hitler. Eight days 
later, the outbreak of large-scale fighting with Japanese forces in the 
Far East gave Stalin an added incentive to make an agreement, for 
he, no more than Hitler, wanted a two-front struggle. 65 

The first of the gangster pacts came on 22 May: the 'Pact of Steel' 
between Hitler and Mussolini. The latter had already swallowed his 
consternation at Germany's occupation of Prague, used it as a 
pretext for his own invasion of Albania on 7 April, and now jointly 
acknowledged with Hitler that international order had finally 
broken down and the reign of force had begun. At this stage Hitler 
was still anxious to stick to his original programme of dismembering 
Poland first, then using it as a corridor shortly afterwards for a 
Blitzkrieg against Russia, with Britain observing benevolent neutral- 
ity. As late as July he hoped such an outcome was possible. But the 
news of the arrival of the Anglo— French military mission in Moscow 
forced his hand, for even the possibility of an Allied deal with 
Moscow would upset his Polish timetable. He decided to preempt 
them, and on 20 August sent a telegram to 'Herr J.V.Stalin, 
Moscow', asking him to receive Ribbentrop three days later. The 
reply came back within twenty-four hours, revealing Stalin's evident 
longings. The next day, 22 August, Hitler addressed the High 
Command at Obersalzberg. According to jottings made by some of 
those present, he said that the Polish operation could go ahead. They 



360 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

need fear nothing from the West: 'Our opponents are little worms. I 
saw them in Munich.' He concluded: 'I shall provide the propagand- 
istic pretext for launching the war, no matter whether it is credible. 
The victor is not asked afterwards whether or not he has told the 
truth. What matters in beginning and waging the war is not 
righteousness but victory. Close your hearts to pity. Proceed brutally. 
Eighty million people must obtain what they have a right to. Their 
existence must be guaranteed. The stronger is in the right. Supreme 
hardness.' 66 

The deal with Stalin was struck the following night. It was the 
culmination of a series of contacts between the Soviet and German 
governments which went right back to the weeks following Lenin's 
putsch. They had been conducted, according to need, by army 
experts, secret policemen, diplomats or intermediaries on the fringe 
of the criminal world. They had been closer at some periods than 
others but they had never been wholly broken and they had been 
characterized throughout by total disregard for the ideological 
principles which either party ostensibly professed — by a contempt, 
indeed, for any consideration other than the most brutal mutual 
interest - the need of each regime to arm, to arrest and kill its 
opponents, and to oppress its neighbours. For two decades this evil 
stream of exchanges had flowed underground. Now at last it broke 
the surface. That night of 23-4 August there was a gruesome junket 
in the Kremlin. Ribbentrop reported: 'It felt like being among old 
party comrades.' He was as much at ease in the Kremlin, he added, 
'as among my old Nazi friends'. Stalin toasted Hitler and said he 
'knew how much the German people loved the Fiihrer'. There were 
brutal jokes about the Anti-Comintern Pact, now dead, which both 
sides agreed had been meant simply to impress the City of London 
and 'English shopkeepers'. 67 There was the sudden discovery of a 
community of aims, methods, manners and, above all, of morals. As 
the tipsy killers lurched about the room, fumblingly hugging each 
other, they resembled nothing so much as a congregation of rival 
gangsters, who had fought each other before, and might do so again, 
but were essentially in the same racket. 

Their agreement was termed a non-aggression pact. In fact it was a 
simple aggression pact against Poland. A secret protocol, which 
emerged in 1945 but which the Russian judges kept out of the 
Nuremberg trials record, divided up Eastern Europe into spheres of 
influence and left it open 'whether the interests of both parties make 
the maintenance of an independent Polish state appear desirable and 
how the frontiers of this state should be delimited'. 68 Thus a fourth 
partition of Poland was arranged, and consummated on 17 September 
when Soviet troops moved in, the division being solemnized by 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 361 

another gangster-pact, the Soviet-German Frontier and Friendship 
Treaty of 28 September 1939. The ground covered extended well 
beyond Poland, Stalin being given a free hand in Finland, most of the 
Baltic states and part of Romania. Hence in the autumn of 1939 he 
was able to impose upon Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania so-called 
'security treaties', which involved the introduction of Soviet troops. 
He told the Latvian Foreign Minister: 'So far as Germany is 
concerned, we can occupy you.' 69 When the Finns resisted, Stalin 
unleashed war on them (30 November 1939) with Germany's 
acquiescence. 

Stalin was delighted with the pact. He said it left Russia in a 
stronger position than at any time since the regime came to power. 
He did everything in his power to make the agreement work, to fulfil 
his pledge to Ribbentrop 'on his word of honour that the Soviet 
Union would not betray her partner'. 70 All over the world, Com- 
munist Parties reversed their anti-Nazi policy, preaching peace with 
Germany at any price, and actively sabotaging the war-effort when it 
came: at the height of the Nazi invasion of France, Maurice Thorez, 
head of the French cp, broadcast from Moscow begging the French 
troops not to resist. Stalin placed at Hitler's disposal all the immense 
raw material resources of the Soviet Union. This was vital to Hitler. 
In September 1939 Germany needed to import 80 per cent of its 
rubber, 65 per cent of its tin, 70 per cent of its copper, half its lead, a 
quarter of its zinc. Sweden, at the price of freedom from invasion 
(and German coal at one-third the price paid by Switzerland), 
provided Hitler with his iron-ore and all kinds of transit and 
overflight facilities. 71 But Stalin filled equally important gaps in 
Hitler's war-supplies: a million tons of grain, 900,000 tons of oil 
(including 100,000 tons of aircraft fuel), additional iron-ore, man- 
ganese and cotton. In return Russia got aero-engines, naval blueprints, 
torpedoes and mines. 72 

The pact brought a personal rapprochement too. Stalin presented 
Hitler as a man of genius, who had risen from nothing like himself. 
According to Ribbentrop, Hitler greatly admired Stalin, especially 
the way in which he held out against his own 'extremists' (a view 
widely shared in the West). Hitler said that Stalin had produced 'a 
sort of Slavonic-Muscovite nationalism', ridding Bolshevism of its 
Jewish internationalism. Mussolini took the view that Bolshevism 
was now dead: Stalin had substituted for it 'a kind of Slavonic 
fascism'. 73 

Yet the pact did not solve any of the problems Hitler had set 
himself. Indeed it involved a reversal of the original priorities on his 
timetable. He told Carl Burckhardt, League High Commissioner in 
Danzig: 'Everything that I undertake is directed against Russia. If the 



362 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

West is too stupid and too blind to understand this, then I will be 
forced to reach an understanding with the Russians, smash the West, 
and then turn all my concentrated strength against the Soviet 
Union.' 74 Even after Hitler got the Soviet pact, he still hoped to avoid 
war with the West, trusting that it would stun Britain into impotent 
passivity. But it had no effect on British policy other than to make all 
concerned now assume that war was certain. It was positively 
welcomed by some on the British Right as visible proof that the 
godless totalitarian regimes were in shameless and undisguised 
concert, 'out in the open, huge and hideous', as Evelyn Waugh put it 
in his fictional trilogy, Sword of Honour. When Hitler invaded 
Poland on 1 September and the Poles invoked the guarantee, there 
was never any doubt that Britain would stand by it or that France, 
however reluctantly, would follow suit. 

Thus Hitler's programme had to be drastically revised, and he 
found himself with a general war of the type he had hoped to avoid 
before disposing of Russia. From this point he ceased to nurture his 
image as a reasonable man, either at home or abroad, and made it 
clear to all that he would obtain his objectives by the ruthless 
application of force and terror. The same day he invaded Poland he 
ordered the murder of the incurably ill in German hospitals. 75 He 
made no attempt to reach a settlement with the Poles. He simply 
treated the country as occupied territory to be exploited. The victory 
over Poland was not an end; just a beginning. This was the exact 
reverse of the general German mood. After the Polish collapse 
General Ritter von Leeb noted in his diary, 3 October 1939: 'Poor 
mood of the population, no enthusiasm at all, no flags flying from 
the houses. Everyone waiting for peace. The people sense the 
needlessness of the war.' But Hitler was determined to burn 
Germany's bridges, to lock the nation onto an irreversible course. He 
told his generals, 23 November 1939: 'All hope for compromise is 
childish. Victory or defeat. I have led the German people to a great 
height even though the world now hates us. I am risking this war. I 
have to choose between victory or annihilation. It is not a single 
problem that is at stake, but whether the nation is to be or not to be.' 
On 17 October he ordered General Keitel to treat occupied Polish 
territory as 'an advanced glacis' for the future invasion of Russia. 76 
So much for the security Stalin thought he had bought! But in the 
meantime the West had to be eliminated: France by Blitzkrieg, 
Britain by despair. 

Hitler was now Generalissimo. The Polish campaign was the last 
prepared by the old General Staff. From now on, as with security and 
the civil ministries, Hitler double-banked the direction of the army, 
with the okw (High Command of the Armed Forces), under his 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 363 

personal orders, duplicating the work of the okh (Army High 
Command). The French made things easy for him. They had not 
wanted the war. After Munich they recognized that their Eastern 
policy was finished. With Poland they simply went through the 
motions. They thought the British pledge madness and endorsed it 
simply because they had no alternative. 77 They knew that to enter an 
all-out war with Hitlerite Germany might mean a repetition of 1870, 
and it took them fifty-six hours of agonized hesitation to respond to 
the German assault on Poland, which had been their sworn ally since 
1921. 78 The military protocol which General Gamelin had signed in 
May 1939 with the Polish War Minister, Kasprzycki, pledged that 
the French air force would take immediate offensive action against 
Germany as soon as Poland was invaded, and that a French army 
invasion of Germany would follow within sixteen days. Neither 
promise was fulfilled. All that happened was a tentative army probe 
on 8 September, soon discontinued. On 22 September, on the receipt 
of decisively bad news from the Polish front, the French scrapped all 
their aggressive plans. During this time the Germans had only eleven 
active-service divisions in the west, but by 1 October they were 
transferring troops from the eastern front. Thereafter, as the minutes 
of the Anglo— French staff discussions show, it was the British who 
pressed for action on the main German front, and the French who 
wished to do nothing there, while planning diversionary schemes in 
Scandinavia, the Caucasus, Salonica, Finland and elsewhere. 79 

The French preference for passivity on the Franco-German border 
combined with largely meaningless activity elsewhere played straight 
into Hitler's hands. Hitler originally ordered the attack on France for 
12 November, selecting from the alternatives offered the daring 
concept of an armoured thrust through the Ardennes. The restless- 
ness of French policy forced him to command and recommand the 
operation twenty-nine times throughout the winter and early spring. 
But in the meantime he himself had conceived the brilliant Norway 
operation, which his military advisers pronounced impossible. 
Anglo-French activities gave him the pretext and he pulled off the 
invasion, demoralizing the Allies and discountenancing his generals, 
who raised no objections when he strengthened the concept of the 
Ardennes thrust and launched it while France was still reeling from 
the Norway defeat and Allied logistics were in desperate confusion. 

The rapid destruction of French military power in May-June 1940 
convinced Hitler that the errors of the previous autumn were not 
irreversible and that he could still proceed towards his ultimate 
targets by a series of swift Bismarckian coups. The campaign bore 
the hallmarks of both his overweening self-confidence in attack and 
his ingenuity in detailed invention: according to Albert Speer, it was 



364 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

Hitler who thought of fitting the Stuka dive-bombers with sirens, 
one of the masterly psychological strokes of the Blitzkrieg. There 
were many other examples of his military inventiveness at this 
stage, including lengthening the gun-barrels of the tanks. 80 Just as 
earlier he had wrong-footed the democracies by the rapidity by 
which he created and exploited diplomatic opportunities, so now he 
gave the French commanders no chance to recover from their initial 
surprise. 'The ruling idea of the Germans in the conduct of this war 
was speed,' wrote the historian Marc Bloch, who served as staff- 
captain on the First Army Group. His account of those fatal weeks, 
Vetrange defaite, stressed that the collapse was a verdict on the 
French system as much as on its army. He praised both the 
populism and the intellectual calibre of Nazism: 

Compared to the old Imperial army, the troops of the Nazi regime have 
the appearance of being far more democratic. The gulf between officers 
and men seems now to be less unbridgeable .... The German triumph was 
essentially a triumph of intellect - and that is what makes it so peculiarly 
serious .... It was as though the two opposed forces belonged, each of 
them, to an entirely different period of history. We interpreted war in 
terms of assegai versus rifle made familiar to us by long years of colonial 
expansion. But this time it was we who were cast in the role of the 
savage! 81 

Bloch noted that, whatever the deep-seated causes, the immediate 
one was 'the utter incompetence of the high command'. It is now 
known that General Gamelin was suffering from syphilis, which 
may explain the inability to make up his mind, lack of concentra- 
tion, failing memory and delusions of grandeur which he exhibited 
during the campaign. 82 But the paralysis of senior officers was 
general. Bloch describes his own Army Group commander, General 
Blanchard, sitting 'in tragic immobility, saying nothing, doing noth- 
ing, but just gazing at the map spread on the table between us, as 
though hoping to find on it the decision he was incapable of 
taking.' 83 

As a military gamble the attack on France was a complete 
success. It began on 10 May and six weeks later, on 22 June, France 
signed an armistice which gave Hitler everything he wanted. The 
ratio of casualties - 27,000 German dead to 135,000 for the Allies 
— gives some indication of the magnitude of the German victory. 
On 10 June Italy had entered the war on Germany's side, and the 
terms of France's armistice with Mussolini, signed on 24 June, 
included the withdrawal of the French colonies from the war. Three 
days later Stalin invaded Romania and seized the provinces of 
Bessarabia and Bukovina; he had already appropriated the Karelian 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 365 

isthmus from Finland in a capitulation signed on 12 March. He was 
in every military sense Hitler's ally, though not his co-belligerent. 

France rapidly inclined towards the Nazi camp. Disarmed by the 
socialists, betrayed by the fascists and, still more, by the Commu- 
nists, and now deserted by the Right and the Centre, the Third 
Republic collapsed, friendless and unmourned. At Riom, a series of 
trials, against a background of approval or indifference, condemned 
those judged les responsables for the defeat: Daladier, Reynaud, 
Blum, Gamelin, Mandel, Guy la Chambre and others — in effect a 
verdict against the kind of parliamentary politics practised in 
France. 84 The armistice had been signed by Marechal Henri Philippe 
Petain, and he was now invested with pleins pouvoirs by the rump 
parliament in the new capital set up in Vichy. His dictatorship had 
been long in coming. He had been a 1914-18 war hero and had 
dominated French military policy 1920-36, so in fact was as 
responsible as any for the degringolade. But he was the most popular 
French general because his men felt they were less likely to be killed 
under his command than anyone else's. He was stupid. His books were 
ghosted for him by clever young officers. But he had the simple 
dignity of the French peasant (his father had been one). When Le 
Petit Journal held a survey in 1935 to find whom the French would 
most like as their dictator, Petain came top. Second was Pierre Laval, 
a former socialist of the Mussolini type, whom Petain now made 
Prime Minister. 85 

Petain quickly became the most popular French ruler since 
Napoleon. He incarnated anti-romanticism, the anxiety to relinquish 
historical and global duties, the longing for a quiet and safe life 
which now swept over France. He was a compulsive womanizer: 
'Sex and food are the only things that matter,' he said. But the 
Church worshipped him. Cardinal Gerlier, the French primate, 
announced: 'La France, cest Petain, et Petain cest la Pranced In a 
sense it was true. He was treated like royalty. Peasants lined the rails 
along which his train passed. Women held out their babies for him to 
touch. An official report notes that at Toulouse in November 1940 a 
women hurled herself in front of his car to stop it so she might have 
the chance of touching his hand. The Prefect turned to Petain to 
apologize, but found the Marshal gently asleep (he was eighty-five), 
'without', said the report, 'losing his dignity or his sovereign 
bearing'. 87 In 1934 he had quarrelled with one of his colonels, 
Charles de Gaulle, who refused to write a book for him unacknowl- 
edged. Now, as Under-Secretary for War, de Gaulle refused to 
accept the armistice and on 5 August Britain signed an agreement 
with his Free French movement; but only 35,000 joined him. In its 
early days, the Vichy regime, composed of soldiers and civil servants, 



366 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

with the politicians left out, generated genuine euphoria in France, as 
had Hitler's in Germany in 1933. 

Hitler had no difficulty in turning Vichy into an ally. On 3 July 
1940, lacking adequate reassurances, the Royal Navy was instructed 
to sink the French fleet in Oran and other North African ports. Two 
days later Petain broke off relations with Britain, and thereafter 
Vichy drifted inexorably into the Nazi camp, where she was ruth- 
lessly treated a£ a milch-cow. Some 40 per cent of France's industrial 
production, 1,500,000 workers and half France's public sector 
revenue went to the German war-economy. 88 

Hitler was less lucky with Spain. Franco was determined to keep 
out of war, which he saw as the supreme evil, and especially a war 
waged by Hitler in association with Stalin, which he felt incarnated 
all the evils of the century. He declared strict neutrality in September 
1939. He advised Mussolini to keep out too. He felt he had to shift to 
'non-belligerency' on 13 June 1940, which he described as 'a form of 
national sympathy with the Axis'. 89 But as the price for entering the 
war he pitched his demands impossibly high: Oran, the whole of 
Morocco, huge territories in West Africa, massive quantities of war 
supplies and equipment to attack Gibraltar and defend the Canaries. 
When he met Hitler at Hendaye on 23 October 1940 he not only 
increased these demands but greeted his German benefactor with icy 
coldness verging on contempt. As he was himself a professional 
soldier, and Hitler an amateur - not even a gentleman, a corporal! - 
he treated Hitler's customary military tour d'horizon with un- 
concealed contempt. They talked, wrote Hitler's interpreter Paul 
Schmidt, 'to or rather at one another' until two in the morning and 
failed to agree on anything whatever. Hitler later told Mussolini he 
would rather have two or three teeth out than go through that 
again. 90 

One of Franco's collateral reasons for refusing to join Hitler was 
his belief that Britain had no intention of making peace. Perhaps 
Hitler's biggest single misjudgement was his failure to appreciate the 
depth of the hostility he had aroused in Britain. The main object of 
his Blitzkrieg in France was not to destroy the French army, which he 
felt he could do any time he wished, but to shock Britain into making 
terms. On 21 May, the same day he took Arras, he said he wanted 'to 
sound out England on dividing the world'. 91 His decision to halt his 
armour outside Dunkirk at the end of the month, which allowed the 
bulk of the British Expeditionary Force to be evacuated from the 
beaches, was taken for military reasons but may have been prompted 
by the desire to open up a line of discussion with London. On 2 June, 
as the last bef units were preparing to embark, he told the staff of 
Army Group A in Charleville that he wanted a 'reasonable peace 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 367 

agreement' with Britain immediately so that he would be 'finally free' 
for his 'great and real task: the confrontation with Bolshevism'. 92 With 
the French campaign over, he spoke on 30 June of the need to give 
Britain one more 'demonstration of our military power before she gives 
up and leaves us free in the rear for the East'. 93 He continued to cling to 
the illusion that Britain might compromise into the late autumn. The 
Fiihrer is obviously depressed,' noted an observer on 4 November. 
'Impression that at the moment he does not know how the war ought to 
continue.' 94 He was waiting for a signal from London that never came. 

In fact Britain became decisively more bellicose in the course of 1 940. 
Where France chose Petain and quietism, Britain chose Churchill and 
heroism. There were perfectly sound economic and military reasons for 
this bifurcation. Unlike France, Britain did not elect a popular front 
government in the mid-1930s, and the deflationary policies of the 
Baldwin— Chamberlain governments, though painful, eventually per- 
mitted her to make a substantial economic recovery. Although Britain's 
unemployment in the early 1930s was much higher than France's, there 
is evidence to show that much of it was voluntary as a result of the 
relatively high level of benefit, more than 50 per cent of average 
wages. 95 The economy was much healthier than it appeared in left-wing 
propaganda. Almost throughout the 1930s the building industry was 
expanding, producing over 3 million new houses, adding 29 per cent to 
the total stock, including a record 400,000 in one twelve-month period 
(1936-7). 96 The decline in union power following the failure of the 
General Strike in 1926, and subsequent anti-union legislation, made it 
possible, when the worst of the slump was over, for Britain to adopt new 
technologies with a speed impossible in the 1920s. Indeed for Britain 
the inter-war period culminated in a phase of innovatory expansion. 97 
Numbers employed in the new electrical-electronics industry rose from 
192,000 in 1930 to 248,000 in 1936 andBritain was the first country to 
create a National Grid. The chemical and petro-chemical industry 
expanded rapidly, with exports rising 18 per cent 1930—8. Employ- 
ment in the aircraft industry had risen from 2 1,000 in 1 93 to 35 ,000 in 
1935, even before rearmament got under way. The number of cars 
produced more than doubled from 237,000 in 1930 to 508,000 in 
2937 98 These advances were all directly relevant to war-production 
capacity. 

It is true that, in rearming, Britain experienced many set-backs and 
had to import machine-tools, for instance, from America, Hungary and 
even Germany itself. 99 But in certain key areas, especially aero-engines 
and above all radar, which was to prove of decisive importance both in 
air- and sea-power, Britain had important technological leads over 
Germany. 100 Rearmament accelerated in 1939 and by mid-1940 
Britain was producing more aircraft, and training more air-crews, than 



368 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

Germany. There were thus solid physical reasons for the transforma- 
tion of Britain's mood in 1940. The emergence of Churchill, who 
became Prime Minister and Minister of Defence (an important 
conjunction Lloyd George had never been able to achieve in the First 
World War) on 7 May, was thus natural. His resolution, energy and 
oratory — he used this last gift to astonishing effect just at the point 
when Hitler, his greatest rival in this respect, voluntarily relinquished 
it — were a bonus. By the summer of 1940 he was at least as popular 
in Britain as Petain in France, and more popular than Hitler now was 
in Germany. 101 

Churchill, though romantic and pugnacious, was not unrealistic. 
He knew Britain, even with the Commonwealth, could not beat 
Germany. He assumed that sooner or later the United States would 
be obliged to intervene: therein lay his hope. Whatever he might say 
in public he did not altogether rule out a tactical deal with Hitler. On 
26 May 1940 Chamberlain's diary notes that Churchill told the War 
Cabinet 'it was incredible that Hitler would consent to any terms 
that we could accept though if we could get out of this jam by giving 
up Malta and Gibraltar and some African colonies he would jump at 
it'. The Cabinet Minutes record him saying 'if Herr Hitler was 
prepared to make peace on the terms of the restoration of German 
colonies and the overlordship of Central Europe', it would be 
considered but 'it was quite unlikely he would make any such 
offer'. 102 But this is the only evidence of his willingness to parley. 
Hitler's peace offers did not get through. According to the diary of 
'Chips' Channon MP, then in the government, the Foreign Office did 
not even transcribe Hitler's speeches. 103 

Paradoxically, after the fall of France any possibility of a nego- 
tiated peace ended, and Churchill's political position improved 
steadily. He got his first big cheer from the Conservative benches on 
4 July when he announced the action against the French fleet at 
Oran: hitherto, he noted, 'it was from the Labour benches that I 
received the warmest welcome'. The death from cancer of Chamber- 
lain removed his only really dangerous opponent, and on 9 October 
Churchill was elected to succeed him as Conservative leader. But he 
was neither able nor anxious to purge the regime of the elements who 
had destroyed the Raj in India, neglected defence and appeased 
Hitler. He told Cecil King, director of the Daily Mirror: 

It was all very well to plead for a government excluding the elements that 
had led us astray of recent years, but where was one to stop? They were 
everywhere — not only in the political world, but among the fighting service 
chiefs and the civil service chiefs. To clear all these out would be a task 
impossible in the disastrous state in which we found ourselves. In any case if 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 369 

one were dependent on the people who had been right in the last few years, 
what a tiny handful one would have to depend on! No: he was not going to 
run a government of revenge. 104 

Churchill's decision had important and baleful implications for the 
post-war composition and attitudes of the Conservative Party. But at 
the time it was prudent. Britain's foreign, defence and Common- 
wealth policies in the inter-war period had been conducted with 
reckless misjudgement, but Churchill himself had been a principal 
agent of them in the 1920s and though his record from 1930 
onwards was virtually flawless, he rightly judged that an enquiry 
would absolve no one (least of all his new Labour allies) and would 
destroy the new and fragile unity over which he now presided. His 
magnanimity was justified. Despite the many disasters to come, 
Churchill's authority was never seriously challenged and of all the 
wartime governments his was, in combining authority with popular- 
ity, by far the strongest and most secure. It was this, more than any 
other factor, which allowed Britain to maintain the illusion of global 
presence and superpower status which was preserved until the 
Potsdam settlement in 1945. 

Yet it was an illusion. The summer of 1940 brought the end of old 
Europe, sweeping off the stage of history the notion of a world 
managed by a concert of civilized European powers, within a frame 
of agreed international conventions and some system of moral 
absolutes. Britain survived but in a defensive posture, a prisoner of 
its relative impotence. In July, August and September 1940, Britain's 
fighter-squadrons and radar chains decisively defeated an attempt by 
Goering's Luftwaffe to destroy the raf's airfields in south-east 
England, a necessary preliminary to any attempt to invade Britain. 
Thus Hitler forfeited his option of a conclusive campaign in the 
West. But Churchill, for his part, could carry out effective offensive 
operations only against Hitler's weak and embarrassing ally, Musso- 
lini. On 1 1 November the Italian fleet was crippled at Taranto by a 
naval air-strike, and thereafter the British never lost their general 
sea-control of the Mediterranean. Early in 1941 Britain began 
offensive operations against the Italians in Libya and proceeded to 
dismantle the whole of Mussolini's precarious empire in North-East 
Africa. But Britain's main engagement with the Nazis, the naval-air 
struggle to keep open the sea-lanes, was defensive. The one way of 
striking at Germany itself was through the air. Since fighter escorts 
for daylight bombing could not be provided, and since night- 
bombers could not guarantee to deliver their loads within a ten-mile 
radius of their targets, Churchill's only aggressive option was the 
virtually indiscriminate bombing of cities. On 8 July he wrote a 



370 THE END OF OLD EUROPE 

sombre letter to his Minister of Aircraft Production, the newspaper 
proprietor Lord Beaverbrook: 

When I look round to see how we can win the war I see that there is only 
one sure path. We have no Continental army which can defeat the German 
military power. The blockade is broken and Hitler has Asia and probably 
Africa to draw from. Should he be repulsed here or not try invasion, he will 
recoil eastward, and we have nothing to stop him. But there is one thing that 
will bring him back and bring him down, and that is an absolutely 
devastating, exterminating attack by very heavy bombers from this country 
upon the Nazi homeland. 105 

This letter is of great historical significance (it should be compared 
to Churchill's remarks on the corrupting effect of war on p. 13), 
marking the point at which the moral relativism of the totalitarian 
societies invaded the decision-making process of a major legitimate 
power. It is a matter of argument whether the British or the Germans 
first began the systematic bombing of civilian targets. 106 Hitler (like 
Lenin and Stalin) had from the very first practised and defended the 
use of terror to obtain any or all of his objectives. What is clear is 
that, long before the end of 1940, albeit under the verbal pretext of 
attacking 'strategic objectives', British bombers were being used on a 
great and increasing scale to kill and frighten the German civilian 
population in their homes. As the cabinet minuted on 30 October, 
'the civilian population around the target areas must be made to feel 
the weight of the war'. The policy, initiated by Churchill, approved 
in cabinet, endorsed by parliament and, so far as can be judged, 
enthusiastically backed by the bulk of the British people - thus 
fulfilling all the conditions of the process of consent in a democracy 
under law - marked a critical stage in the moral declension of 
humanity in our times. 

The adoption of terror-bombing was also a measure of Britain's 
desperation. The Treasury had warned the cabinet on 5 July 1939 
that, without decisive American support, 'the prospects for a long 
war are becoming exceedingly grim'. Britain could not pursue 
Germany's economic policy of autarchy. As exports declined with 
the switch to war-production (taking 1938 as 100, British exports 
had fallen to 29 per cent by 1943, imports only to 77 per cent), gold 
and dollar reserves disappeared. The Roosevelt administration was 
verbally sympathetic to the Allies but in practice unhelpful. Pitiful 
French calls for help in early June 1940 were coldly dismissed by 
Cordell Hull as 'a series of extraordinary, almost hysterical appeals'. 
For some time Britain fared no better. Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, 
another Roosevelt campaign contributor, did not even provide 
verbal support: 'From the start I told them they could expect zero 



THE END OF OLD EUROPE 371 

help. We had none to offer and I know we could not give it and, in 
the way of any material, we could not spare it.' 107 By the end of 1940 
Britain had run out of convertible currency: she had only $12 million 
in her reserves, the lowest ever, and was obliged to suspend dollar 
purchases. 108 

On 11 March 1941 Congress enacted the Lend-Lease Act which 
permitted the President to 'sell, transfer title to, exchange, lease, lend 
or otherwise dispose of material to any country whose defence was 
deemed by him vital to the defence of America. In theory this enabled 
Roosevelt to send Britain unlimited war-supplies without charge. But 
in practice Britain continued to pay for most of her arms, and in 
return for the agreement she virtually surrendered the remains of her 
export trade to the United States and (under the subsequent Master 
agreement of 23 February 1942) undertook to abandon Imperial 
Preference after the war, which for Cordell Hull had been through- 
out a more important foreign policy aim than the containment of 
totalitarian power. 109 Roosevelt's arms-supply arrangements with the 
Soviet Union were far more benevolent. Lend-Lease was important 
to Churchill simply because he believed it might tempt Hitler into 
conflict with the United States. Indeed, by the beginning of 1941, he 
recognized that the old European system of legitimacy had disap- 
peared and that the only hope of restoring some system of law lay in 
Hitler's own miscalculations. Churchill was not to be disappointed. 



ELEVEN 

The Watershed Year 



Just before dawn on 22 June 1941, German military radio inter- 
cepted an exchange between a Soviet forward unit and its army hq. 
'We are being fired on. What shall we do?' 'You must be insane. Why 
is your message not in code?' 1 Half an hour later, at 3.40 am, the 
Soviet Chief of Staff, G.K. Zhukov, who had received reports of 
German air attacks, telephoned Stalin at his villa at Kuntsevo, seven 
miles out of Moscow, where the dictator lived, worked and ate in a 
single room, sleeping on a sofa. When Zhukov announced that 
Russia was being invaded, there was nothing at the end of the line 
but a long silence and heavy breathing. Stalin finally told the general 
to go to the Kremlin and get his secretary to summon the Politburo. 
They met at 4.30, Stalin sitting pale and silent, an unlit pipe in his 
hands. At the Foreign Ministry, Molotov received the declaration of 
war from the Nazi ambassador and asked piteously, 'Have we really 
deserved this?' By noon, 1,200 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed on 
the ground. According to Nikita Khrushchev's account, Stalin gave 
way to hysteria and despair. Not until 3 July, eleven days later, could 
he bring himself to address the nation. Then he used a tone that was 
new to him: 'Brothers and sisters . . . my friends'. 2 

Everyone had warned Stalin of an impending Nazi attack. 
Churchill had sent him specific information, which had later been 
confirmed by the American embassy. On 15 May the Soviet spy in 
Tokyo, Richard Sorge, had produced details of the German invasion- 
plan and its correct date. Stalin also got circumstantial warnings 
from his own people, such as General Kirponos, commander in the 
Kiev district. Stalin refused to listen. He became furious if such 
advice was pressed. Admiral Kuznetsov later said it was dangerous to 
take the view invasion was likely even in private conversation with 
subordinates. Anyone who said so to Stalin himself, Khrushchev 
recalled, did so 'in fear and trepidation'. 3 

Stalin, who trusted nobody else, appears to have been the last 

372 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 373 

human being on earth to trust Hitler's word. It was a case of wishful 
thinking. The Nazi— Soviet pact was of enormous benefit to Stalin. 
Though he later defended it solely as a temporary, tactical arrange- 
ment ('We secured our country peace for a year and a half and the 
opportunity of preparing our forces') he clearly hoped at the time 
that it would last indefinitely, or alternatively until the Germans and 
the West had mutually exhausted themselves in a prolonged war 
when, in accordance with his 1925 declaration, Russia could move in 
for the pickings. In the meantime the pact was of immense benefit to 
him. By mid- 1940 he had recovered much of the territory Russia had 
lost in 1918-19. He had destroyed the structure of eastern Poland. In 
spring 1940, he had 15,000 Polish officers murdered, a third at 
Katyn near Smolensk, the rest in or near the Soviet concentration 
camps of Starobelsk and Ostachkov. It is possible that these mass 
killings were carried out at the suggestion of the Gestapo. 4 Nazi- 
Soviet security forces worked together very closely up to 22 June 
1941. The nkvd handed over several hundred German nationals, 
chiefly Communists and Jews, to the Gestapo at this time. 5 The 
Nazis, in turn, helped Stalin to hunt down his own enemies. On 20 
August 1940, after several attempts, he finally had Trotsky ice-axed 
to death in Mexico: as the latter had justly remarked, 'Stalin seeks to 
strike, not the ideas of his opponent, but at his skull.' 6 It was an 
approach he shared with Hitler. 

Stalin rejoiced at the Wehrmachfs triumph over France and 
promptly reorganized his own 13,000 tanks on the German pattern. 7 
He took the view that the downfall of the democracies strengthened 
his claim for additional compensation in Eastern and Northern 
Europe, in return for giving Hitler a completely free hand in the West 
and Africa, and possibly in parts of the Middle East too. Hence when 
Molotov went to Berlin, 12-13 November 1940, to bring the 
Nazi-Soviet pact up to date, Stalin instructed him to demand, as 
primary requirements, Finland, Romania and Bulgaria, plus the 
Black Sea straits, to be allocated to the Soviet sphere of influence 
with, as ultimate demands, Hungary, Yugoslavia, western Poland, 
Sweden and a share in the Baltic Sea outlets. 8 Added up, they are not 
so very different to what Stalin demanded, and in most cases got, as 
his share of victory at the end of the Second World War. The 
Molotov 'package' testifies to the continuity of Soviet aims. 

This list of Soviet interests was put forward on the assumption that 
Hitler was pursuing his acquisitive appetites chiefly in Western 
Europe, Africa and Asia, with the Middle East as his next strategic 
objective. That was a reasonable assumption at the time. Churchill's 
most ardent wish was that the Germans should hurl themselves upon 
the Soviet Union. His greatest fear was that Hitler would make the 



374 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

Middle East his target. In the early months of 1941 that seemed the 
most likely outcome. Germany had been drawn into the Medit- 
erranean war by Mussolini's greed and incompetence. He had 
invaded Greece on 28 October 1940 but the Greeks, with assistance 
from Britain, had humiliated and repulsed the invaders. On 9 
December the British had opened an offensive in Libya, taking 
Benghazi on 6 February 1941. 

Three days later, with furious reluctance, Hitler went to the 
assistance of his stricken ally, sending the Afrika Korps to Libya 
under General Rommel. Once committed to the theatre, the Ger- 
mans moved with terrifying speed. On 28 February the Nazis, who 
already had Hungary and Romania as their puppets, moved into 
Bulgaria. Three weeks later they forced Yugoslavia to come to terms, 
and when a coup d'etat in Belgrade removed the pro-Nazi govern- 
ment, issued ultimatums to both Yugoslavia and Greece. Rommel's 
first victory in North Africa took only eleven days, sending the 
British reeling back into Egypt. Yugoslavia collapsed after a week's 
fight on 17 April, Greece surrendering six days later. In eight days' 
desperate fighting in May, the British, already driven out of Greece, 
were shamed in Crete by German paratroopers. By the end of May, 
Cairo and the Suez Canal, the oilfields of northern Iraq, Persia and 
the Gulf, the world's largest refinery at Abadan and, not least, the sea 
and land routes to India, were all beginning to look vulnerable. 

Hitler's southern venture had committed only a tiny fraction of his 
forces. His startling successes had been achieved at insignificant cost. 
Admiral Raeder and the naval high command begged him to launch 
a major thrust at the Middle East, which at that time was well within 
German capabilities. British naval, air and military power was thinly 
stretched over a vast area and vulnerable everywhere. Hitler's ally 
Japan was already contemplating an assault in the Far East. From 
what we now know, it seems almost certain that the Germans could 
have driven through the Suez barrier and on into the Indian Ocean, 
ready to link hands with the Japanese when they surged down into 
South-East Asia and up into the Bay of Bengal. Raeder's view was 
that such a coup would strike the British Empire 'a deadlier blow 
than the taking of London'. Hitler had 150 divisions, plus most of 
the Luftwaffe, arrayed in eastern Europe. Barely a quarter of these 
forces would have been enough to drive through to India. 9 

The notion opens up a disturbing line of speculation. A linkage of 
German and Japanese power in India would have given to the 
Japanese war-plan an element of long-term strategic logic which it 
never possessed. Anglo-Saxon power and influence would then have 
been eliminated from Asia, certainly for years, perhaps for good. 
Even Australia would have been in peril, and perhaps forced to make 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 375 

terms. South Africa, with its great mineral resources, would not then 
have been outside Hitler's range. Britain and America, instead of 
being able to draw resources from five-sixths of the world and its 
oceans, would have been largely confined to an Atlantic sphere of 
operations. Victory, in these circumstances, would have seemed a 
wearily distant if not unattainable object, and the case for coming to 
terms with Hitler must then have seemed, even to Churchill, almost 
irresistible. Here we have one of the great 'ifs' of history. 

But Hitler, without hesitation, rejected the glittering Alexandrine 
opportunity. He clung to his view that the 'real' war, the war he had 
always intended to wage, was against Russia. That was what fate 
and the ineluctable logic of race-destiny had placed him in charge of 
Germany to accomplish. The destruction of Russia was not, indeed, 
to be the end of the story. But without it the story had no meaning, 
and until it had been brought about Germany could not perform its 
preordained world-role. He was impatient to get on. On 31 July 
1940 he told General Haider that Britain's hope of survival lay in 
America and Russia. To destroy Russia was to eliminate both, since 
it would give Japan freedom of action to engage America. He seems 
to have thought that Roosevelt would be ready to intervene in 1942, 
and he wanted Russia removed from the equation before this 
happened. That, as he saw it, was the proper sequence of events. He 
told his generals on 9 January 1941 that once Russia was beaten 
Germany could absorb its resources and so become 'invulnerable'. 
She would then have the power to wage wars against whole 
continents. With Japan tying down America in the Pacific, he would 
launch a three-pronged pincer, through the Caucasus, North Africa 
and the Levant, which would take Germany into Afghanistan and 
then into the British Empire at its heart, in India. Such a strategic 
conception was too risky with Russia on the flank. 10 

Hence within a few days of Petain's armistice, Hitler put his staff 
to work planning the Russian campaign. 11 His original idea was to 
launch it that autumn, and he was only with great difficulty 
persuaded to drop so risky a scheme — the army, the generals 
pleaded, must have the whole of the dry season, from early May 
onwards, to engulf and annihilate Russian military power before the 
snows came. He took the final decision to strike in December 1940, 
after the re-election of Roosevelt, to him an event of peculiar 
ill-omen, and after Molotov had presented Stalin's list of 'interests' 
which Hitler said made the Nazi— Soviet pact untenable 'even as a 
marriage of convenience*. Thereafter he did not waver from his 
resolve to exterminate Bolshevism at the earliest opportunity. The 
descent into the Mediterranean was a regrettable sideshow, made 
necessary by Mussolini's folly. He blamed it for what he later called 



376 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

'a catastrophic delay in the beginning of the war against Russia .... 
We should have been able to attack Russia starting 15 May 1941 and 
. . . end the campaign before the winter.' 12 The assault was launched 
at the earliest possible moment after the southern campaign was 
over. 

Surveying this watershed year of 1941, from which mankind has 
descended into its present predicament, the historian cannot but be 
astounded by the decisive role of individual will. Hitler and Stalin 
played chess with humanity. In all essentials, it was Stalin's personal 
insecurity, his obsessive fear of Germany, which led him to sign the 
fatal pact, and it was his greed and illusion - no one else's - which 
kept it operative, a screen of false security behind which Hitler 
prepared his murderous spring. It was Hitler, no one else, who 
determined on a war of annihilation against Russia, cancelled then 
postponed it, and reinstated it as the centrepiece of his strategy, as, 
how and when he chose. Neither man represented irresistible or even 
potent historical forces. Neither at any stage conducted any process 
of consultation with their peoples, or even spoke for self-appointed 
collegiate bodies. Both were solitary and unadvised in the manner in 
which they took these fateful steps, being guided by personal 
prejudices of the crudest kind and by their own arbitrary visions. 
Their lieutenants obeyed blindly or in apathetic terror, and the vast 
nations over which they ruled seem to have had no choice but to 
stumble in their wake towards mutual destruction. We have here the 
very opposite of historical determinism - the apotheosis of the single 
autocrat. Thus it is, when the moral restraints of religion and 
tradition, hierarchy and precedent, are removed, the power to 
suspend or unleash catastrophic events does not devolve on the 
impersonal benevolence of the masses but falls into the hands of men 
who are isolated by the very totality of their evil natures. 

Hitler's decision to invade Russia was the most fateful of his 
career. It destroyed his regime, and him with it. It was also one of the 
most important in modern history, for it brought Soviet totalitarian- 
ism right into the heart of Europe. But it was a gamble that might 
have succeeded. It is vital to grasp why it did not do so. Hitler 
claimed early in 1945 that the five or six weeks' delay in launching 
the invasion accounted for his failure to take Moscow and destroy 
Stalin's regime before the winter came. But at the time he did not feel 
constrained by so tight a timetable. The truth is, he grievously 
underestimated Russian military capacity. There is an old and wise 
diplomatic saying: 'Russia is never as strong as she looks. Russia is 
never as weak as she looks.' Hitler ignored it. He was not alone in his 
contempt for the Red Army. As noted, the British and French general 
staffs rated its performance below Poland's. This view appeared to 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 377 

be confirmed by the Finnish campaign. It was generally believed that 
the purge of 1937-8 had destroyed its morale. Admiral Canaris, head 
of the German intelligence service, the Abwehr, believed Heydrich's 
claim that his organization had deliberately framed Tukhachevsky 
and all the other able Soviet officers. 13 It was partly on the basis of 
Canaris's misleading estimates that Hitler thought the Russian 
campaign would be an easier proposition than the conquest of France. 
The Red Army, he told the Bulgarian Ambassador, Dragonoff, was 
'no more than a joke'. It would be 'cut to pieces' and 'throttled in 
sections'. In December 1940 he estimated that 'in three weeks we shall 
be in St Petersburg'. 14 Though the Japanese were his allies, he made no 
attempt to possess himself of their far more sober estimates of Russian 
fighting capacity, especially in tank-warfare, based on their bitter 
experience in May-June 1939. German staff- work, which had been 
very thorough as well as brilliant in preparation for the French 
campaign, took the Soviet campaign lightly — there was a feeling of 
euphoria that Germany had at last broken out of the iron 'strategic 
triangle' formed by France-Poland- Czechoslovakia, and that it could 
now roam freely. General Marcks, the chief planner, thought it would 
require nine weeks at best, seventeen at worst, to destroy Soviet 
military resistance. The argument that Russia would withdraw into 
her vastness, as in 1 8 1 2, was rejected on the grounds that Stalin would 
have to defend the industrial regions west of the Dnieper. It would 
prove beyond her organizational capacity to bring into play her 9-12 
million reserves: Marcks thought that the Russians would at no point 
possess even numerical superiority. 15 

This was exactly the advice Hitler wanted, since it reinforced his 
belief he could wage war on the cheap. The Blitzkrieg was as much an 
economic as a military concept, based on Hitler's view that Germany 
could not sustain prolonged war until she possessed herself of Russia's 
riches. 'Operation Barbarossa', as it was called, was to be the last 
Blitzkrieg. It was cut to the bone. Even in 1941 Hitler was not 
prepared to put the German economy on a full war-footing. Since the 
occupation of Prague he had become suspicious of the will of the 
German people to wage total war, and he was reluctant therefore to 
drive women into the war-factories or to cut civilian production and 
consumption more than was absolutely necessary to attain his military 
objectives. As a result, Barbarossa was seriously underpowered in 
terms of the magnitude of its objectives: there were elements of 153 
divisions involved, but only 3,580 tanks, 7,184 guns and 2,740 
aircraft. For purposes of comparison, the Soviet offensive in January 
1945 on the Berlin front alone employed 6,250 tanks, 7,560 aircraft 
and no less than 41,600 guns. 16 Much of the German transport was 
horse-powered and lack of mobility proved an increasing handicap as 



378 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

the campaign proceeded. The Germans found themselves fighting a 
Forties war with late-Thirties weaponry, and not enough even of 
that. 

The defects were most pronounced in the air, where Goering's 
Luftwaffe, which had already revealed grave weaknesses during the 
Battle of Britain campaign, failed either to provide effective ground 
support over the whole front or to bomb Stalin's war-factories. 
Goering proved an increasingly idle and incompetent leader; both his 
chief technical officer and his staff chief were eventually driven to 
suicide by the exposure of their bunglings. 17 But the responsibility 
was also Hitler's, for failing to provide aircraft in sufficient quantity. 
Equally to blame was Nazi procurement policy, which was statist 
and bureaucratic and totally unable to produce a satisfactory heavy 
bomber. It is a significant fact that all the best Second World War 
aircraft, such as the British Mosquito and the American Mustang 
(P. 51), were the products of private initiative rather than govern- 
ment and air staff. 18 Hitler allowed the Luftwaffe to become the 
most party-dominated and totalitarian of his armed services, and 
dearly did he pay for it. 

He also contributed his own quota of mistakes, which grew 
progressively as the campaign proceeded. Barbarossa was over- 
optimistically conceived, and its crushing early successes led Hitler to 
compound his error by assuming the campaign was nearly over. 
Russia had overwhelming weapons superiority at the start of the 
war: seven to one in tanks, four or five to one in aircraft. 19 But 
Stalin's refusal to heed warnings of the attack, his insistence that 
Soviet units be placed in strength right up against the frontier, and 
hold their ground at any cost, led to staggering losses. Before the end 
of the year the Germans had taken 3.5 million prisoners and killed or 
wounded another million. 20 Most of these big German successes 
came in the first month of the campaign. By 14 July Hitler was 
convinced that the war was won, and gave orders for war production 
to be switched from army to naval and air force orders. 21 Tank 
production actually slowed to one-third of the 600 tanks a month 
originally scheduled. He hoped to start pulling back some infantry 
divisions at the end of August, with armour following in September, 
leaving only fifty to sixty divisions to hold a line Astrakhan- 
Archangel, and to conduct punitive raids to and over the Urals. Then 
he would begin his descent on the Middle East and on into India. 

This appreciation proved absurdly sanguine. In the second half of 
July Hitler decided, for economic reasons, to plunge into the 
Ukraine. The drive to Moscow was put off for two months. It did not 
actually begin until 2 October. The same day General Guderian, 
Hitler's best tank commander, noticed the first snowflakes. The 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 379 

heavy rains began four days later. The big frosts followed early, in 
the second week of November. The offensive slowed down. German 
tanks got to within twenty miles of the centre of Moscow in the 
north, and within thirty miles on the west. But the temperature 
dropped progressively, first to 20, then 60 below zero. The report 
Quartermaster-General Wagner produced on 27 November was 
summed up by General Haider in one sentence: 'We have reached the 
end of our human and material forces.' 22 Then, on 6 December 
without warning and in considerable strength, the Russians 
counter-attacked. 

At this stage it was clear Barbarossa was a failure. A completely 
new strategy was needed. Hitler's response was to sack Brauchitsch 
and take over operational command himself. He immediately issued 
orders forbidding tactical withdrawals. This quickly became a settled 
policy, inhibiting any kind of flexibility in manoeuvre. The defensive 
battles in which the Wehrmacht then engaged, through the worst of 
the winter, cost it over a million casualties, 31.4 per cent of the 
strength of the eastern army. It never recovered its elan. The era of 
the Blitzkrieg was over, two years after it began. The offensive was 
resumed in the spring. On 21 August the Germans reached the 
summits of the Caucasus, though they never got to the oilfields to 
the south. Two days later they penetrated Stalingrad on the Volga. 
But by then Germany's offensive capacity, in the widest sense, was 
exhausted. The future consisted entirely of bitter defensive warfare. 

The switch from attack to defence was marked by Hitler's 
increasing interference in the details of the campaign. He now 
regularly gave direct orders to army groups, to the staffs of particular 
sectors, even to divisional and regimental commanders. There were 
furious rows with senior officers, many of whom were dismissed; 
one was shot. In the winter of 1941, wrote Goebbels, Hitler 'very 
much aged'. 'His underestimation of the enemy potentialities,' noted 
General Haider, 'always his shortcoming, is now gradually assuming 
grotesque forms.' 23 He sacked the commander of one army group, 
taking over detailed control himself. He refused to speak to Jodl. 
Eventually he quarrelled with all his commanders-in-chief, all his 
chiefs-of-staff, eleven out of eighteen of his field-marshals, twenty- 
one out of forty full generals, and nearly all the commanders of all 
three sectors of the Russian front. 24 

But Hitler's personal mismanagement of the campaign was not the 
only, or indeed the chief, reason for his failure in Russia. The cause 
went deeper, to the very conception of the war, to the roots indeed of 
Hitler's whole political purpose. In attacking Russia, he was trying to 
do two quite different things simultaneously, to achieve a military 
victory and to set in motion an enormous enterprise of social 



380 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

engineering. The two aims were mutally incompatible. It is not of 
course unusual for a military campaign to have an accompanying 
political purpose, to be a 'war of liberation'. That indeed would have 
made sense in 1941. Stalin ruled by terror alone. His regime was 
universally unpopular at home, and hated and feared throughout 
Europe. There were many in Germany, and still more outside 
Germany, who wished to view a war against Bolshevism as a crusade, 
waged on behalf of dozens of oppressed European peoples, from the 
Arctic to the Black Sea, who had been plundered and oppressed by 
half-Asiatic Russians. Taking part in Barbarossa were more than 
twelve divisions from Romania, two from Finland, three from 
Hungary, three from Slovakia; to which were later added three Italian 
and one Spanish division. 25 Many of these soldiers were volunteers. In 
addition, there were many Russians themselves, at home and abroad, 
who saw the occasion of Hitler's assault as an opportunity to seize 
their own freedom, and destroy the regime which had brought more 
than twenty years of misery and cost over 15 million lives. 

Hitler might have put himself at the head of such a crusade. But to 
have done so would have been false to himself. Hitler was not in the 
business of liberation. Like Stalin, he was in the business of slavery. 
The accident of race made them opponents, and pitted their regimes 
against each other. But in essential respects they were fellow- 
ideologues, pursuing Utopias based on a fundamental division of 
mankind into elites and helots. Hitler's aims in Russia were in no sense 
idealistic. They were narrowly and ruthlessly acquisitive. He tried to 
explain them, on 30 March 1941, to a meeting of 250 senior German 
officers of all three services. 26 The war against France, he said, had 
been a 'conventional' war. So was the whole of the war against the 
West. It was military in character. The rules of war applied. But in the 
East things were to be quite different. Against Russia Germany would 
wage total war. 'We have a war of annihilation on our hands.' The 
purpose of the campaign was to be extermination, expansion and 
settlement on a colonial basis. The generals do not seem to have 
grasped the enormity of what Hitler proposed. 27 That did not surprise 
him. He was prepared for it. That was why he had embarked on a vast 
expansion of the s s, which was now to fulfil the real purpose for which 
he had created it. He formed bodies of 'specialists', 3,000 in each, 
which were termed Einsatzgruppen, and which moved in the wake of 
the regular army units, to begin the most audacious exercise in social 
engineering ever conceived. 

Thus poor, tortured, misruled Eastern Europe, which had already 
for an entire generation borne the brunt of Lenin's ideological 
adventurism, and Stalin's brutally magnified version of its worst 
aspects, was to be the theatre of yet another totalitarian experiment. 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 381 

The military object of Barbarossa was incidental. The real aim was to 
exterminate Bolshevism and its 'Jewish catchment area', to acquire 
territory for colonial settlement, to enslave the Slav masses in four 
'Reich Commissariats' (termed Baltic, Ukraine, 'Muscovy' and 
Caucasus), and to create an autarchic economic system which would 
be proof against any blockade the Anglo-Saxon powers might 
impose. 28 

Hitler's ultimate aim was to create a German Volk of 250 million. 
He said that he proposed settling 100 million Germans on the great 
plains to the west of the Urals. In 1941 he envisaged that over the 
next decade the first 20 million would move east. Though he saw the 
colonization process clearly, he was vague about where the settlers 
were to come from. Those eligible and willing to settle, the Volks- 
deutsche from south-east Europe, numbered only 5 million, perhaps 
8 million at most. His colleague Alfred Rosenberg considered the 
idea of 'drafting' Scandinavian, Dutch and English settlers, being 
racially approximate to Germans, when the war was won. Some 
aspects of this great population transfer, to be the most formidable 
and decisive in history, were determined in meticulous detail. There 
was to be polygamy and a free choice of women for servicemen with 
decorations. The Crimea, after being 'cleansed' of Slavs and Jews, 
was to be turned into a gigantic German spa under its old Greek 
name of Tauria, populated by a mass transfer of peasants from the 
South Tyrol. 29 Over vast areas of the Ukraine and south European 
Russia, a new Volk civilization was planned. As Hitler described it: 

The area must lose the character of the Asiatic steppe. It must be 
Europeanized! . . . The 'Reich peasant' is to live in outstandingly beautiful 
settlements. The German agencies and authorities are to have wonderful 
buildings, the governors palaces. Around each city, a ring of lovely villages 
will be placed to within 30 or 40 kilometers .... That is why we are now 
building the large traffic arteries on the southern tip of the Crimea, out to 
the Caucasus mountains. Around these traffic strands, the German cities 
will be placed, like pearls on a string, and around the cities the German 
settlements will lie. For we will not open up Lebensraum for ourselves by 
entering the old, godforsaken Russian holes! The German settlements must 
be on an altogether higher level! 30 

As Hitler's vision expanded, in the heady days of 1941, it came to 
embrace all Europe. Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, the 
whole of France north of the Somme were to be incorporated in a 
Greater Germany, the names of the cities being changed - Nancy 
would become Nanzig, Besanqon Bisanz. Trondheim would become 
a major German city and naval base of 250,000 inhabitants. The 
Alps would be the boundary between 'the German Empire of the 



382 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

North', with a new 'Germania' as its capital, and 'the Roman Empire 
of the South'. The Pope would be hanged in full pontificals in St 
Peter's Square. Strasbourg Cathedral would be turned into a giant 
'Monument to the Unknown Soldier'. New crops, such as perennial 
rye, would be invented. He would forbid smoking, make vegetarian- 
ism compulsory, 'revive the Cimbrian art of knitting', appoint a 
'Special Commissioner for the Care of Dogs' and an 'Assistant 
Secretary for Defence Against Gnats and Insects'. 31 

Most of these 'constructive' proposals had to wait. But from 
22 June 1941 onwards, the preliminary work of destruction could 
begin. The 'Final Solution' for the Jews was organically linked to the 
Russian settlement programme. We shall examine that in the next 
chapter. In military terms, what was important in 1941 was the 
decision, embodied in orders issued by Heydrich in May and 
confirmed by a 'Fuhrer's decree' exempting from punishment mem- 
bers of the forces who carried them out, to categorize Communist 
officials along with Jews, gypsies and 'Asiatic inferiors' as targets for 
immediate extermination. The 'Commissar Order' of 6 June 1941 
insisted that Soviet functionaries 'are in principle to be disposed of by 
gunshot immediately'. 'Guidelines' issued just prior to Barbarossa 
called for 'ruthless and energetic measures against Bolshevistic 
agitators, guerrillas, saboteurs, Jews and total elimination of all 
active and passive resistance'. 32 In practice, the Einsatzgruppen 
rounded up all educated men and social leaders in areas occupied by 
the Germans, and began to shoot them in large numbers. About 
500,000 European Russian Jews were shot in 1941, and perhaps as 
many Russians. Otto Ohlendorf, one of the gruppen commanders, 
admitted at Nuremberg that his unit alone murdered 90,000 men, 
women and children in 1941. By July, the Russian nation as a whole 
began to grasp the horrifying fact that they faced what appeared to 
be a war of extermination. 

The result was the salvation of Stalin and his regime. By the time 
Stalin finally brought himself to speak to the Russian people on 
3 July, it was clear that he could turn the struggle into the Great 
Patriotic War. He compared Hitler with Napoleon. He called for 
guerrilla warfare and a vast 'scorched earth' policy. This appeal met 
with some response. For the first time since 1918, the practice of 
religion was generally permitted. This was perhaps the biggest single 
factor in the recovery of a national identity. Some prisoners from the 
concentration camps were allowed out to form front-line 'punish- 
ment battalions'. In Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak later gave a 
moving description of how the inmates welcomed the war. 33 Stalin 
even indulged in a little participatory 'democracy', leaving his 
vaulted Kremlin study, where he sat with Lenin's death-mask at his 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 383 

elbow, and addressing the Soviet in the safety of the Moscow 
underground on 6 November. Characteristically he told them a lie, 
that Russia had 'several times fewer tanks than the Germans': in fact 
the Red Army had started with 13,000. 34 The next day he spoke in 
Red Square, invoking the saints and warriors of imperial Russia: 'Let 
the manly images of our great ancestors — Alexander Nevsky, 
Dimitry Donskoy, Kuzma Minin, Dimitry Pozharsky, Alexander 
Suvorov and Mikhail Kutozov - inspire you in this war!' 35 

All the same, the regime came close to destruction in November 
1941. Most government departments were evacuated to Kuibyshev 
on the Volga. There was a general burning of archives which could 
not be carried away. Once the news spread there were riots. Mobs 
broke into the food shops. Party officials tore up their cards and 
prepared to go into hiding. Only the knowledge that Stalin himself 
was staying in Moscow prevented dissolution. 36 

Stalin stayed for exactly the same reason Hitler concentrated all 
power in his hands: he did not trust the generals, and he wished to 
maintain personal control of the terror. It was the only way he knew 
how to rule. Though he played the patriotic card for all it was worth, 
he never relaxed the dead weight of fear he imposed on everyone. 
The army was held together by bonds of dread as well as loyalty. His 
right-hand man was his former secretary, Colonel-General 
L.Z.Mekhlis, now head of the Army Political Directorate, who had 
carried out thousands of executions during the purges. Stalin had 
sent him to Finland during the debacle there in the winter of 
1939-40, where he had dismissed, arrested and shot failed comman- 
ders. Under Leninist military law it was a crime to be taken prisoner. 
Mekhlis had arranged a grisly scene in March 1940, when thousands 
of returning pows were greeted in Leningrad with a banner, The 
Fatherland Greets its Heroes', and marched straight through to 
railway sidings where they were hustled into cattle-trucks for the 
camps. 37 Under Stalin's personal orders, Mekhlis and his assistant 
Army Commissar E.A.Shchadenko continued to arrest, imprison 
and shoot selected officers throughout 1940 and 1941. The Army 
Group Commander in the West, D.G.Pavlov, was murdered for 
'treachery'. There was another big batch of shootings in October 
1941 and again in July 1942, the latter to forestall a coup. 3S Lesser fry 
were dealt with by a new and terrifying Field Security Force, Smersh, 
which co-operated with police blocking-battalions behind the front 
to prevent any retreat. Relatives of those known to have become 
pows were made liable to long terms of imprisonment. 39 With the 
prospect of death on all sides of him, the ordinary Russian soldier 
had no real alternative but to fight to the last. 

Anyone whose loyalty was suspect in the slightest, even in theory, 



384 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

was treated like an animal. Political prisoners in areas open to the 
German advance were massacred. 40 Stalin engaged in defensive 
social engineering on a scale only marginally less ambitious than 
Hitler's wild plans. The Germans of the Volga German Autonomous 
Republic, numbering 1,650,000, were hustled into Siberia. They 
were followed by other entire nations: the Chechens, the Ingushes, 
the Karachays, the Balkars of the Northern Caucasus, the Kalmyks 
from the north-west Caspian, the Crimean Tatars, the Meskhetians 
of the Soviet-Turkish border. Some of these genocidal-type crimes 
were enacted long after the danger from the Germans was past. The 
Chechens were moved as late as 23 February 1944, being carried off 
in American trucks supplied under Lend-Lease. 41 

Stalin's ruthlessness, combined with Hitler's folly, ensured Soviet 
survival. Yet as generalissimos, the two men were strangely alike, 
in their total indifference to casualties, however calamitous, in 
their refusal to visit the fronts (in both cases for security reasons) and 
in their personal direction of the campaigns. Stalin, like Hitler, some- 
times deployed regiments himself. On 30 November 1941 Stalin 
received a report that the town of Dedovo-Dedovsk, twenty miles 
west of Moscow, had fallen. He ordered Zhukov, plus two army 
commanders, Rokossovsky and Govorov, to assemble a rifle com- 
pany and two tanks, and retake it personally. 42 But Stalin added an 
extra dimension of secrecy of which even the suspicious Hitler was 
incapable. From the point when he recovered his nerve, early in July 
1941, Stalin began quietly to accumulate secret military reserves of 
his own, the Stavka, which he commanded personally and whose 
very existence was concealed from the army commanders, no matter 
how senior. 43 The Leninist system of political control of the army, 
with its duplicated chains of command, made this possible. At any 
point in the war, therefore, Stalin had his own private army, which 
he directed personally, either to launch unexpected offensives, and 
thus retain control of the battle, or to overawe his generals, as Hitler 
did with the ss. He remembered Lenin's dictum: The unstable rear 
of Denikin, Kolchak, Wrangel and the imperialist agents prede- 
termined their defeat.' Stalin 'stabilized' his rear with his Stavka, 
party and nkvd troops, and with an organization termed 
Tsentral'nyi Shtab controlling the guerrillas, which he himself com- 
manded. 44 

In this personal struggle for survival, Stalin was greatly helped at 
every stage by the Western democracies. It can be said that, if Hitler's 
policy saved the regime, Churchill and Roosevelt saved Stalin 
himself. When Hitler attacked, there were some cool heads who 
argued that Western aid to Russia should be on a basis of simple 
material self-interest, highly selective and without any moral or 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 385 

political commitment. It should, George Kennan minuted to the State 
Department, 'preclude anything which might identify us politically 
or ideologically with the Russian war effort'. Russia should be 
treated as a 'fellow-traveller' rather than 'a political associate'. 45 
This was sensible. On a moral plane Stalin was no better than Hitler; 
worse in some ways. It was practical advice too, because it formed a 
framework within which bargains could be struck, and it raised no 
assumptions that Russia would be consulted about the disposition of 
the post-war world. 

Britain had no obligations whatever to Russia. Up to the very 
moment of the German invasion, the Soviet regime had done its best 
to assist Hitler's war-effort, fulfilling its raw-materials delivery 
contracts scrupulously. As late as early June 1941 the raf was still 
contemplating bombing the Baku oilfields, which were supplying the 
Wehrmacht. 46 But at this point Churchill was close to despair about 
the long-term prospects for the war, and the likelihood of a 
successful German thrust right into the Middle East. When Hitler 
turned on Russia instead, his relief was so intense that he reacted in 
an irrational manner. Here was the opportunity to combine Anglo- 
Saxon industrial power with Russian manpower, to bleed the 
German army to death! It was exactly the same impulse which had 
prompted his Gallipoli scheme in the Great War, whose success, he 
still believed, would have altered the whole course of world history. 
The evening of the German invasion Churchill, without consulting 
his War cabinet, committed Britain to a full working partnership 
with Russia. Eden was even more enthusiastic, under the influence of 
his secretary, Oliver Harvey, a pro-Soviet Cambridge intellectual, 
who regarded the Gulag Archipelago as the necessary price for 
Russian modernization. 47 To launch the new alliance Churchill 
chose as his emissary his friend Lord Beaverbrook. He brushed aside 
pleas from the specialists of the British embassy, who shared 
Kennan's view, and who wanted hard bargaining, 'trading supplies 
against detailed information about Russian production and re- 
sources'. Beaverbrook laid down the policy as 'to make clear beyond 
a doubt the British and American intention to satisfy Russian needs 
to the utmost in their power, whether the Russians gave anything or 
not. It was to be a Christmas Tree party.' 48 

The aid was given unconditionally, being passed directly to Stalin's 
personal autocracy. No questions were ever asked about what he did 
with it. The Soviet people were never officially informed of its 
existence. Thus Britain and America supplied the means by which 
Stalin bolstered his personal power, and he repaid them in the ready 
coin of his soldiers' lives. Churchill and Roosevelt were content with 
this arrangement. Among Stalin's gifts was an enduring capacity to 



386 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

pose as a moderate. It served him well throughout the period 1921 to 
1929, when step by step he fought his way to solitary eminence. He 
was always the moderate then, dealing with 'extremists' of both 
wings in turn. He posed as the moderate now. Churchill and Eden, 
Roosevelt and his envoy Averell Harriman, all accepted the view that 
Stalin was a statesman of the centre who, with considerable diffi- 
culty, kept his violent and fanatical followers under restraint. Stalin 
fed this fantasy with occasional dark hints. (Curiously enough Hitler, 
who had used the same tactics in the past, was taken in also; so was 
Mussolini.) 49 Thus Stalin and his autocracy were the sole beneficia- 
ries of democratic aid. 

How critical Western assistance was to Soviet survival cannot be 
determined until scholars get access to the Soviet archives, and must 
await the demise of the system. Under carefully controlled condi- 
tions, Stalin was fed in spectacular detail knowledge of German 
dispositions and plans on the Eastern Front acquired through the 
Enigma/Ultra intelligence system. 50 This had a major direct bearing 
on the campaign from 1942 onwards and helped to make possible 
Stalin's spectacular victories in 1943-4, for which he has been given 
credit. Of more decisive importance in the first instance, however, 
were the military supplies rushed to Archangel and Murmansk in the 
first autumn of the invasion, which made possible Stalin's 6 Decem- 
ber offensive and tipped the balance during that first desperate 
winter. They included 200 modern fighter aircraft, intended origin- 
ally for Britain's highly vulnerable base in Singapore, which had 
virtually no modern fighters at all. The diversion of these aircraft 
(plus tanks) to Russia sealed the fate of Singapore. 51 Thus, by one of 
the great ironies of history, Churchill, the last major British imperial- 
ist, may have sacrificed a liberal empire in order to preserve a 
totalitarian one. 

The opening of the Soviet counter-offensive on 6 December 1941 
marked the point at which Hitler lost control of the war. He had 
dominated world politics since he marched into the Rhineland in 
1936, always keeping the initiative in his solitary hands. Now, 
suddenly, he was the servant of events rather than their master. 
Perhaps in unconscious recognition of this sombre fact - or rather to 
conceal it - he took five days later a decision of such insensate folly 
as to stagger belief. 

One of the chief mysteries of Hitler's entire career is his failure to 
co-ordinate his war plans with the Japanese. They had been allies 
since the Anti-Comintern Pact of 25 November 1936. As 'have not' 
powers with expansionary aims they had a great deal in common, 
including a short-term military capacity of tremendous vehemence 
and almost insuperable long-term logistical weaknesses (neither had 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 387 

oil or access to it). For either to succeed they had to act together. Yet 
neither did so. Hitler gave Japan only two days' warning of his pact 
with Stalin in August 1939, though it made complete nonsense of the 
Anti-Comintern pledges. 52 When he decided to reverse the policy in 
1941, he made the Japanese look even bigger fools. He knew that the 
Japanese ruling elite was divided between a 'Northern' strategy of 
attacking Russia, and a 'Southern' strategy against the old empires. 
Japan signed the Axis Pact on 27 September 1940. If Hitler drove 
first through the Middle East against Britain in 1941, then a Japanese 
'Southern' strategy was to his advantage. If, as he eventually decided, 
he went first against Russia, then his interest was to persuade Japan 
to opt for a Northern attack. Early in April 1941 the Japanese 
Foreign Minister, Matsuoka Yosuke, who was strongly pro-Axis, 
was in Berlin. Hitler told him nothing about his plan to attack 
Russia. Matsuoka went from Berlin to Moscow and on 13 April 
signed a neutrality pact with Stalin, so clearing the way for a 
'Southern' strategy. When Hitler invaded Russia eight weeks later, 
Matsuoka naively confessed to his colleagues: 'I concluded a neutral- 
ity pact because I thought that Germany and Russia would not go to 
war. If I had known they would go to war ... I would not have 
concluded the Neutrality Pact.' 53 Thereafter Japan moved towards a 
'Southern' strategy, and by October Stalin's spy Sorge told him it was 
safe to move some of his twenty Eastern divisions to the Western 
front, where they arrived in time for the December counter-offensive. 

Despite this, Hitler cleared the way for Japan's attack on America 
by allowing Ribbentrop, on 21 November, to give Japan an assur- 
ance that Germany would join her in war on the USA even though 
not required to do so under the Axis Pact. 54 From Hitler's viewpoint 
the Japanese surprise attack on Britain and America, at 2 am on 8 
December, could not have been more ill-timed, for it came just two 
days after the sinister news of Stalin's offensive. Nevertheless, on 11 
December, Hitler declared war on America. Ribbentrop summoned 
the US Charge, Leland Morris, kept him standing, harangued him 
furiously and finally screamed: 'Ihr Prasident hat diesen Krieg 
gewollt; jetzt hat er ihn! y (Your President wanted this war. Now he 
has it), and then stamped off. 55 

In fact it is most unlikely Roosevelt could have persuaded Con- 
gress to make war on Germany had not Hitler taken the initiative, 
still less to give the defeat of the Nazis priority. On 22 June 1941 
Hitler took a tremendous gamble which did not come off, and 
thereafter the best outcome of the war he could hope for was a 
stalemate. But on 11 December 1941 he took a decision which made 
his defeat certain. The only short-term advantage he gained was the 
chance to launch a U-boat offensive in the Atlantic before America 



388 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

was organized to meet it. He said to Ribbentrop: The chief reason 
[for war] is that the US is already shooting at our ships.' 56 But 
Hitler's failure to create the 100-strong fleet of ocean-going subma- 
rines his admirals had demanded in 1939 blunted this preemptive 
blow; only sixty were available in December 1941, the rest were 
not ready until the end of 1942, by which time Allied counter- 
measures had made a German Atlantic victory impossible. In every 
other respect, short- and still more long-term, the war with America 
was to Germany's overwhelming disadvantage. Hitler's gesture was 
no more than a piece of bravado. He told the Reichstag: 'We will 
always strike first. We will always deal the first blow.' It was an 
attempt to persuade the Germans, the world, perhaps even himself, 
that he, Europe's leading statesman, was still in a position to dictate 
global events. It did the opposite, signalling the end of European 
hegemony and introducing the age of the extra-European super- 
powers. 

Japan's entry into the conflict was equally short-sighted. But the 
background to it was more complicated. It contained elements of 
what might be termed rational hysteria. As the American Ambassa- 
dor Joseph Grew put it, 'a national psychology of desperation 
develops into a determination to risk all'. 57 The Japanese were 
uneasily aware of their short staying-power in war, illustrated by 
the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5, which began with brilliant 
Japanese victories but developed into a war of attrition from which 
Japan was, in effect, rescued by the intervention of the Great 
Powers. The war with China, begun in 1937, had proved a similar 
illusion. By 1940 Japan had occupied all China's great cities, seized 
the modern sector of her economy, and controlled all her main rail, 
road and river communications: yet the war had stalemated, China 
was unconquerable, all Japan's economic dilemmas remained - 
had, indeed, been aggravated by the effort of the China struggle. It 
was not a case of Japan swallowing China, as the army hotheads 
had predicted, but of China, in its gigantic, wallowing helplessness, 
swallowing Japan. The almost undefended French, British and 
Dutch empires of South-East Asia and the Indies, the American 
Philippines, the vastness of the Pacific, offered similar temptations 
and dangers. The point did not escape even the limited intelligence 
of the Tenno Hirohito. When on 5 September 1941, the two Chiefs 
of Staff, General Sugiyama and Admiral Nagano, told him the 
'Southern strategy' could be accomplished in a ninety-day war of 
lightning conquest, he replied that Sugiyama had said the same thing 
about the China war, now three years old and unfinished. Sugiy- 
ama: 'China is a continent. The "south" consists mostly of islands.' 
The Tenno: 'If the interior of China is huge, is not the Pacific 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 389 

Ocean even bigger? How can you be sure that war will end in three 
months?' 58 

There was no answer to this question. As Admiral Nagano put it: 
'If I am told to fight regardless of consequences, I shall run wild 
considerably for six months or a year. But I have utterly no 
confidence in the second and third years.' 59 The ablest of the naval 
commanders, Admiral Yamamoto, said that Japan could not hope to 
win a war against Britain and America, however spectacular her 
initial victories. Colonel Iwakuro, a logistics expert, told one of the 
regular 'liaison conferences', where the top military and government 
bosses met, that the differentials in American and Japanese produc- 
tion were as follows: steel twenty to one, oil one hundred to one, 
coal ten to one, aircraft five to one, shipping two to one, labour- 
force five to one, overall ten to one. Yet to put forward such views, 
even in the privileged secrecy of the liaison conference, was to risk 
assassination or removal. It was contrary to the relativistic code of 
'honour', now the dominant impulse in Japanese public life. After 
Yamamoto expressed his opinion, he had to be given a sea-command 
to get him out of range of the killers. The Colonel was promptly sent 
to Cambodia. Ambassador Grew reported (22 October 1940) that 
the Emperor was told plainly he would be murdered if he opposed 
the war policy. 60 

The result was to precipitate into power the reckless, indeed the 
emotionally unstable, such as Matsuoka. This man had been head of 
the Manchurian railways, prominent in the army-business network 
which provoked and profited from the China war. He actually 
embodied what was later to become the largely mythic concept of the 
'military-industrial complex'. It was he who gave the 'Southern 
strategy' some kind of political and economic rationale, inventing the 
phrase 'the Great East-Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere'. 61 He epitomized 
the schizophrenia of Japan, the jostling incompatibility of new and 
old and east and west, combining Catholicism and Shinto, sophis- 
ticated business techniques and utter barbarism. He greatly resented 
it when, after signing the Russian agreement, Stalin (characteristi- 
cally) waltzed him round the room saying, 'We are all Asiatics here - 
all Asiatics!' Hitler told Mussolini suspiciously that Matsuoka, 
though Christian, 'sacrificed to pagan gods' and combined 'the 
hypocrisy of an American Bible missionary with the craftiness of a 
Japanese Asiatic'. Roosevelt, who, thanks to 'Operation Magic' 
which cracked the Japanese codes, read some of Matsuoka's mes- 
sages, thought them 'the product of a mind which is deeply dis- 
turbed'. This view was shared by Matsuoka's colleagues. After one 
liaison conference the Navy Minister asked, 'The Foreign Minister is 
insane, isn't he?' 62 



390 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

In Japan's governing atmosphere of heroic anarchy, however, 
madness went almost unnoticed. Once embarked on the China 
campaign, Japan had become morally isolated from the rest of the 
world. Hitler's destruction of France tipped the balance in favour of 
temptation. As the British Ambassador, Sir Robert Craigie, put it, 
'How . . . could Japan expect Hitler to divide the spoils with them 
unless she had been actively associated in the spoliation?' 63 This was 
the background to the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy which 
Matsuoka signed in September 1940. The way in which Japanese 
policy was determined inhibited sensible discussion. Democracy had 
been killed in 1938. The parties were abolished in 1940, being 
replaced by the Imperial Rule Assistance Association. 64 The cabinet 
ceased to function on important issues. Decisions were supposed to 
be taken at the liaison conferences, attended by the Tenno, the 
premier and Foreign Secretary, the two Service ministers (sometimes 
chiefs of staff also) and two court ministers. But the services would 
not confide in the politicians — each ran its own diplomatic network 
through service attaches — or in each other. 

To jo, the War Minister from 1940, concealed his plans from the 
navy, which he regarded as unreliable and cowardly. He sought to 
get his way and keep himself informed by doubling-up offices. Thus 
he became Home Minister, Foreign Minister in July 1941 (when 
Matsuoka was ousted over the Nazi invasion of Russia) and finally 
Prime Minister on 18 October. Even so, he knew nothing of the 
navy's Pearl Harbor plan until eight days before it was put into 
execution. It was, in fact, impossible for any one man to assert 
effective central control without adopting a posture of arrogance 
which invited instant assassination. It is significant that Tojo, the 
'Southern strategy' fire-eater - he was known as 'Razor' - became 
much less aggressive once he took over as prime minister, and 
denounced the Pearl Harbor plan (when he learned of it) as 'entirely 
impermissible, being in contravention of accepted procedure . . . 
hurtful to the national honour and prestige'. 65 Yet the war, and the 
plan, went ahead just the same. 

The liaison conferences inhibited honesty. The Emperor-God sat 
between two incense burners, on a dais in front of a gold screen, with 
the mere mortals at two brocade-covered tables at right angles to 
him. 66 A special archaic court language had to be used. The Tenno 
could signify approval by banging his gold seal. Normally he did not 
speak; or if he did speak it was against protocol to take down his 
words, so the record is missing. Once (6 September 1941) he issued a 
warning by reading out an allusive poem written by his grandfather. 
He was not allowed to ask questions or express opinions: that was 
done for him by the President of the Council, on the basis of what he 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 391 

thought the Tenno intended to say. 67 Often the real decisions, if any, 
were taken in whispered bilateral deals, or everyone simply went 
ahead and acted as they thought best. 

The conference of 19 September 1940, when the alliance with the 
Nazis was approved, showed the system at its worst. Afterwards, 
Hirohito called it 'the moment of truth' and said his failure to break 
protocol and voice his objections was 'a moral crime'. The unstable 
Matsuoka took this view even before Pearl Harbor, went to the 
Tenno to 'confess my worst mistake', warned of 'calamity' and burst 
into tears. 68 All found the system intolerable, and it provoked the 
impulse to escape into furious activity — always appealing to the 
impatient Japanese. Tojo, in his frustration, took to riding round the 
Tokyo markets on horseback, and in reply to the complaints of the 
fishermen that they had no petrol for their boats would shout, 'Work 
harder, work harder!' He told a colleague, 'There are times when we 
must have the courage to do extraordinary things, like jumping with 
eyes closed off the veranda of the Kiyomizu Temple!' 69 

Jumping blindfold off a temple is, in fact, an accurate image of the 
Japanese decision to go to war. The records of the policy conferences 
reveal four things: that all Japanese leaders believed she must obtain 
access to South-East Asia and its raw materials to survive; that Japan 
was being pushed into a corner by America and Britain; that there 
was a general willingness to take risks, so that mere deterrence did 
not work; and that there was a corresponding unwillingness to 
discuss the consequences of failure. When Germany knocked France 
out, the Japanese demanded and got airfields in Indo-China: that 
provoked the first American economic sanctions. At this stage only 
the army definitely wanted war. In 1941 Indo-China was occupied, 
and on 28 July America applied total sanctions, including oil. That, 
in effect, brought the matter to a head. Thereafter, Japan was 
reducing her oil reserves by 28,000 tons a day and her only 
prospect of replenishing them was by seizing the Dutch East Indies. 
The navy insisted there must be either a negotiated settlement or war. 
As Nagano put it: 'The Navy is consuming four hundred tons of oil 
an hour . . .. We want it decided one way or another quickly.' 70 

Could America have successfully 'appeased' Japan? Did it wish to? 
The service chiefs, General Marshall and Admiral Stark, undoubt- 
edly did, since they thought the destruction of German power must 
have priority, and they wanted time to strengthen the defences of the 
Philippines and Malaya. Unlike the Japanese side, where the military 
were pushing the civilians to war, they tried to exercise restraint on 
the Roosevelt administration. 71 Roosevelt himself was passionately 
pro-Chinese. He could be termed a founder-member of the 'China 
Lobby', which was already in vociferous existence by 1940 and 



392 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

included his cronies Harry Hopkins and Henry Morgenthau. He had 
long believed in the existence of a secret (in fact mythical) one- 
hundred-year 'plan of conquest' which the Japanese had drafted in 
1889. 72 In contrast to his unwillingness to take action in the 
European theatre, Roosevelt had always been aggressive-minded in 
Asia, proposing to Britain a total blockade of Japan as early as 
December 1937. Hostility to Japan, as he knew, was always popular 
in America. He regarded war with Japan as inevitable and, unlike the 
brass hats, saw advantages in precipitating it. Always pro-Soviet, his 
bellicosity increased sharply once Russia entered the war. His close 
colleague, the Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, wrote to him the day 
after Russia was invaded: 

To embargo oil to Japan would be as popular a move in all parts of the 
country as you could make. There might develop from the embargoing of 
oil to Japan such a situation as would make it, not only possible but easy, to 
get into this war in an effective way. And if we should thus be indirectly 
brought in, we would avoid the criticism that we had gone in as an ally of 
communistic Russia. 73 

The 'Magic' intercepts fortified Roosevelt in his war policy because 
they showed clearly that, in the long negotiations which followed the 
oil embargo and lasted until the Japanese attack itself, Japan was 
systematically practising deception while planning aggression. But 
the intercepts did not tell the whole story. If Roosevelt and Cordell 
Hull had possessed transcripts of the liaison conferences they would 
have grasped the confusion and the agonized doubts which lay 
behind Japanese policy. At the 1 November liaison conference, 
which took the final decision to go to war (while continuing to 
negotiate), the level of strategic debate was not high: 

Finance Minister Kaya: If we go along as at present without war, and 
three years hence the American fleet comes to attack us, will the navy have a 
chance of winning or won't it? (Question asked several times.) 

Navy Chief of Staff Nagano: Nobody knows. 

Kaya: Will the American fleet come to attack us, or won't it? 

Nagano: I don't know. 

Kaya: I don't think they will come. 

Nagano: We might avoid war now, but go to war three years later. Or we 
might go to war now and plan for what the situation will be three years 
hence. I think it would be easier to engage in a war now. 74 

The navy and army were quite clear what they intended to do in 
the initial stages of the war, to last from three to six months. 
Thereafter plans, and means to carry them out, became increasingly 
vague. The navy and army's independently calculated steel-supply 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 393 

requirements, for instance, each made sense only if the other's was 
scaled down to the point where carrying on the war became 
impossible. 75 After the initial operations were completed, there was a 
theoretical intention to move against India and Australia. But there 
was no plan at all to invade America, knock her out of the war or 
destroy her capacity to wage it. In short, there was no strategic 
war-winning plan at all. Instead, there was an optimistic assumption 
that, at some stage, America (and Britain) would negotiate a 
compromise peace. 

Even on a tactical level, there was a huge hole in the Japanese 
war-plan. The navy had almost completely neglected submarine 
warfare, both defensive and offensive. The army's 'Southern 
strategy' was based on spreading its resources in occupying thou- 
sands of islands over millions of square miles of ocean, all of which 
would have to be supplied by sea. The contempt for the submarine 
meant the navy had no means of ensuring these supplies; or, 
conversely, of inhibiting the Allies from moving their own supplies. 
The last omission meant that, in the long run, Japan could not 
prevent America from developing a war-winning strategy. Granted 
America's enormous industrial preponderance there was thus no real 
incentive for her to seek a compromise peace, however spectacular 
Japan's initial success. Regarded logically, therefore, Japan's decision 
to go to war made no sense. It was hara-kiri. 

Moreover, the circumstances of the Japanese attack might have 
been designed to create American intransigence. Throughout their 
calculations from 1937 onwards, Roosevelt and his advisers had 
always assumed that the fury of the Japanese attack would fall on the 
British and Dutch possessions. True, the Philippines might also be at 
risk. But the notion of an attack on Pearl Harbor seems never to have 
been considered. Ambassador Grew had reported (27 January 
1941): There is a lot of talk around town to the effect that the Japs, 
in case of a break with the US, are planning to go all out in a surprise 
attack on Pearl Harbor.' No one took any notice. 76 Yet the idea had 
been knocking around since 1921, when the Daily Telegraph Naval 
correspondent, Hector Bywater, wrote Sea Power in the Pacific, later 
expanded into a novel, The Great Pacific War (1925). The Japanese 
navy had both translated and put the novel on the curriculum of its 
War College. 77 The idea slumbered until Yamamoto became so 
impressed by improvements in carrier-borne aircraft training that he 
decided it was feasible. In the meantime, the concept of a series of 
army landings in the tropics had been developed by a fanatical staff 
officer, Colonel Masanobu Tsuji, so full of Shinto that he had tried 
to blow up a prime minister with dynamite and actually burned 
down a brothel full of officers out of sheer moral indignation. His 



394 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

ideas for the invasion of Malaya, the Philippines, the Dutch East 
Indies and other targets required the elimination of the American 
Pacific Fleet during the landings period. That, in turn, gave a kind of 
strategic virtue to the Pearl Harbor project: the American fleet would 
be destroyed at anchor, and while it was being rebuilt Japan would 
lay hands on all of South-East Asia. The Pearl Harbor plan itself, 
which meant getting a huge carrier force unobserved over thousands 
of miles of ocean, was the most audacious and complex scheme of its 
kind in history, involving creating a special intelligence network, 
devising new means to refuel at sea, designing new torpedoes and 
armour-piercing shells, and training programmes of an intensity and 
elaboration never before undertaken. The final naval planning 
conference at the Naval College near Tokyo on 2 September 1941 
was something of a prodigy in naval annals, since it embraced 
attacks and landings over several millions of square miles, involving 
the entire offensive phase of the war Japan intended to launch. 

Yet all this ingenuity went for nothing. The Far East war began at 
1.15 am on 7 December with a sea-bombardment of the Malayan 
landing area, the attack on Pearl Harbor following two hours later. 
The Pearl Harbor assault achieved complete tactical surprise. All but 
twenty-nine planes returned to their carriers and the fleet got away 
safely. But the results, though they seemed spectacular at the time, 
were meagre. Some eighteen warships were sunk or badly damaged, 
but mostly in shallow water. They were raised and repaired and 
nearly all returned to active service in time to take part in major 
operations; losses in trained men were comparatively small. As luck 
would have it the American carriers were out at sea at the time of the 
attack, and the Japanese force commander, Admiral Nagumo, had 
too little fuel to search and sink them, so they escaped completely. 
His bombers failed to destroy either the naval oil storage tanks or the 
submarine-pens, so both submarines and carriers — now the key arms 
in the naval war — were able to refuel and operate immediately. 

All this was a meagre military return for the political risk of 
treacherously attacking a huge, intensely moralistic nation like the 
United States before a formal declaration of war. This may not have 
been the Japanese intention (it is still being argued about) for their 
arrangements were a characteristic mixture of breathtaking effi- 
ciency and inexplicable muddle. But it was the effect. Secretary of 
State Hull knew all about the Pearl Harbor attack and the ultimatum 
by the time the two Japanese envoys handed him their message at 
2.20 pm, and had rehearsed his little verdict of history (he was a 
Tennessee judge): 'In all my fifty years of public service I have never 
seen a document that was more crowded with infamous falsehood 
and distortions on a scale so huge that I never imagined until today 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 395 

that any government on this planet was capable of uttering them.' 
Then, to the departing diplomats: 'Scoundrels and piss-pants!' 78 
Thus America, hitherto rendered ineffectual by its remoteness, its 
racial diversity and its pusillanimous leadership, found itself in- 
stantly united, angry and committed to wage total war with all its 
outraged strength. Hitler's reckless declaration the following week 
drew a full measure of this enormous fury down upon his own 
nation. 

At the liaison conference of 5 November 1941, the army Chief of 
Staff General Sugiyama had said, of the vast series of offensive 
operations Japan planned to undertake: 'It will take fifty days to 
complete the operations in the Philippines, one hundred days in 
Malaya and fifty days in the Netherlands East Indies . . . the entire 
operations will be completed within five months after the opening of 
the war ... we would be able to carry on a protracted war if we 
could bring under our control such important military bases as 
Hong Kong, Manila and Singapore, and important areas in the 
Netherlands East Indies.' 79 It says a good deal about the fundamen- 
tal unsoundness of the whole Japanese war-plan that these remark- 
ably ambitious targets were all achieved - yet the net result had little 
bearing on Japan's capacity to win the war or even to force a 
stalemate. It was significant that, at the conference, maps of India 
and Australia, the ultimate targets, were not even displayed; and 
nothing was done to train technicians to exploit the Sumatran 
oilfields effectively. 

Singapore surrendered on 15 February 1942; the Dutch East 
Indies on 8 March; the Philippines on 9 April; Corregidor on 6 May; 
and a week before the Japanese had taken Mandalay in Upper 
Burma. The net hardware cost of those astounding victories was 100 
aircraft, a few destroyers and a mere 25,000 tons of Japan's precious 
shipping. But success had been attended by a great deal of luck. The 
destruction of the Prince of Wales and Repulse by air-strikes on 10 
December 1941, which sank in deep water with nearly all their 
experienced crews, was a greater naval victory than Pearl Harbor, 
not least because it demoralized the Singapore-Malaya garrison. The 
great fortress, whose inadequacies were a monument to inter-war 
defence economies, delays and wishful thinking, would have sur- 
vived if General Percival, the British commander, and General 
Gordon Bennett, who commanded the Australians, had shown more 
fighting spirit. General Tomoyuki Yamashita, who commanded the 
Japanese assault force, admitted after the war that his strategy was 'a 
bluff, a bluff that worked'. He was as short of water, petrol and 
ammunition as Percival, who gave them as grounds for capitulation. 
None of the Japanese guns had more than one hundred rounds left. It 



396 THE WATERSHED YEAR 

was the Japanese belief that, had the garrison held out another 
week, their campaign must have failed. Churchill had plainly in- 
structed Field-Marshal Wavell, the area commander, that 'the 
whole island must be fought until every single unit and every single 
strongpoint has been separately destroyed. Finally the city of Singa- 
pore must be converted into a citadel and defended to the death.' 
But Wavell, himself a melancholic defeatist, did not press these 
resolutions on the apathetic Percival. 80 The main-force surrender in 
the Philippines was also a pusillanimous act, carried out against the 
instructions of the commander-in-chief. The narrowness of the 
Japanese victories indicated that, even at this early stage, they were 
pressing up against the limits of their physical resources. 

The notion of a Nazi-Japanese global strategy disappeared in the 
early summer. On 18 January 1942 the Germans and the Japanese had 
signed a military agreement, with longitude 70 degrees defining 
their respective spheres of operations. There was vague talk of 
linking up in India. 81 But Hitler's forces did not reach Asian 
territory until the end of July. By that time the Japanese, blocked at 
the gates of India, had moved off into the opposite direction, 
operating in the Aleutian Islands on the road to Alaska in early 
June - the furthest limit of their conquests. They had already 
suffered two calamitous defeats. On 7—8 May a Japanese invasion 
force heading for Port Moresby in New Guinea was engaged at 
long-range by American carrier planes in the Coral Sea, and so 
badly damaged that it had to return home - the first major reverse 
after five months of uninterrupted triumphs. On 3 June another 
invasion force heading for Midway Island was outwitted and 
defeated, losing four of its carriers and the flower of the Japanese 
naval air-force. The fact that it was forced to return to Japanese 
waters indicated that Japan had effectively lost naval-air control of 
the Pacific. 82 Six months into the war, Yamamoto felt obliged to 
reassure his staff: There are still eight carriers in the combined 
fleet. We should not lose heart. In battle as in chess it is the fool 
who lets himself into a reckless move out of desperation.' 83 Yet the 
entire war, and Hitler's insistence on joining it, were both desperate 
moves. The year before, Hitler had seemed to control the European 
chess-board, as Japan controlled that of East Asia. Yet once united 
in common global predation, they rapidly shrank to the status of 
two medium-sized powers, flailing desperately against the creeping 
force of economic and demographic magnitude. The imbalance was 
really apparent by the end of 1941. On 3 January 1942 Hitler 
admitted to the Japanese ambassador, General Hiroshi Oshima, 
that he did not yet know 'how America could be defeated'. 84 That 
made two of them: the Japanese did not know either. In 1945 



THE WATERSHED YEAR 397 

General Jodl claimed that, 'from the start of 1942 on', Hitler knew 
'victory was no longer attainable'. 85 What he did not then grasp, but 
what 1942 made painfully clear, was that the huge coalition he had 
ranged against himself and his two allies had a decisive superiority 
not merely in men and material but in technology. The real signifi- 
cance of the Battle of Midway, for example, was that it was won 
primarily by the Allied success in code-breaking. In launching war, 
the Germans and the Japanese had pushed the world over the 
watershed into a new age, outside their or anyone's control, full of 
marvels and unspeakable horrors. 



TWELVE 

Superpower and Genocide 



Early in April 1943 the Americans determined to kill Admiral 
Yamamoto, master-spirit of the Japanese navy. They felt that the 
overwhelming moral superiority of their cause gave them the right to 
do so. Yamamoto, as it happened, had never believed Japan could 
win without the miraculous intervention of God. He told his chief of 
staff just before Pearl Harbor: 'The only question that remains is the 
blessing of heaven. If we have heaven's blessing there will be no 
doubt of success.' But all war-leaders had become assassination 
targets. That was why Hitler and Stalin never left their working 
headquarters. Churchill took the most risks. After the Washington 
Arcadia Conference in December 1941 he returned by an unescorted 
Boeing flying-boat, which was nearly shot down, first by the German 
defences in Brest, then by intercepting British Hurricanes. 'I had done 
a rash thing,' he admitted. The same month the Americans plotted to 
murder Yamamoto, the Germans destroyed a British flight from 
Lisbon believing Churchill was aboard: in fact they killed the 
film-actor Leslie Howard. 1 The difference was that, on the Allied 
side, morality was reinforced by technical superiority. The Germans 
did not know of Churchill's flights, whereas Yamamoto's 
movements were studied in advance by America's code-breakers. 

The Americans had broken Japan's diplomatic code in 1940. But 
Kazuki Kamejama, head of Japan's Cable Section, proclaimed such a 
feat to be 'humanly impossible', and Japan continued to underrate 
Allied technical capacity in code-breaking. 2 When Yamamoto began 
his tour of Solomon Island defences on 13 April 1943 his flying 
schedule was radioed, the communications office claiming 'The code 
only went into effect on 1 April and cannot be broken.' In fact the 
Americans had done so by dawn the next morning. The shooting 
down of Yamamoto's plane was personally approved by Roosevelt. 
After it was accomplished, a signal was sent to the theatre comman- 
der, Admiral Halsey: 'Pop goes the weasel'. He was chagrined: 

398 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 399 

'What's so good about it? I'd hoped to lead that scoundrel up 
Pennsylvania Avenue in chains.' 3 

The skill with which Britain and America used advanced tech- 
nology to illuminate global war was one of the principal reasons 
why the Germans and the Japanese, with all their courage and 
energy, were fighting an unsynchronized struggle from 1942 on. 
Like Bronze Age warriors facing an Iron Age power, they appeared 
increasingly to be survivors from a slightly earlier epoch. The 
British had been the leading code-breakers for half a century. It was 
'Room 40' in the Old Admiralty Building in Whitehall which, early 
in 1917, had decoded a telegram from Arthur Zimmerman, Ger- 
man Foreign Minister, to the Mexican President, proposing a 
German-assisted Mexican re-conquest of Texas. Brilliantly publi- 
cized, this coup had helped to bring America into the war. 4 British 
intelligence, which had a continuous history since the sixteenth 
century, was one aspect of defence not neglected between the wars. 
The Germans, too, were active in this field, within limits. They 
intercepted and unscrambled the transatlantic telephone circuit 
between Britain and America, and sometimes heard Roosevelt and 
Churchill converse, though the talk was too guarded to yield much. 
They broke some Russian codes and the US military attaches' code 
in Cairo, Rommel making excellent use of the results. But the code 
was changed in 1942 and thereafter could not be broken. 5 Nor 
could the Germans repeat an early wartime success with British 
naval codes. From mid- 1942 onwards, British— American commun- 
ications were reasonably secure. 

It was a different matter for the Germans. In 1926 their army had 
adopted the electrical Enigma coding machine, followed by the 
navy two years later. Both services remained convinced of the 
indestructible virtues of this encoding system. In fact Polish intelli- 
gence had reconstructed the Enigma machine, and in July 1939 
they gave one each to Britain and France. 6 This became the basis 
for the most successful intelligence operation of the war, run from 
Bletchley in Buckinghamshire. 'Ultra', as it was called, remained a 
secret until 1974, and some aspects were concealed even in the 
1980s because of their bearing on operations against Soviet codes. 7 
Many of the Ultra intercepts have not yet been published and it 
may never be possible to assess its full impact on the course of the 
war. 8 But Ultra played a part as early as 1940 by helping to win the 
Battle of Britain. More important, the breaking of the German 
'Triton' code by Bletchley in March 1943 clinched the Battle of the 
Atlantic, for German U-boats continued to signal frequently, con- 
fident in their communications security, and breaking the code 
allowed the Allies to destroy their supply-ships too. As a result, 



400 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

victory in the Atlantic came quite quickly in 1943, and this was 
important, for the U-boat was perhaps Hitler's most dangerous 
weapon. 9 The Ultra system was also well-adapted to the provision of 
false intelligence to the Axis, which became a leading feature of the 
Allied war-effort and was highly successful, for instance, in persuading 
the Germans that the D-Day Normandy landings in 1 944 were a feint. 10 

Knowing how to break codes was only the core of a vast and 
increasingly complex operation working on the frontiers of electronic 
technology. It was the success of the British Post Office Research 
Establishment in building Colossus, the first electronic computer, 
which produced the acceleration in the analysis process essential to the 
effective use of code-breaking. From early 1 942, the marriage of British 
and American technology and intelligence led to the early break- 
through in the Pacific war. Midway in June 1942 was an intelligence 
victory. Thereafter, the Allies knew the positions of all Japanese capital 
ships nearly all the time. Perhaps even more important, they were able 
to conduct a spectacularly successful submarine offensive against 
Japanese supply-ships. This turned the island empire the Japanese had 
acquired in their first five months of war (10 per cent of the earth's 
surface at its greatest extent) into an untenable liability, the graveyard 
of the Japanese navy and merchant marine and of their best army units: 
code-breaking alone raised shipping-losses by one-third. 11 

But intelligence, however complete, cannot win wars. Enigma gave 
the British the German order-of-battle as early as the Norway campaign 
in 1940; but that battle was lost because the resources were not 
available and in place. Where one side is outclassed in military strength, 
intelligence can rarely tip the balance back. 12 But where overwhelming 
intelligence superiority is married to quantitative advantages, the 
combination is devastating. Both the Nazis and the Japanese ran 
shortage economies. The Japanese had no alternative. Despite prodigi- 
ous ingenuity, they were able to increase their total production only 2 
per cent beyond its 1940 level by the beginning of 1943 (US production 
rose 36 per cent in the same period). 13 The Germans had a much 
stronger and more comprehensive economy, but Hitler was obsessed by 
the cost and risk of over-production, and by the need for import- 
substitutes. As a result, German research was devoted to ersatz 
materials rather than accelerating mass-production, and the economy 
was held back. At the end of 1 941 Fritz Todt, Hitler's production chief, 
protested bitterly at the premature switch of production from the 
Russian to the Western theatres and the failure to cut back the civil 
economy. His death in a mysterious air crash on 2 February 1942 may 
not have been accidental. 14 For Germany, Jodl claimed, 'actual 
rearmament had to be carried out after the war began'. On 1 September 
1939 Germany had only 3,906 military and naval aircraft of all types. 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 401 

Only 10,392 were turned out in 1940, 12,392 in 1941 and 15,497 in 
1942. Not until 1943-4, when it was too late, did the war-economy 
expand to its maximum (despite Allied bombing), producing 24,795 
aircraft in 1943 and 40,953 in 1944. 15 Stalin argued in 1949 that 
Germany lost the war because 'Hitler's generals, raised on the dogma 
of Clausewitz and Moltke, could not understand that war is won in 
the factories'. Out of a population of 80 million, he continued, they 
put 13 million in the armed forces, and 'history tells us that no single 
state could maintain such an effort': the Soviet armed forces were 
only 11.5 million out of a population of 194 million. 16 This was a 
Marxist view of war which greatly exaggerates the power of the 
generals over Nazi war-production policy. It ignores the real reason 
why the German economy failed to rise into top gear until the end of 
1942, which was Hitler's obstinate attachment to the military- 
economic doctrine of the Blitzkrieg. In fact many industrial workers, 
especially women, did not move into the war-factories until Allied 
bombing destroyed their civilian livelihood. 

The notion that 'socialized' industry won the war is baseless. The 
socialized sector of German industry (e.g. the Herman Goering Steel 
Works) was a complete failure. The Soviet economy performed 
reasonably well in producing mass quantities of certain basic military 
items: in August 1942, at the furthest point of the Nazi advance, 
Soviet factories were already making 1,200 tanks a month. 17 But the 
troop-carrying vehicles and jeeps which gave the Red Army its 
growing and decisive mobility in 1943—4 came from American 
industry, and the Western powers jointly supplied the high tech- 
nology which slowly gave Russia command of the air in the East: 
even in 1946 Britain was still sending Russia aero-engines, which 
became the basis for the highly successful post-war Mig-15. In 
Britain, the adoption of Ludendorff-style 'war socialism' and Keynes- 
ian macro-economics enabled the British capitalist economy to 
perform much more effectively than Germany's: in 1942 her war 
production was 50 per cent higher. But the real engine of Allied 
victory was the American economy. Within a single year the number 
of tanks built had been raised to 24,000 and planes to 48,000. By the 
end of the first year of the war America had raised its army 
production to the total of all three Axis powers together, and by 
1944 had doubled it again — while at the same time creating an army 
which passed the 7 million mark in 1943. 18 

This astonishing acceleration was made possible by the essential 
dynamism and flexibility of the American system, wedded to a 
national purpose which served the same galvanizing role as the 
optimism of the Twenties. The war acted as a boom market, 
encouraging American entrepreneurial skills to fling her seemingly 



402 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

limitless resources of materials and manpower into a bottomless 
pool of consumption. One reason the Americans won Midway was 
by reducing a three-month repair-job on the carrier Yorktown to 
forty-eight hours, using 1,200 technicians round the clock. 19 The 
construction programme for the defence co-ordinating centre, the 
Pentagon, with its sixteen miles of corridors and 600,000 square 
feet of office space, was cut from seven years to fourteen 
months. 20 The war put back on his pedestal the American capitalist 
folk-hero. Henry Kaiser, Henry Morrison and John McCone, the 
San Francisco engineers who created the Boulder Dam (and who 
had been systematically harassed during the New Deal by 
Roosevelt's Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes, for breaches of federal 
regulations), led the field in the wartime hustle. They built the 
world's biggest cement plant and the first integrated steel mill. Told 
to build ships at any cost, they cut the construction time of a 
'Liberty' ship from 196 to twenty-seven days and by 1943 were 
turning one out every 10.3 hours. 21 General Electric in 1942 alone 
was able to raise its production of marine turbines from $1 million 
to $300 million. 22 America won the war essentially by harnessing 
capitalist methods to the unlimited production of firepower and 
mechanical manpower. After the loss of the decisive battle of 
Guadalcanal, the Tenno Hirohito asked the navy's chief of staff, 
'Why was it that it took the Americans only a few days to build an 
airbase and the Japanese more than a month?' All Nagano could 
say was, 'I am very sorry indeed.' The truth was, the Americans had 
a vast array of bulldozers and other earth-moving equipment, the 
Japanese only muscle-power. 23 

The devastating combination of high technology and unrivalled 
productive capacity took its most palpable and significant form in 
offensive air-power. There were two reasons for this. First, the 
British 24 persuaded the Americans it was the best way to make the 
maximum use of their vast economic resources, while suffering the 
minimum manpower losses. Second, the bombing offensive appealed 
strongly to the moralistic impulse of both nations: what the British 
atomic scientist P.S.M.Blackett called 'the Jupiter complex' - the 
notion of the Allies as righteous gods, raining retributive thunder- 
bolts on their wicked enemies. 

We see here the corruptive process of moral relativism at work. 
Churchill was well aware of the moral decay war brings; was 
appalled by it. He had initiated the mass-bombing strategy on 2 
July 1940 because he was overwhelmed by the prospect of Nazi 
occupation — the ultimate moral catastrophe — and saw bombing as 
the only offensive weapon then available to the British. This was 
the old utilitarian theory of morals, as opposed to natural law 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 403 

theory which ruled that the direct destruction of war-waging capac- 
ity was the only legitimate manner of conducting combat. 25 But all 
forms of moral relativism have an innate tendency to generate moral 
collapse since they eliminate any fixed anchorage and launch the ship 
of state on an ocean where there are no bearings at all. By the end of 
1941, with both Russia and America in the war, the defeat of Hitler, 
as Churchill himself realized, was inevitable in the long run. The 
utilitarian rationale for attacks on cities had disappeared; the moral 
case had always been inadmissible. But by this time the bomber force 
was in being, and the economy geared to producing large numbers of 
long-range Lancasters. It was on 14 February 1942 that the directive 
was issued to Bomber Command that a primary objective was the 
destruction of the morale of German civilians. 26 The first major raid 
carried out in accordance with the new order was on Liibeck on 28 
March 1942; the city 'burned like kindling', said the official report. 
The first 1,000-bomber raid followed on 30 May and in the summer 
the American Air Force joined the campaign. 

Bombing used up 7 per cent of Britain's total military manpower, 
and perhaps as much as 25 per cent of Britain's war production. 27 
The entire strategy may have been, even in military terms, mistaken. 
Bombing, which killed 600,000 Germans altogether, reduced but 
could not prevent the expansion in German war-production up to 
the second half of 1944, achieved by the switch from civilian 
consumer goods which, against an index of one hundred in 1939, fell 
to ninety-one in 1943 and eighty-five in 1944 - Britain's being as low 
as fifty-four in both years. 28 True, from the end of 1944 bombing 
effectively destroyed the German war-economy. Even before that, 
the need to defend German cities by night and day had prevented the 
Luftwaffe from keeping its air superiority on the Russian front. But 
the effectiveness of bombing as a war-winning weapon depended 
entirely on the ability to maintain indefinitely very heavy raids on the 
same targets night after night. The Allies came near to a strategic 
'victory' in the raids on Hamburg, by far the best-protected German 
city, from 24 July-3 August 1943, using the 'Window' foil device 
which confused German radar. On the night of 27-28 July, the raf 
created temperatures of 800 to 1,000 centigrade over the city, 
producing fire-storm winds of colossal force. Transport systems of 
all types were destroyed, 214,350 homes out of 414,500, 4,301 out 
of 9,592 factories; eight square miles were burnt out completely, and 
in one night alone fatal casualties in the four fire-storm districts were 
40,000 or up to 37.65 of the total population. 29 Albert Speer, who 
had succeeded Todt as the production supremo, told Hitler that if 
another six cities were similarly devastated, he could not keep 
war-production going. But the British simply did not have the 



404 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

resources to enable Bomber Command to repeat raids on this scale in 
quick succession. 

The worst aspect of terror-bombing was the appeal of the 'Jupiter 
complex' to the war-leaders striking their geopolitical bargains. This 
was the explanation for the greatest Anglo-American moral disaster 
of the war against Germany, the destruction of Dresden on the night 
of 13-14 February 1945. The origin of the raid was the desire of 
Roosevelt and Churchill at the Yalta Conference to prove to Stalin 
that the Allies were doing their best to assist the Russian effort on the 
Eastern front. In particular they wanted to deliver a crippling blow to 
German morale to help on the Russian offensive which began on 12 
January. Dresden was not an industrial but a communications 
centre. Its population of 630,000 had been doubled by German 
refugees, 80 per cent of them peasants from Silesia. Stalin wanted 
them destroyed to facilitate his plan to 'move' Poland westwards and 
he also believed the city was being used as a concentration-point for 
troops. According to Sir Robert Saundby, deputy head of Bomber 
Command, the Russians specifically asked for Dresden as the target 
of 'Operation Thunderclap'. Not long before, the Command's 
chaplain, Canon L. John Collins (later to create the nuclear disar- 
mament campaign), had invited the pious Christian socialist, Sir 
Stafford Cripps, who was Minister of Aircraft Production, to talk to 
senior officers. He took as his text 'God is my co-pilot' and told them 
it was essential they should be sure they were attacking military 
targets: 'Even when you are engaged in acts of wickedness, God is 
always looking over your shoulder.' This led to an angry scene, since 
Bomber Command believed Cripps's Ministry was deliberately starv- 
ing them of aircraft for pseudo-moralistic reasons. Thereafter they 
were anxious to make it clear they were under politicians' orders. 
Hence they queried the Dresden order. It was confirmed direct from 
the Yalta Conference (by either Churchill or Air Chief Marshal 
Portal). 30 

The attack was carried out in two waves (with a third, by the 
usaf, to follow) in accordance with Bomber Command's tactic of 
the 'double blow', the second falling when relief forces had concen- 
trated on the city. Over 650,000 incendiaries were dropped, the 
firestorm engulfing eight square miles, totally destroying 4,200 acres 
and killing 135,000 men, women and children. As it was the night of 
Shrove Tuesday, many of the children were still in carnival costumes. 
For the first time in the war a target had been hit so hard that not 
enough able-bodied survivors were left to bury the dead. Troops 
moved in and collected huge piles of corpses. The centre round the 
Altmarkt was cordoned off. Steel grills, twenty-five feet across, were 
set up, fuelled with wood and straw, and batches of five hundred 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 405 

corpses were piled up on each and burned. The funeral pyres were 
still flaming a fortnight after the raid. Goebbels claimed, 'It is the 
work of lunatics.' According to Speer, the attack sent a wave of 
terror over the whole nation. But by this stage there was no means 
whereby public opinion could bring pressure on an inaccessible, 
isolated and paranoid Hitler to negotiate surrender. And there were 
neither the resources nor the will to repeat the raid, which affronted 
the pilots themselves. One commented, 'For the first time in many 
operations I felt sorry for the population below/ Another said it was 
'the only time I ever felt sorry for the Germans'. 31 

Germany yielded less to the Jupiter syndrome only because Hitler 
distrusted Goering's ability to make effective use of the vast resour- 
ces a strategic bombing campaign would require. But the idea of 
dealing mass destruction impersonally, by remote control, appealed 
strongly to him. The Versailles Treaty forbade Germany to make 
bombers but it said nothing about ballistic missiles. Hence when 
Hitler came to power he found a military missile team already in 
existence: in 1936 its head, Walter Dornberger, was authorized to 
issue a directive calling for a rocket to carry one hundred times the 
explosive force of the Big Bertha gun of 1918 over twice the range 
(2,200 lbs over 156 miles). 32 In a sense Hitler was right that the 
coming strategic weapon would be a high-payload ballistic missile. 
One of the few to grasp this on the Allied side was the Tory mp 
Duncan Sandys, who warned on 23 November 1944: 'In future the 
possession of superiority in long-distance rocket artillery may well 
count for as much as superiority in naval or air power.' Allied 
orthodoxy revolved around the flexibility of the big bomber, essen- 
tially a First World War concept. The reply of Churchill's chief 
scientist, Lord Cherwell, 5 December 1944, was that the long-range 
rocket would be highly inaccurate, without a compensatory high 
payload. This was an unanswerable criticism so long as the explosive 
remained conventional. 

Hitler's difficulty was that he had to choose between two possibili- 
ties. The pilotless guided aircraft (VI) appealed strongly to his highly 
developed sense of military economy. It was one of the most 
cost-effective weapons ever produced. For the price of one Lancaster 
bomber, crew-training, bombs and fuel, Hitler could fire well over 
three hundred Vis, each with a ton of high-explosive, a range of 200 
miles and a better chance of reaching its target. In the period 12 
June-1 September 1944, for an expenditure of £12,600,190, the VI 
offensive cost the Allies £47,645,190 in loss of production, extra 
anti-aircraft and fighter defences, and aircraft and crews in the 
bombing offensive against the sites. The Air Ministry reported (4 
November 1944): 'The results were greatly in the enemy's favour, 



406 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

the estimated ratio of our costs to his being nearly four to one.' Only 
185 Germans lost their lives, against 7,810 Allies (including 1,950 
trained airmen). The Vis were damaging 20,000 houses a day in July 
1944 and the effect on London morale was very serious. 

But Hitler did not invest early or extensively enough in this telling 
weapon. In the chaos of the Nazi procurement programme, it was 
necessary to appeal to the Fuhrer's romanticism to get priority. That 
was what Dornberger's big rockets did. The V2 programme seemed 
the only way to gratify Hitler's intense desire to revenge himself on 
Roosevelt by destroying New York. The allocation of resources to it 
made no sense in terms of likely performance. In Germany alone it 
employed 200,000 workers, including a large proportion of the 
highest-skilled technicians. The programme deprived the Germans of 
advanced jets and underground oil refineries and its absorption of 
scarce electrical equipment interfered with production of aircraft, 
submarines and radar. The actual rockets used in the V2 campaign, 
the A4, of which only 3,000 were fired, cost £12,000 each (against 
£125 for the VI), carried a payload of only 12,000 lb and were 
hopelessly inaccurate. The projected intercontinental rocket, the 
A9/A10, weighing 100 tons and with a second stage ascending to 
230 miles into the stratosphere, planned to be used against New 
York and Washington, never got beyond the drawing-board stage. 33 
Even if built and fired, its conventional payload would have rendered 
it nugatory. 

Hitler's only prospect of achieving stalemate by a decisive techni- 
cal advance lay in marrying the A10 rocket to a nuclear payload. 
There was never much prospect of him achieving this within the 
time-scale of the war. Yet there was a continuing fear on the Allied 
side that Hitler would come into possession of atomic bombs. Many 
scientists believed the Second World War would become nuclear. 
There was a certain symmetry in the development of atomic know- 
ledge in the inter-war period. The notion of a man-made explosion of 
colossal power was implicit in Einstein's Special Theory of Relativ- 
ity. If the vast energy binding particles into the closely packed entity 
of the nucleus could be released - the heaviest elements containing 
the greatest energy - then uranium-235, at the top of the weight- 
table, was the raw material of the quest. High-energy physics was the 
great expanding science of the 1920s. In 1932, as Germany turned 
towards Hitler, the results began to come in, all over Europe and 
North America. That year, at the Cavendish laboratory in Cam- 
bridge, J. D. Cock croft and E.T. S.Walton, using a £500 piece of 
equipment - which Lord Rutherford, head of the Cavendish, thought 
an outrageous sum - split the atom. Their colleague Sir James 
Chadwick discovered the neutron, consisting of proton and electron, 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 407 

with a binding energy of 1-2 million electron volts. In 1934 the 
Joliot-Curies, in France, made radioactive isotopes artificially and 
Enrico Fermi, in Italy, successfully slowed down (that is, controlled) 
neutrons, and went on to produce transuranic elements with even 
heavier masses than on the atomic table. The process of developing 
the theoretical notion of atomic fission, involving scientists in 
Germany and America as well, culminated in the first nine months of 
the fatal year 1939, so that by the time Hitler invaded Poland it was 
already clear that a man-made atomic explosion was possible. The 
dramatic advances of 1939, and the outbreak of war, constitute one 
of the most striking and sinister coincidences in history: a review 
article in January 1940 was able to summarize over one hundred 
significant publications over the previous year. The most important 
of them, by the Dane Nils Bohr and his American pupil J.A.Wheeler, 
explaining the fission process, appeared only two days before the 
war began. 34 

From the very beginning applied atomic physics had its ideological 
and moral dimensions. The concept of the bomb was born among 
the mainly Jewish refugee scientific community, who were terrified 
that Hitler might get it first. It was one of them, Leo Szilard, who 
proposed a self-imposed censorship of scientific publication. The 
bomb was created by (among others) men who put ideological 
considerations before national self-interest, just as it was betrayed by 
such men. Many of those who worked on the British project, the 
greatest of wartime secrets, were excluded for security reasons from 
other war work. 35 Fear was the primary motive. Robert Oppen- 
heimer, a Jew, built the first A-bomb because he feared Hitler would 
do it first; Edward Teller, a Hungarian, built the first H-bomb 
because he was terrified of a Soviet monopoly. 36 

Hence the real father of the atomic bomb was Hitler and the 
spectres his horrifying will conjured up. In March 1940 Otto Frisch 
and Rudolf Peierls of Birmingham University produced an astonish- 
ing memorandum, of three typed pages, showing how to make a 
bomb of enriched uranium. The high-powered 'Maud' Committee 
(whimsically called after Maud Ray, a Kentish governess) was 
created to crash-develop the idea. In June it was joined by the French 
nuclear team, who brought with them the world's entire stock of 
heavy water, which they had snatched from Norway: 185 kilograms 
in twenty-six cans, which was first temporarily housed in Worm- 
wood Scrubs prison, then put in the library at Windsor Castle. 37 At 
Einstein's request (he also feared an 'anti-Semitic bomb'), Roosevelt 
had set up an 'Uranium Committee' in October 1939. It was jolted 
into activity in the autumn of 1940 when the two leaders of the 
British scientific war-effort, Sir Henry Tizard and Sir John Cock- 



408 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

croft, went to Washington taking with them a 'black box* containing, 
among other things, all the secrets of the British atomic programme. 

At that time Britain was several months ahead of any other nation, 
and moving faster. Plans for a separation plant were completed in 
December 1940 and by the following March the atomic bomb had 
ceased to be a matter of scientific speculation and was moving into the 
arena of industrial technology and engineering. By July 1941 the 
Maud Committee report, 'Use of Uranium for a Bomb', argued that 
such a weapon, which it thought could be ready by 1943, would be 
much cheaper, in cost per pound, than conventional explosives, highly 
economical in air-power, more concentrated in its impact and with a 
profound effect on enemy morale. Even if the war ended before the 
bomb became available, the effort was essential because no nation 
'would care to risk being caught without a weapon of such decisive 
capabilities'. 38 Already, then, the bomb was seen in post-Hitler terms 
as a permanency of international life. But its supposed imminence 
made it a natural ingredient in the bombing policy. There can be no 
doubt that an all-British bomb, if available, would have been used 
against German cities, with the approbation of the British public, 
which throughout supported the area bombing policy. 

In fact the optimism of the British planners was not justified. The 
industrial and engineering problems involved in producing pure 
U-235 or plutonium (the alternative fissionable material) in sufficient 
quantities proved daunting; as did the design of the bomb itself. The 
success of the project was made possible only by marrying European 
theory to American industrial technology and, above all, American 
resources and entrepreneurial adventurism. The Maud Report be- 
came the basis for America's 'Manhattan' project, with a budget of $2 
billion, which spent $1 billion in 1944 alone. In order to race Hitler to 
the bomb (as they thought), three completely different methods of 
producing bomb-material, two types of uranium enrichment plants 
(gaseous diffusion and electro-magnetic) and a set of plutonium 
reactors, were pursued simultaneously. Each involved building some 
of the largest factories ever conceived. 

The project was under the direction of an army engineer general, 
Leslie Groves, who shared to the full the giganticist philosophy of the 
new Forties phase of American capitalism. 39 Given a clear and 
attainable objective, he was impervious to qualitative or quantitative 
difficulties. He took a fierce delight in prodigality. 'We have so many 
PhDs now that we can't keep track of them', he boasted. He asked the 
American Treasury for thousands of tons of silver for electric wiring 
and was told: 'In the Treasury we do not speak of tons of silver. Our 
unit is the troy ounce.' 40 But he got the silver. The effort to invent 
nuclear power involved creating a series of new technologies: the first 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 409 

fully automated factory, the first plant operated by remote control, 
the first wholly sterile industrial process - 6 million square feet of 
leak-proof machinery - and a variety of revolutionary gadgets. 41 The 
waste was enormous, and much of it in retrospect seemed inexcus- 
able. But then war is about waste; war is waste. The Americans were 
compressing perhaps three decades of scientific engineering progress 
into four years. There was no other way of being sure to get the 
bomb. There was no other country or system which could have 
produced this certainty. It was Hitler's bomb; it was also and above 
all. a capitalist bomb. 

It is ironic that totalitarianism, having generated the fear which 
made the bomb possible, made only feeble efforts of its own to justify 
the righteous terror of the legitimate powers. The Leningrad physic- 
ist Igor Kurchatov had asked for funds to build a reactor in the late 
1930s, in response to the prodigal outpouring of Western published 
data. When one of his pupils noticed that this flow had halted, 
Kurchatov alerted his political superiors (May 1942) and eventually 
got a Uranium Institute established in Moscow. The Soviet pro- 
gramme began only a few months after the Manhattan Project, but 
with a low resource-priority which reflected doubt about the feasibil- 
ity of a bomb. 42 According to Nikita Khrushchev it was not until the 
day after the Hiroshima explosion that Stalin put his secret police 
head, Beria, in charge of a crash project with absolute priority over 
all else in the state. 43 The Japanese, too, had an A-bomb project 
under their leading physicist, Yoshio Nishina, and built five cyclo- 
trons. But that, too, lacked resources and in 1943 the Japanese 
concluded that not even the US economy could produce a bomb in 
the foreseeable future. 44 Germany, despite the scientific exodus, 
retained enough nuclear scientists to conceive a bomb. But to Hitler, 
the nuclear field was identified with Einstein and 'Jewish physics'. 
Perhaps deliberately, they failed to ignite Hitler's enthusiasm, though 
a nuclear explosive was exactly what he needed to make his rocket 
programme effective. In its colossal destructive power, it was an 
archetypal Hitler weapon: the destroyer-state incarnate. Even before 
the war he had grimly outlined to Hermann Rauschning the price of 
Nazi failure: 'Even as we go down to destruction we will carry half 
the world into destruction with us'. 45 The atomic bomb could have 
brought this reckless boast closer to reality. But the bomb never 
possessed Hitler's mind as the rocket did. The failure in the imagina- 
tion of this romantic nihilist rendered groundless the fears of the 
scientific exiles who caused the bomb to be made. 

By a further, though predictable, irony, the race to get the weapon 
intensified as the moral and military necessity for it diminished. As 
enemy power receded in 1943 and 1944, and it became clear that 



410 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

total victory was only a matter of time, the need to forestall Hitler 
was replaced by the gruesome urge to make the bomb while the war 
still provided the chance to use it. By the end of December 1941 it 
was manifest that Hitler and his Japanese allies could not win the 
war. By the late summer of 1942, after the Japanese disaster at 
Midway and the petering out of Hitler's Volga-Caucasus offensive, 
it was also obvious that the Axis could not achieve a stalemate either. 
The hinge-month was November 1942. On 2 November the British 
began the decisive battle of Alamein, to clear North Africa and the 
Mediterranean, followed by Anglo-American landings in Morocco 
and Algeria six days later. The next day the Japanese failed in their 
last major effort to win the battle of Guadalcanal Island in the 
Solomons, which their army commander described as the 'battle in 
which the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire will be decided'. Nine 
days after this catastrophe the Russians launched their counter- 
offensive at Stalingrad. Roosevelt told the Herald Tribune: 'It would 
seem that the turning point in this war has at last been reached.' 

Italy was the first to accept the logic of Allied power. As early as 
December 1940 Mussolini had told his son-in-law Ciano that the 
Italians of 1914 had been superior to those of the fascist state. It 
reflected, he said, badly on his regime. 46 By the time the Allies 
invaded Sicily on 10 July 1943 he was in a mood of invincible 
pessimism. He did nothing to prevent his critics summoning the 
fascist Grand Council fifteen days later, having listened to the 
ten-hour debate; and waiting apathetically for his arrest, he auto- 
graphed a photograph for a woman 'Mussolini defunto\ 47 While 
Italy hastened to make terms with the Allies, Hitler turned the 
country into an occupied zone, rescued the fallen dictator and 
allowed him to run a puppet regime. In his twilight, Mussolini 
reverted to his Lenin-type totalitarian socialism, always the bedrock 
of his political philosophy, and preached the destruction of 'pluto- 
cracy' and the supremacy of syndicalism. By the end of March 1945 
he had carried through, albeit largely on paper, a socialist revolution 
which had nationalized all firms employing more than one hundred 
workers. And just before he was captured and hanged, upside down 
alongside his mistress, he had resumed his violent Germanophobia of 
1914—15: *// tedeschi sono responsabili di tutto' was one of his last 
dicta** 

It was essentially Hitler's decision to fight the war to its now 
inevitable finish. For a time at least Stalin was always prepared to 
revert to the Nazi— Soviet Pact. He offered to negotiate with Hitler in 
December 1942 and again in summer 1943. In the autumn, fearing 
that Anglo-American long-term strategy predicated a Nazi-Soviet 
war of exhaustion, he sent his Deputy Foreign Minister and former 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 411 

Berlin ambassador, Vladimir Dekanozov, to Stockholm, with an 
offer of a return to the 1914 frontiers and an economic deal. 49 No 
doubt Stalin hoped to resurrect his 1925 strategy, pull out of the war 
and re-enter it later. But in November 1942, on the anniversary of his 
putsch, Hitler had said, There will no longer be any peace offers 
coming from us', and he stuck to that resolve, fulfilling the menacing 
prediction he had made on numerous occasions in the 1920s and 
1930s that Germany had the choice only between world leadership 
and national destruction. 

This saved the legitimate powers a damaging internal debate. It 
became apparent early in 1942 that official opinion in both Britain 
and the USA was divided into 'hard' and 'soft' armistice formulae. 
To resolve the dilemma, the State Department in May 1942 and the 
Defence Department in December 1942 recommended 'uncondi- 
tional surrender' as a working principle. Roosevelt, to avoid 
Wilson's difficulties in 1918-19, pushed the idea on a reluctant 
Churchill at the Casablanca Conference on 24 January 1943, then 
unilaterally made it public. But there is no evidence to justify 
Churchill's fear that Hitler would exploit Allied intransigence to 
bolster German resistance. 50 No power in Germany could compel or 
persuade Hitler to make peace on any terms whatever. The German 
professional officer class, or what was left of it, made no move until 
it was clear that the Allied invasion of Europe, begun on 6 June 
1944, had been successful. Then on 15 July Marshal Rommel sent a 
teletype to Hitler: 'The unequal struggle is nearing its end. I must ask 
you immediately to draw the necessary conclusions from this situa- 
tion.' 51 When Hitler made no response, a Junker bomb-plot took 
place on 20 July. If Hitler had been killed, a military dictatorship 
would have followed, but it is not at all clear that Roosevelt would 
have been prepared to bargain with it, following the Italian example 
(Italy was excluded from the Casablanca 'unconditional surrender' 
formula). 

Hitler, surviving, drew the conclusions: 'Nothing is fated to happen 
to me, all the more so since this isn't the first time I've miraculously 
escaped death ... I am more than ever convinced that I am destined 
to carry on our great common cause to a happy conclusion.' 52 The 
plotters were mostly aristocrats, enjoying their traditional monopoly 
of staff jobs; as a result they had no troops. They could give orders; 
no one followed. Nor did they have popular support, or even 
contacts. Noting their narrow social base, Hitler moved emotionally, 
or rather returned, to the Left. In this last phase he admired Stalin 
more than ever. If Stalin lived ten to fifteen years he would make 
Russia 'the greatest power in the world'. He was a 'beast', but a beast 
'on a grand scale'. Hitler added: 'I have often bitterly regretted I did 



412 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

not purge my officer corps in the way Stalin did.' He now gave his 
Lenin-type 'People's Court' and its radical hanging-judge, Roland 
Freisler, its moment of apotheosis: 'Freisler will take care of things all 
right. He is our Vishinsky.' 53 Hitler adopted the Leninist principle of 
'responsibility of next of kin', while denying it was Bolshevistic - it 
was 'a very old custom practised among our forefathers'. The 
executions of suspects ('I want them to be hanged, strung up like 
butchered cattle'), while on a small scale compared with Stalin's 
killings in 1936-8, continued right up to the end of the regime. 54 

Meanwhile Goebbels, the most socialist-minded of the leading 
Nazis, became Hitler's closest adviser, and was allowed to radicalize 
the war effort, ordering total mobilization, the conscription of 
women, the shutting of theatres and other long-resisted measures. The 
Wehrmacht still numbered over 9 million. While some leading Nazis 
now sought to do a deal with the Anglo-Saxons in the name of 
antibolschevismus. Hitler clung to the image of Frederick the Great, 
surviving hopeless encirclement. He and Goebbels read together 
Carlyle's weird, multi-volume biography of the King, thus dealing a 
stunning blow to the already shaky reputation of the old Scotch 
sage. 55 Far from seeking a common front against Russia, Hitler 
transferred divisions to the West to launch his last offensive in the 
Ardennes, in December 1944, making possible the great Russian push 
of January 1 945, which carried Soviet power into the heart of Europe. 

Hitler remained to the end a socialist, though an eccentric one. Like 
Stalin he lived in hideous discomfort. Ciano was horrified by his 
Rastenburg headquarters, calling its inhabitants troglodytes: 'Smells 
of kitchens, uniforms, heavy boots'. 56 It was a concentration camp- 
monastery - the Escorial without its palatial splendour. Indeed, Hitler 
came to resemble Philip n in his isolation and remoteness, his 
resolution, above all in his cartomania, spending hours studying maps 
already rendered out of date by the march of war, and issuing orders 
for the taking of a tiny bridge or pillbox, often by imaginary soldiers. 
His closest companions were his Alsatian, Blondi, and her pup Wolf. 
Professor Morell, a smart Berlin doctor, gave him sulfanilamide and 
glandular injections; he took glucose, hormones, anti-depressant pills. 
One of his doctors, Karl Brandt, said that he aged 'four or five years 
every year'. His hair went grey. But his capacity for work remained 
impressive to the end. 

Hitler moved down into his bunker under the Berlin Chancellery in 
January 1945, taking Goebbels with him, both breathing socialist fire. 
'Under the ruins of our devastated cities,' Goebbels exulted, 'the last 
so-called achievements of our bourgeois nineteenth century have 
finally been buried.' 57 In between incessant munching of cream cakes 
— Hitler became 'a cake-gobbling human wreck', one of his circle said 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 413 

- he voiced his radical regrets: that he had not exterminated the 
German nobility, that he had come to power 'too easily', not 
unleashing a classical revolution 'to destroy elites and classes', that 
he had supported Franco in Spain instead of the Communists, that he 
had failed to put himself at the head of a movement for the liberation 
of the colonial peoples, 'especially the Arabs', that he had not freed 
the working class from 'the bourgeoisie of fossils'. Above all he 
regretted his leniency, his lack of the admirable ruthlessness Stalin 
had so consistently showed and which invited one's 'unreserved 
respect' for him. One of his last recorded remarks, on 27 April 1945, 
three days before he killed himself (whether by bullet or poison is 
disputed) was: 'Afterwards, you rue the fact that you've been so 
kind.' 58 

Before Hitler died, deploring his benevolence, he had largely 
completed the greatest single crime in history, the extermination of 
the European Jews. The 'Jewish problem' was central to his whole 
view of history, political philosophy and programme of action. Next 
to the provision of space and raw materials for the German 
master-race, the destruction of the Jewish 'bacillus' and its home in 
Bolshevist Russia was the primary purpose of the war. For Hitler the 
years of peace, 1933-9, were in Jewish policy as in everything else 
merely years of preparation. It cannot be too strongly emphasized 
that Hitler's aims could not be achieved except through war and 
under cover of war. Like Lenin and Stalin, Hitler believed in ultimate 
social engineering. The notion of destroying huge categories of 
people whose existence imperilled his historic mission was to him, as 
to them, entirely acceptable. The only thing he feared was the 
publicity and opposition which might prevent him from carrying 
through his necessary task. 

The war, therefore, had the great convenience of plunging Ger- 
many into silence and darkness. On 1 September 1939 he sent a note 
to Philip Bouhler, head of his Chancellery, ordering the extermina- 
tion of the chronically insane and incurable. The work was done by 
ss doctors, who thus acquired experience of selecting and gassing 
large numbers. This programme, in which about 70,000 Germans 
were murdered, could not be kept completely secret. Two prominent 
German ecclesiastics, Bishop Wurm of Wiirttemburg and Bishop- 
Count Galen of Munster, protested — the only time the German 
hierarchy successfully raised angry voices against Nazi crimes — and 
at the end of August 1941 a telephone call from Hitler ended the 
programme. 59 But the 'euthanasia centres' were not closed down. 
They continued to be used to kill insane cases from the concentration 
camps. In retrospect, this programme appears to have been a pilot 
for the larger genocide to follow. 



414 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

For Hitler the war really began on 22 June 1941. That was when he 
could begin not only his eastern clearance programme for German 
expansion but large-scale genocide. There is confusion both about the 
sequence of events and the object of policy, reflecting the ever-changing 
chaos of Hitler's mind and the anarchy of Nazi administration. As early 
as 7 October 1939, by a secret decree, Hitler appointed Himmler to a 
new post as Reich Commissioner for Consolidation of German 
Nationhood, with instructions to undertake a 'racial clean-up' in the 
east, and to prepare the way for the resettlement programme. Many 
murders of Polish Jews were already taking place. It is not known 
precisely when Hitler ordered the 'final solution' to begin or exactly 
how he defined its scope: all his orders were verbal. In March 1941 
Himmler called the first genocide conference, announcing that one of 
the aims of the coming Russian campaign was 'to decimate the Slav 
population by thirty million'. 60 At the end of the same month Hitler 
himself told his senior officers about the Einsatzgruppen extermination 
units which would follow in the wake of the German armies. Two days 
later, on 2 April, Alfred Rosenberg, after a two-hour talk with Hitler, 
wrote in his diary: 'Which I do not want to write down, but will never 
forget.' 61 The ss extermination units began their work immediately the 
invasion started and by the end of 1941 had murdered about 500,000 
Russian Jews (as well as other Russians), chiefly by shooting. However, 
the key document in the genocide programmes appears to be an order 
issued (on the Fiihrer's authority) by Goering on 31 July 1941 to 
Himmler 's deputy and sd Chief, Reinhard Heydrich, whom Hitler 
called 'the man with an iron heart'. This spoke of a total solution, 
Gesamtlosung) and a final solution, Endlosung, 'to solve the Jewish 
problem'. Goering defined 'final' to Heydrich verbally, repeating 
Hitler's own verbal orders : according to the evidence given at his trial in 
1961 by Adolf Eichmann, whom Heydrich appointed his deputy, it 
meant 'the planned biological destruction of the Jewish race in the 
Eastern territories'. The operative date for the programme was April 
1942, to give time for preparation. 62 The executive conference, which 
settled the details, was organized by Eichmann and chaired by Heydrich 
at Wannsee on 20 January 1942. By now much evidence had been 
accumulated about killing methods. Since June 1941, on Himmler's 
instructions, Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Camp 'A' at Auschwitz- 
Birkenau, had been experimenting. Shooting was too slow and messy. 
Carbon monoxide gas was found too slow also. Then in August 1941, 
using 500 Soviet pows as guinea-pigs, Hoess conducted a mass-killing 
with Zyklon-B. This was made by a pest-control firm, Degesch, the 
vermin combatting corporation, a satellite of I.G.Farben. Discovering 
Zyklon-B, said Hoess, 'set my mind at rest'. 63 A huge s s order went out 
for the gas, with instructions to omit the 'indicator' component, which 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 415 

warned human beings of the danger. I.G.Farben's dividends from 
Degesch doubled, 1942-4, and at least one director knew of the use 
being made of the gas: the only protest from Degesch was that 
omitting the 'indicator' might endanger their patent. 64 

The final solution became fact from the spring of 1942. The first 
mass-gassings began at Belzec on 17 March 1942. This camp had the 
capacity to kill 15,000 a day. The next month came Sobibor (20,000 
a day), Treblinka and Maidanek (25,000) and Auschwitz, which 
Hoess called 'the greatest institution for human annihilation of all 
time'. The documentation on the genocide is enormous. 65 The 
figures almost defy belief. By December 1941 Hitler had about 
8,700,000 Jews under his rule. Of these he had by early 1945 
murdered at least 5,800,000: 2,600,00 from Poland, 750,000 from 
Russia, 750,000 from Romania, 402,000 from Hungary, 277,000 
from Czechoslovakia, 180,000 from Germany, 104,000 from Li- 
thuania, 106,000 from the Netherlands, 83,000 from France, 70,000 
from Latvia, 65,000 each from Greece and Austria, 60,000 from 
Yugoslavia, 40,000 from Bulgaria, 28,000 from Belgium and 9,000 
from Italy. At Auschwitz, where 2 million were murdered, the 
process was run like a large-scale industrial operation. German firms 
submitted competitive tenders for the 'processing unit', which had to 
possess 'capacity to dispose of 2,000 bodies every twelve hours'. The 
five furnaces were supplied by the German firm of Topt & Co of 
Erfurt. The gas chambers, described as 'corpse cellars', were designed 
by German Armaments Incorporated, to a specification requiring 
'gas-proof doors with rubber surround and observation post of 
double 8-millimetre glass, type 100/1 92'. 66 The ground over the 
gassing-cellars was a well-kept lawn, broken by concrete 
mushrooms, covering shafts through which the 'sanitary orderlies' 
pushed the amethyst-blue crystals of Zyklon-B. The victims 
marched into the cellars, which they were told were baths, and did 
not at first notice the gas coming from perforations in metal 
columns: 

Then they would feel the gas and crowd together away from the menacing 
columns and finally stampede towards the huge metal door with its little 
window, where they piled up in one blue clammy blood-spattered pyramid, 
clawing and mauling at each other even in death. Twenty-five minutes later 
the 'exhauster' electric pumps removed the gas-laden air, the great metal 
door slid open, and the men of the Jewish Sonderkommando entered, 
wearing gas-masks and gumboots and carrying hoses, for their first task 
was to remove the blood and defecations before dragging the clawing dead 
apart with nooses and hooks, the prelude to the ghastly search for gold and 
the removal of the teeth and hair which were regarded by the Germans as 



416 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

strategic materials. Then the journey by lift or rail-waggon to the furnaces, 
the mill that ground the clinker to fine ash, and the lorry that scattered the 
ashes in the stream of the Sola. 67 

In fact, to save money inadequate quantities of the expensive gas 
were often used, so the healthy victims were merely stunned and 
were then burned alive. 68 

The 'final solution', like most Nazi schemes, degenerated into 
administrative muddle and cross-purposes. As in the Soviet camps, 
internal discipline fell into the hands of professional criminals, the 
dreaded Kapos. Eichmann and Hoess gradually lost effective control. 
There was a fundamental conflict of aims in concentration camp 
policy. Hitler wanted all the Jews (and many other groups) murdered 
at any cost. He rejected savagely military complaints that supplies for 
the desperate battles on the eastern front were being held up by the 
need to transport millions of victims all across Europe (often in 
packed trains of up to one hundred trucks or carriages, holding tens 
of thousands). Himmler, on the other hand, wanted to expand his ss 
'state within a state' into a huge industrial and construction empire, 
which during the war would provide an increasing proportion of 
Germany's military supplies, and after it would build the infrastruc- 
ture of Hitler's planned eastern settlements, with their population of 
150 million. The latter task would take twenty years and require 
14,450,000 slave labourers, allowing for an annual death-rate of 10 
per cent. 69 

The figure is not so fantastic as it appears: in August 1944, there 
were 7,652,000 foreigners working in German industry alone, 
consisting of 1,930,000 prisoners of war, and over 5 million forced 
deportees or slaves. 70 Himmler wanted to use the war to create the 
nucleus of his slave empire and was not therefore anxious to kill Jews 
if he could get work out of them, particularly since he could get hard 
cash for his ss coffers from Krupps, Siemens, I.G.Farben, Rheinmet- 
all, Messerschmidt, Heinkel and other big firms in return for 
concentration camp labour. By the end of 1944 over 500,000 camp 
inmates were being 'leased out' to private industry, and in addition 
Himmler was running his own factories, often with the use of 
'hoarded' Jews whose very existence he concealed from Hitler. 71 

Himmler resolved the dilemma by a compromise, brought German 
industry into the death-camp system, and then worked the slaves 
until they were fit only to be exterminated in the ovens. Auschwitz 
occupies a peculiar place of dishonour in this horror story not only 
because of its unique size but because it was deliberately designed to 
embody this compromise. It was created jointly by the ss and 
I.G.Farben as a synthetic rubber (Buna) and fuel centre. The vast 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 417 

complex consisted of Al, the original concentration camp; A2, the 
extermination plant at Birkenau; A3, the Buna and synthetic fuel 
plant; and A4, I.G.Farben's own concentration camp at Monowitz. 
Farben had its special 'Auschwitz division', with its own firemen and 
camp police, armed with whips, though management complained of 
the noise and number of floggings carried out by the Kapos, 
demanding that these take place within the concentration camp 
proper and not on the work-sites. 

When trains of victims arrived, they were divided into the healthy, 
who went to Monowitz, and the weak, sick, women and children, 
who went straight into the death-camp. The Buna— Monowitz 
workers started each day at 3 am, moving at the 'ss trot', even when 
carrying heavy materials, and confined at work in ten-metre-square 
zones. There were no rest-periods and anyone leaving his zone was 
shot, 'attempting to escape'. There were floggings every day and 
'several hangings a week'. Potato-turnip soup was served at midday, 
a piece of bread in the evening. Fritz Saukel, head of the slave-labour 
system, had laid down: 'All the inmates must be fed, sheltered and 
treated in such a way as to exploit them to the fullest possible extent, 
at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure.' 72 They were in fact 
worse than slaves: 25,000 were literally worked to death at 
Auschwitz alone. Each morning the labour allocation officer picked 
out the sickly for gassing. Farben kept the records, including the 
terminal instruction, Nach Birkenau. The average weight-loss was 
six and a half to nine pounds a week, so the hitherto normally 
nourished could make up the deficiency from his own body for up to 
three months (longer than in most Russian camps of this type). The 
slaves burned up their own body-weight and finally died of exhaus- 
tion. As one historian has put it: 

I. G. Farben reduced slave-labour to a consumable raw material, a human 
one from which the mineral of life was systematically extracted. When no 
usable energy remained, the living dross was shipped to the gassing 
chambers and cremation furnaces of the extermination centre at Birkenau, 
where the ss recycled it into the German war economy — gold teeth for the 
Reichbank, hair for mattresses and fat for soap. 73 

The meagre possessions the dead brought to Auschwitz were offi- 
cially 'confiscated' and sent to Germany. Over one six-week period, 
1 December 1944-15 January 1945, these included 222,269 sets of 
men's suits and underclothes, 192,652 sets of women's clothing, and 
99,922 sets of children's clothes. 74 Yet despite all this gruesome 
meanness, so characteristic of the totalitarian state, Auschwitz was a 
complete economic failure: very little synthetic fuel and no Buna at 
all were produced. 



418 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

Within the general framework of genocide, which engulfed mill- 
ions of Poles and Russians as well as Jews, many bizarre forms of 
cruelty were practised. Himmler's Lebensborn decree of 28 October 
1939 set up stud-farms for the breeding of 'ideal Aryans', and 
women ss officers scoured the concentration camps to kidnap 
Aryan-type children to stock them, 'so that during our lifetime we 
shall become a people of 120 million Germanic souls'. Himmler, 
who admired Lord Halifax's slim figure, ordered women-breeders to 
be fed porridge: 

Englishmen, and particularly English lords and ladies, are virtually brought 
up on this type of food .... To consume it is considered most correct. It is 
precisely these people, both men and women, who are conspicuous for their 
slender figures. For this reason the mothers in our homes should get used to 
porridge and be taught to feed their children on it. Heil Hitler! 75 

At the other end of the spectrum, 350 ss doctors (one in 300 of those 
practising in Germany) took part in experiments on camp inmates. 
Dr Sigmund Rascher, for instance, conducted low-temperature tests 
at Dachau, killing scores, and asked to be transferred to Auschwitz: 
'The camp itself is so extensive that less attention will be attracted to 
the work. For the subjects howl so when they freeze!' Polish girls, 
termed 'rabbits', were infected with gas-gangrenous wounds for 
sulphonamides tests. There was mass sterilization of Russian slave- 
labourers, using X-rays. Other projects included injection of hepati- 
tis virus at Sachsenhausen, of inflammatory liquids into the uterus to 
sterilize at Ravensbruck, the all-women camp, phlegmon-induction 
experiments on Catholic priests at Dachau, injections of typhus- 
vaccine at Buchenwald, and experimental bone-transplants and the 
forced drinking of seawater by gypsies. At Oranienburg selected Jews 
were gassed to provide specimens for Himmler's skeleton collection 
of 'Jewish-Bolshevik commissars who personify a repulsive yet 
characteristic sub-humanity'. 76 

There is a sense in which 'the crime without a name', as Churchill 
termed it, was a national act of wrongdoing. True, the genocide 
programme from first to last, despite its immense scale, was furtive. 
Hitler never once referred to it, even in the endless harangues to 
intimates which form the subjects of his Table-talk and other 
documents. Though he exulted in the slaughter of the July 1944 
plotters and had film of their horrific executions played to him again 
and again, he never visited any of the camps, let alone the death- 
camps. His huge, hate-filled will set the whole process in motion and 
kept it going until the purpose was virtually accomplished. But the 
hate was abstract. It was as though he felt that even his will would 
dissolve if he saw the doomed millions as individual human faces: 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 419 

then his capacity to carry through what he saw as his supreme service 
to German 'culture' would collapse. He relished his murders of the 
well-born generals he knew and loathed; but the massacre of entire 
categories of mankind was nothing more than a distasteful duty. Lenin 
seems to have cultivated exactly the same attitude. Even Stalin, who 
peered through his peep-hole at the trial-agonies of his old comrades, 
never visited the Lubyanka cellars or set foot in his death-camps. 

From Hitler's silence downwards, the entire operation of genocide 
was permeated by unspoken, unspeakable guilt. Even Himmler, the 
archetype of the sacerdotal revolutionary, who superintended all the 
details of the crime, only visited Auschwitz twice. As in all totalitarian 
systems, a false vernacular had to be created to conceal the concrete 
horrors of moral relativism, ss terms for murder included 'special 
treatment', 'resettlement', 'the general line', 'sovereign acts beyond 
the reach of the judiciary', above all 'sending East'. 77 As with the 
murders of 1934, the major crime which was progenitor of the 
colossal crime, a conspiracy of silence must envelop the nation. 
Himmler told his ss major-generals, 4 October 1943: 'Among 
ourselves it should be mentioned quite frankly - but we will never 
speak of it publicly.' Just as in 1934 it had been their duty 'to stand 
comrades who had lapsed up against a wall and shoot them', so now it 
was their duty 'to exterminate the Jewish race'. They had never 
referred publicly to the 1934 killings, and now too they must keep 
silent. Again, he told Gauleiters on 29 May 1944 that before the end of 
the year all the Jews would be dead: 

You know all about it now, and you had better keep it all to yourselves. 
Perhaps at some later, some very much later period we might consider 
whether to tell the German people a little more about this. But I think we had 
better not! It is we here who have shouldered the responsibility, for action as 
well as for an idea, and I think we had better take this secret with us into our 
graves. 78 

Hence security around the death-camps was elaborate. The wife of 
a German officer, who at a confused railway junction got onto a 
death-train by mistake, was ordered to the ovens nonetheless so that 
she could not relate what she had seen. No victim emerged alive from 
Auschwitz until two Slovak Jews escaped in August 1944. All the 
same, millions of Germans knew that something horrible was being 
done to the Jews. There were 900,000 people in the ss alone. 
Countless Germans heard and saw the endless trains rattling through 
the night, and knew their significance, as one recorded remark 
suggests: 'Those damned Jews — they won't even let one sleep at 
night.' 79 There was a huge overlap between the slave system and 
German industry. It might be recalled that the Germans had used 



420 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

slave-labour and working-to-exhaustion in 1916—18; it was a 
national response to war, a salient part of the 'war socialism' Lenin 
so much admired. Race paranoia was deeply rooted in German 
culture and had been fostered by generations of intellectuals. It 
antedated Hitler; dwarfed him. Forty years later it is difficult to 
conceive of the power and ubiquity of inter-white racism, especially 
anti-Semitism (and not in Germany alone). In a sense, then, it was the 
German people who willed the end; Hitler who willed the means. 80 

In another sense the crime had accessories throughout the civilized 
world. There were 150,000 non-German members of the ss. The 
worst massacres of Poles, for instance, were carried out by an ss 
division of 6,500 White Russian pows. 81 Hitler often found willing 
collaborators in hunting down non-German Jews. Ironically, the 
safest places in Europe for Jews were fascist Spain and Portugal, and 
Italy until Hitler set up his puppet regime. The most dangerous was 
France, where the Vichy regime, anti-Semitic from the outset, 
became steadily more so with time. There were two types of French 
Jews, the assimilated Sephardis and Alsacians, and the new arrivals 
and refugees. In November 1941 Vichy set up the Union Generate 
des Israelites de France, largely staffed from the first group, which 
constituted a bureaucratic machine to ship the second group into the 
concentration camps — a miniature Jewish Vichy. 82 Vichy, in effect, 
took an eager part in hustling its foreign-born Jews into the 
death-camps; and its claim that it protected its own Jews was false, 
since of 76,000 Jews handed over by France to the Nazis (of whom 
less than 2,000 survived), a third were French by birth. Those 
murdered included 2,000 under six and 6,000 under thirteen. 83 

The penumbra of guilt spread wider still. In the years 1933-9, 
when Hitler was ambivalent about emigration and the Jews could 
still escape, nobody wanted them. Virtually all European govern- 
ments had an anti-Semitic problem and were terrified of aggravating 
it. Britain firmly closed the open door to Palestine, for fear of the 
Arabs: the 1939 White Paper limited Jewish immigration to 75,000 
over five years. Roosevelt, as usual, devoted a good deal of rhetorical 
sympathy to the Jews but did nothing practical to help them get into 
America. The first reports of genocide reached the World Jewish 
Congress in Lausanne in August 1942. Even Jewish officials, inured 
to horror, were sceptical at first. In April 1943 an Anglo— American 
meeting of officials in Bermuda decided, in effect, that neither nation 
would do anything to help the Jews and would not criticize each 
other for doing nothing — a mutual anti-conscience pact. By August 
1943 it was known, and published, that 1,702,500 Jews had already 
been exterminated. On 1 November Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill 
jointly warned the German leaders that they would be tried for such 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 421 

crimes. On 24 March 1944 Roosevelt issued a further public 
warning. But that was all. Though America had the space and food, 
he would not give asylum. Churchill alone supported action at any 
cost. He was overruled by his united colleagues led by Anthony 
Eden, whose secretary noted: 'Unfortunately A.E. is immovable on 
the subject of Palestine. He loves Arabs and hates Jews.' On 6 July 
1944 Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Jewish Agency, 
begged Eden to use Allied bombers to stop the movement of 
Hungarian Jews, then being incinerated at the rate of 12,000 a day. 
Churchill minuted: 'Get anything out of the Air Force you can, and 
invoke me if necessary.' But nothing was done; and it is unclear 
whether anything effective could have been done by bombing. 84 

By this time most of the Jews were dead. What the survivors 
wanted was evidence that the civilized world had not forgotten them: 
'We didn't pray for our life,' said a survivor, 'we had no hopes for 
that, but for revenge, for human dignity, for punishment to the 
murderers.' 85 The Jews asked for recognition of the unique enormity 
of the crime. It cannot be said that they got it, either from the 
Germans themselves, who might have absolved their shared guilt by 
acknowledging it, or from the Allies. The history of the punishment 
of German war crimes is almost as complicated and confused as the 
crimes themselves. Because Stalin believed, as Lenin had once done, 
that a Soviet Germany would emerge from the war, he underplayed 
German war-guilt in his public statements and encouraged his 
Western supporters to do the same. His private feelings were quite 
different. At the Teheran Conference he rebuked Churchill for 
distinguishing between the German leaders and the mass of the 
people. Equally, for home consumption he instructed Ehrenburg and 
other writers to publish violently racist attacks on the Germans in 
Pravda, Red Star and other papers. 86 Publicly, however, the Com- 
munist line in the West was to treat war-crime as a political not a 
moral issue. In 1942 Victor Gollancz, Britain's leading left-wing 
publicist, coined a famous phrase with his tract Shall our Children 
Live or Die?, which argued that guilt for the war must be placed 
mainly on imperialism: therefore 'everyone of us is "guilty"', though 
capitalists were guiltier than the mass of ordinary people. 87 

In 1945 the Allies were agreed about convicting and hanging the 
leading Nazis. Lower down the scale the difficulties began. The 
Russians were the first to reach the main death-camps. Some of the 
officials there disappeared, possibly to work for their captors. The 
links between the Nazi and Soviet security forces had always been 
strong, and were cordially resumed after the war. Himmler had 
always admired Soviet police methods (he believed Stalin had 
distinguished Mongol blood from Genghis Khan's horde) and his 



422 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

head of the Gestapo, s s General Mueller, probably went to work for the 
nkvd. 88 Many of the Prussian police officials, who had served 
Goering, went on to high office in the police of the East German People's 
Republic, which Stalin in due course set up. 

Among the British and Americans, the ardour to punish lasted longer 
but was eventually damped by the march of history. By the time the 
I.G.Farben executives were sentenced at Nuremberg (29 July 1948), 
the Berlin blockade had started, Germany was now a potential ally and 
the resuscitation of German industry was an Anglo— American 
objective. So Karl Krauch, the man who Nazified the firm and 
personally selected Auschwitz for the Buna plant, got only six years. 
Eleven other executives got prison terms from eight years to eighteen 
months - 'light enough to please a chicken-thief, as the prosecutor, 
Josiah DuBois, angrily put it. 89 By January 1951 all the German 
industrialist war-criminals had been released by act of clemency by the 
Allies. Alfred Krupp, sentenced to forfeit all his property, got it back, 
since John J. McCloy, the US High Commissioner, felt that 'property 
forfeiture was somehow repugnant to American justice'. When the 
work of retribution was handed over by the Allies to the Germans 
themselves, the results did not indicate any intensity of collective 
remorse. An indemnity was paid by the new Federal Government to the 
new Zionist State of Israel. But individual slave-labourers who pressed 
their claims found the German courts unsympathetic. Out of half a 
million surviving slaves, 14,878, after years of litigation, eventually 
received sums rarely amounting to $1,250 each. Rheinmetall, after a 
long legal rearguard action, paid out $425 to each former slave. Krupp 
paid a total of $2,380,000 in 1959, after pressure from the American 
government. Friedrich Flick paid not a penny, and left over $1,000 
million when he died, aged ninety, in 1 972. 90 But who is foolish enough 
to believe there is justice in this world? 

There were many reasons why retribution was confused and 
inadequate. When the Hitler regime collapsed in fragments, America 
and Britain were still waging an increasingly one-sided war of total 
destruction against Japan. The Pacific war saw the greatest naval 
battles in history, determined by the overwhelming advantages of 
resources and technology, which increased inexorably. The Japanese 
began with the brilliant Zero fighter. One fell intact into American 
hands in the Aleutians on 4 June 1942. An aircraft to counter it, the 
Hell-cat, was promptly designed and manufactured in prodigious 
numbers. 91 Japanese aircraft production reached its peak in June 1 944, 
when 2,857 were produced; thereafter, it was steadily reduced by Allied 
bombing. In the whole of the war Japan made only 62,795 aircraft, of 
which 52,109 were lost. 92 The United States was producing more than 
1 00,000 a year by 1 943 . It was the same story with warships. During the 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 423 

war, Japan could only get twenty carriers into commission, of which 
sixteen were destroyed. By the summer of 1944 the United States 
alone had nearly 100 carriers operating in the Pacific. 93 The im- 
balance was reinforced by Japan's irrational strategy. Japanese subma- 
riners were trained only to attack enemy warships. On the General 
Staff, only two officers were allocated to anti-submarine, mining and 
anti-aircraft warfare, contemptuously categorized as 'rear-line 
defence'. Even a limited convoy system was not adopted until 1943 
and full convoying began only in March 1944; by that time the US 
navy had hundreds of submarines and a full-scale 'wolf-pack' 
system. 94 As a result, out of the 6 million tons of shipping with which 
Japan began the war, she lost over 5 million: 50 per cent to 
submarines, 40 per cent to aircraft, the rest to mines. The mistakes of 
the navy compounded that of the army which, in its territorial greed 
during the first five months of war, scattered its forces over 
3,285,000 square miles, with 350 million 'subjects', garrisoned by 
3,175,000 men, most of whom had to be supplied by sea. The result 
was that the Japanese navy destroyed itself, as well as the mercantile 
marine, in the increasingly futile effort to keep the army alive and 
armed. Many in fact starved to death or, lacking ammunition, were 
reduced to fighting with bamboo spears. 95 

The Japanese army strategy was to cling to its gains, arguing that 
US conscripts would be no match for Japanese soldiers in close- 
quarter fighting, and that high casualties would lead American 
public opinion to force its government to compromise. But once the 
Allies had established sea and air superiority, they adopted the 
'Central Pacific strategy' of hopping or leap-frogging the Central 
Pacific islands, on the route to Japan itself, using amphibious 
landings and making maximum advantage of overwhelming fire- 
power, 96 The Japanese fought desperately throughout, but tech- 
nology and productivity allowed the Americans to establish and 
maintain a colonial-era casualty-ratio. The pattern was set in the 
'hinge' battle of Guadalcanal, November 1942, when the Japanese 
lost 25,000 against only 1,592 American fatalities. When the Central 
Pacific offensive began, at Tarawa Atoll in November 1943, the 
Americans had to kill all but seventeen of the 5,000 garrison, and 
lost 1,000 men themselves. As a result, they increased the fire-power 
and lengthened the leap-frogging. At the next island, Kwajalein, the 
air-sea bombardment was so cataclysmic that, an eye-witness said, 
'the entire island looked as if it had been picked up to 20,000 feet 
and then dropped'. Virtually all the 8,500 defenders had to be killed, 
but firepower kept American dead down to 373. 97 These ratios were 
maintained. On Leyte, the Japanese lost all but 5,000 of their 70,000 
men; the Americans only 3,500. At Iwojima, the Americans sus- 



424 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

tained their worst casualty ratio: 4,917 dead to over 18,000 
Japanese; and in taking Okinawa they had their highest casualty-bill: 
12,520 dead or missing, against Japanese losses of 185,000 killed. 
But in general American losses were small. Most Japanese were killed 
by sea or air bombardment, or cut off and starved. They never set 
eyes on an American foot-soldier or got within bayonet-range of 
him. Even in Burma, where the fighting was very severe throughout 
and sea-air superiority could not be used, the Indo-British 14th Army 
killed 128,000 Japanese, against their own total casualties of less 
than 20,000. 98 

The object of the Central Pacific strategy was to bring Japan itself 
within range of land-based heavy bombers, maintaining a round-the- 
clock bombardment on an ever-growing scale. In short, this was the 
war the air expert Douet had predicted in the 1920s, the British 
Appeasers had feared in the 1930s, and which Churchill had tried to 
wage against Germany. It started in November 1944, when the 
captured Guam base came into full use, and B29 Flying Fortresses, 
each carrying eight tons of bombs, could attack in 1,000-strong 
masses with fighter-escorts. In 1939 Roosevelt had sent messages to 
the belligerents begging them to refrain from the 'inhuman barbar- 
ism' of bombing civilians. That attitude did not survive Pearl 
Harbor. From March to July 1945, against virtually no resistance, 
the B29s dropped 100,000 tons of incendiaries on sixty-six Japanese 
cities and towns, wiping out 170,000 square miles of closely 
populated streets. On the night of 9-10 March, 300 B29s, helped by 
a strong north wind, turned the old swamp-plane of Musashi, on 
which Tokyo is built, into an inferno, destroying fifteen square miles 
of the city, killing 83,000 and injuring 102,000. A British eye-witness 
in a nearby pow camp compared it to the horror of the 1923 
earthquake which he had also experienced." Even before the 
dropping of the A-bombs, Japanese figures show that raids on 
sixty-nine areas had destroyed 2,250,000 buildings, made 9 million 
homeless, killed 260,000 and injured 412,000. These raids increased 
steadily in number and power; and in July the Allied fleets closed in, 
using their heavy guns to bombard the coastal cities from close 
range. 

On 16 July Oppenheimer's plutonium bomb was exploded on the 
Almogordo bombing-range in New Mexico. It generated a fireball 
with a temperature four times that at the centre of the sun. 
Oppenheimer quoted the phrase from the Bhagavadgita, 'the ra- 
diance of a thousand suns ... I am become as death, the destroyer of 
worlds.' Fermi, more prosaically, calculated that the shock-wave 
indicated a blast of 10,000 tons of tnt. The news was flashed to the 
new American President, Harry S.Truman, on his way back from 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 425 

Potsdam. A protocol, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt at the 
latter's Hyde Park estate on 9 September 1944, had stated that 'when 
the bomb is finally available it might perhaps after mature considera- 
tion be used against the Japanese'. Truman promptly signed an order 
to use the bomb as soon as possible and there does not seem to have 
been any prolonged discussion about the wisdom or morality of 
using it, at any rate at the top political and military level. As General 
Groves put it: 'The Upper Crust want it as soon as possible.' 100 
America and Britain were already hurling at Japan every ounce of 
conventional explosive they could deliver, daily augmented by new 
technology and resources; to decline to use the super-bomb would 
have been illogical, indeed irresponsible, since its novelty might have 
an impact on Japan's so far inflexible resolve to continue resistance. 

The Emperor had been told that the war could not be won as early 
as February 1942. In 1943 the navy had reached the conclusion that 
defeat was inevitable. In 1944 Tojo had been thrown out by a navy 
putsch. None of this made any difference. The fear of assassination 
was too great. In May 1945 Russia was asked to mediate. But Stalin 
sat on the offer, since in January at Yalta he had been promised 
substantial territorial rewards to enter the Japanese war in August. 
On 6 June the Japanese Supreme Council approved a document, 
'Fundamental Policy to be Followed henceforth in the Conduct of the 
War', which asserted 'we shall . . . prosecute the war to the bitter 
end'. The final plan for the defence of Japan itself, 'Operation 
Decision', provided for 10,000 suicide planes (mostly converted 
trainers), fifty-three infantry divisions and twenty-five brigades: 
2,350,000 trained troops would fight on the beaches, backed by 4 
million army and navy civil employees and a civilian militia of 28 
million. They were to have weapons which included muzzle-loaders, 
bamboo spears and bows and arrows. Special legislation was passed 
by the Diet to form this army. 101 The Allied commanders assumed 
that their own forces must expect up to a million casualties if an 
invasion of Japan became necessary. How many Japanese lives 
would be lost? Assuming comparable ratios to those already exper- 
ienced, it would be in the range of 10-20 million. 

The Allied aim was to break Japanese resistance before an invasion 
became unavoidable. On 1 August 820 B29s unloaded 6,600 tons of 
explosive on five towns in North Kyushu. Five days later America's 
one, untested uranium bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan's 
eighth largest city, headquarters of the 2nd General Army and an 
important embarkation port. Some 720,000 leaflets warning that the 
city would be 'obliterated' had been dropped two days before. No 
notice was taken, partly because it was rumoured Truman's mother 
had once lived nearby, and it was thought that the city, being pretty, 



426 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

would be used by the Americans as an occupation centre. Of the 
245,000 people in the city, about 100,000 died that day, about 
100,000 subsequently. 102 Some died without visible injury or cause. 
Others were covered with bright, multi-coloured spots. Many vo- 
mited blood. One man put his burned hand in water and 'something 
strange and bluish came out of it, like smoke'. Another, almost blind, 
regained perfect sight; but all his hair fell out. 

Publicly, the Japanese government reaction was to send a protest 
to the world through the Swiss embassy. Having ignored inter- 
national law for twenty years they now denounced 'the disregard of 
international law by the American government, particularly the 
brutality of the new land-mine used against Hiroshima'. Privately, 
they summoned Nishina, head of their atomic programme, to Tokyo 
to demand whether the Hiroshima bomb was a genuine nuclear 
weapon and, if so, whether he could duplicate it within six 
months. 103 This does not suggest that a single atomic weapon would 
have been decisive. 

The second, plutonium-type, bomb was dropped on 9 August, not 
on its primary target (which the pilot could not find) but on its 
alternative one which, by a cruel irony, was the Christian city of 
Nagasaki, the centre of resistance to Shinto; 74,800 were killed by it 
that day. This may have persuaded the Japanese that the Americans 
had a large stock of such bombs (in fact only two were ready, and 
scheduled for dropping on 13 and 16 August). On the following day 
Russia, which now had 1,600,000 men on the Manchurian border, 
declared war, following the bargain made at Yalta. A few hours 
before, the Japanese had cabled accepting in principle the Allied terms 
of unconditional surrender. Nuclear warfare was then suspended, 
though conventional raids continued, 1,500 B29s bombing Tokyo 
from dawn to dusk on 13 August. 

The final decision to surrender was taken on 14 August. The War 
Minister and the two chiefs of staff opposed it, and the Prime 
Minister, Admiral Suzuki, had to ask the Tenno to resolve the 
dispute. As Hirohito later put it: 

At the time of the surrender, there was no prospect of agreement no matter 
how many discussions they had .... When Suzuki asked me at the Imperial 
conference which of the two views should be taken, I was given the 
opportunity to express my own free will for the first time without violating 
anybody else's authority or responsibilities. 104 

Hirohito then recorded a surrender message to the Japanese people 
which admitted that 'the war situation has developed not necessarily 
to Japan's advantage' and that in order to avoid 'the total extinction 
of human civilization' Japan would have to 'endure the unendurable 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 427 

and suffer what is unsufferable'. 105 Army officers broke into the 
palace to destroy this recording before it was broadcast, killed the 
head of the Imperial Guard and set fire to the homes of the Prime 
Minister and the chief court minister. But they failed to stop the 
broadcast; and immediately after it the War Minister and others 
committed suicide in the Palace square. 106 

The evidence does not suggest that the surrender could have been 
obtained without the A-bombs being used. Without them, there 
would have been heavy fighting in Manchuria, and a further 
intensification of the conventional bombardment (already nearing 
the nuclear threshold of about 10,000 tons of tnt a day), even if an 
invasion had not been required. The use of nuclear weapons thus 
saved Japanese, as well as Allied, lives. Those who died in Hiroshima 
and Nagasaki were the victims not so much of Anglo— American 
technology as of a paralysed system of government made possible by 
an evil ideology which had expelled not only absolute moral values 
but reason itself. 

The true nature of Japan's form of totalitarianism only became 
apparent when the pow camps were opened up and the International 
Military Tribunal began its work. Its president, Sir William Webb, 
noted: 

... the crimes of the Japanese accused were far less heinous, varied and 
extensive than those of the Germans accused at Nuremberg [but] torture, 
murder, rape and other cruelties of the most barbarous character were 
practised on such a vast scale and on such a common pattern that the only 
conclusion possible was that those atrocities were either secretly ordered or 
wilfully permitted by the Japanese government or its members, or by the 
leaders of the Armed Forces. 107 

David James, the British interpreter who visited the main camps after 
the surrender, noted the collapse of absolute moral values among 
officers of the post- 1920s intakes, who had been 'thoroughly drilled 
in Kodo and state Shinto' and who were responsible for the routine 
cruelties: 'they had the same killing instincts in and out of action .... 
For that reason there was that common pattern of atrocity which 
appeared to surprise the Tribunal sitting in Tokyo.' The regime did 
not possess concentration camps as such: at the most it had only four 
hundred political prisoners of its own. But its pow camps were run 
on the same economic principles as Nazi and Soviet slave-camps. 
After visiting them James reported in September 1945: 

The basic principles of Japanese pow administration were: extract the 
maximum amount of work at the minimum cost in food and military 
supplies. In the end this plunged them into an abyss of crime which engulfed 



428 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

the entire administration and turned Japanese into murderers pure and 
simple .... All camps were run on the same lines: they did not break any of 
their own regulations ... if we try them we must bring evidence against 
individuals but it is the system which produced the criminals. 108 

Hence, of the 50,00 prisoners who worked on the Siam railway, 
16,000 died of torture, disease and starvation. Captured Japanese 
field orders repeatedly emphasized that prisoners thought to be of no 
use were to be killed. Evidence before the courts showed that 
Japanese medical officers removed hearts and livers from healthy 
prisoners while they were still alive. Cannibalism of Allied prisoners 
was authorized when other food was not available. The Japanese 
killed more British troops in prison camps than on the field of battle. 
The Japanese pow record, in fact, was much worse than the Nazis': 
of 235,000 Anglo-American pows held by Germany and Italy only 4 
per cent died, whereas of the 132,000 in Japanese custody 27 per 
cent died. 109 

The Allied Tribunal in Tokyo sentenced twenty-five major war 
criminals, especially those responsible for planning the war and the 
four major horrors - the Nanking massacre, the Bataan 'death 
march', the Thai-Burma railway and the sack of Manila. Seven, 
including Tojo, were hanged. Local military commissions con- 
demned a further 920 war-criminals to death and over 3,000 to 
prison. Of the non-white judges of the Tribunal, the Indian, Radha- 
bino Pal, dissented, saying the Japanese had acted throughout only 
in self-defence and that the trial was 'victors' justice'. The Filipino 
judge, Delfin Jarahilla, said the sentences were too lenient. In fact 
Japanese atrocities against Indian and Filippino soldiers and against 
Chinese, Malay and other non-white civilians were infinitely more 
savage and numerous than any inflicted on the Anglo-Americans. 110 
The chief victims of the system were the Japanese people, of whom 
more than 4 million died: for the same dogma which taught men to 
treat prisoners as capital criminals was responsible both for the 
decision to embark on suicidal war and the delay in making peace. 
Prime Minister Konoye, one of the guilty men, left by his deathbed a 
copy of Oscar Wilde's De Profundis, having carefully underlined the 
words: Terrible as was what the world did to me, what I did to 
myself was far more terrible still' - an epitaph for totalitarian 
Japan. 111 And, as we have noted time and again in this book, the 
holistic principle of moral corruption operates a satanic Gresham's 
Law, in which evil drives out good. The American aircraft which 
destroyed the convoy reinforcing the Lae garrison in New Guinea, 3 
March 1943, machine-gunned the survivors swimming in the water, 
reporting: 'It was a grisly task, but a military necessity since Japanese 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 429 

soldiers do not surrender and, within swimming distance of shore, 
they could not be allowed to land and join the Lae garrison.' 112 It 
became commonplace for the Allies to shoot Japanese attempting to 
surrender. One of the defending counsel at the Tribunal, Captain 
Adolf Feel Jr, exclaimed bitterly: 'We have defeated our enemies on 
the battlefield but we have let their spirit triumph in our hearts.' 113 
That was an exaggeration; but it contained an element of truth. The 
small-scale Japanese bombing of Chinese cities in 1937-8 had been 
condemned by the entire liberal establishment in America. When the 
time came to determine the first target for the atom bomb, it was the 
President of Harvard, James Conant, representing the interests of 
civilization on the National Defense Research Committee, who made 
the decisive suggestion 'that the most desirable target would be a 
vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely 
surrounded by workers' houses'. 114 

In any case, the confusion of moral issues by the end of the war 
was fundamentally compounded by the presence, in the ranks of the 
righteous, of the Soviet totalitarian power. There was scarcely a 
crime the Nazis or the knights of bushido had committed, or even 
imagined, which the Soviet regime had not also perpetrated, usually 
on an even larger scale. It ran precisely the type of system which had 
produced the war and its horrors. More specifically, the Nazi-Soviet 
Pact of September 1939 and the Japanese-Soviet Pact of April 1941 
had made the Axis aggressions possible. 

Nevertheless, Soviet Russia not only judged the guilty of the war it 
had helped to create but emerged as its sole beneficiary, by virtue of 
precisely one of those secret wartime treaties - or bribes - which the 
Treaty of Versailles had so roundly condemned. And not only 
Versailles. The Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 (reiterated in the 
United Nations Declaration of 1 January 1942) stated that the 
signatories 'seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other . . . they 
desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the 
freely-expressed wishes of the peoples concerned'. The Anglo- 
Russian Treaty of Alliance, 26 May 1942, stated (Article 5): ' ... 
they will act in accordance with the two principles of not seeking 
territorial aggrandizement for themselves and of non-interference in 
the internal affairs of other states'. Yet at the Yalta Conference of 
January 1945, in return for agreeing to enter the war against Japan 
'two or three months after Germany has surrendered', Stalin de- 
manded recognition of Russia's possession of Outer Mongolia; 
southern Sakhalin and adjacent islands; internationalization of Da- 
rien with the safeguarding of the 'pre-eminent interests of the Soviet 
Union'; the lease of Port Arthur as a base; the right to operate, jointly 
with the Chinese, the Chinese Eastern railway and the South 



430 SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 

Manchurian railroad, with safeguards for 'the pre-eminent interests 
of the Soviet Union'; and, by outright annexation, the Kuril Islands. 
Roosevelt agreed to all these acquisitive conditions virtually without 
argument; and Churchill, desperate for his support on issues nearer 
home, acquiesced, since the Far East was largely 'an American 
affair .... To us the problem was remote and secondary.' 115 

China, the principal victim of this gross act of territorial larceny, 
which made the destruction of her regime possible, was not present 
at Yalta and, though an ally, was not even informed of these terms in 
principle until six months later, or in detail until 14 August, by which 
time Russia had declared war and the agreement was irreversible. 
The official Russian declaration of war was not issued until four 
hours after the Japanese had agreed in principle to yield. 116 Stalin got 
his blood-bargain for nothing, and the legitimate powers could not 
justify the surrender of their salient wartime principle even on 
grounds of iron military necessity. 

What gave an additional dimension of mockery to the trials of 
German and Japanese war-criminals was that, at the very time when 
the evidence for them was being collected, Britain and America were 
themselves assisting Stalin to perpetrate a crime on a comparable 
scale, to the point of using force to deliver the victims into his hands. 
The Allies knew, and said nothing, about the Soviet deportation of 
eight entire nations in the years 1941 and 1943-4, though this was a 
war-crime under the definition of genocide later drawn up by the 
United Nations (9 December 1948). But they could not ignore the 
Soviet demand, made on 31 May 1944, that any Russian nationals 
who fell into Allied hands during the liberation of Europe must be 
returned to Russia, whether or not they were willing. In practice it was 
found that 10 per cent of 'German' prisoners were in fact Russians. 
Some wanted to return; some did not. They were units in a vast human 
convulsion few of them understood. A British intelligence report (17 
June 1944) noted: They were never asked if they would like to join the 
German army but simply given German uniforms and issued with 
rifles .... These Russians never considered themselves anything but 
prisoners.' 117 The Americans resolved the dilemma by treating any 
prisoner in German uniform as German unless he insisted he was not. 
The British Foreign Office insisted on a pedantic rectitude. Its legal 
adviser, Sir Patrick Dean, minuted (24 June): 

This is purely a question for the Soviet authorities and does not concern His 
Majesty's Government. In due course all those with whom the Soviet 
authorities desire to deal must be handed over to them, and we are not 
concerned with the fact that they may be shot or otherwise more harshly 
dealt with than they might be under English law. 



SUPERPOWER AND GENOCIDE 431 

On this basis, and despite Churchill's misgivings, the Foreign Secre- 
tary, Anthony Eden, forced through the War cabinet a decision (4 
September 1944) which wholly conceded Stalin's case, and which 
was later written into the Yalta agreement. 118 

As a result, many hundreds of thousands of human beings were 
dispatched to Stalin's care. Of the first batch of 10,000, all but 
twelve went voluntarily. An American diplomat watched their 
arrival: They were marched off under heavy guard to an unknown 
destination.' With time the reluctance increased. The men aboard the 
Empire Pride, which docked at Odessa on 10 June 1945, had to be 
held under armed guard and included many sick and injured from 
desperate suicide attempts. A British observer recorded: 

The Soviet authorities refused to accept any of the stretcher cases as such 
and even the patients who were dying were made to walk off the ship 
carrying their own baggage . . . [One] prisoner who had attempted suicide 
was very roughly handled and his wound opened up and allowed to bleed. 
He was taken off the ship and marched behind a packing case on the docks. 
A shot was heard but nothing more was seen. 

He added that thirty-one prisoners were taken behind a warehouse, 
and fifteen minutes later machine-gun fire was heard. The senior 
pow on the ship, a major, informed on about 300 of those on board, 
all of whom were probably shot. Then the major was shot too - a 
typical Stalin touch. 119 

In an excess of zeal, the British Foreign Office also handed over 
50,000 Cossacks who had surrendered in South Austria. These men 
had been refugees for over a generation and were not liable to 
repatriation even under the Yalta deal; but they were given to Stalin 
as a kind of human bonus, together with their wives and children. 
Some 25,000 Croats were likewise 'returned' to the Communist 
regime in Yugoslavia, where they became showpieces of a 'death 
march' through the cities: '. . . starved, thirsty, emaciated, disfigured, 
suffering and agonizing, they were forced to run long distances 
alongside their "liberators", who were riding on horses or in 
carts'. 120 In order to force these men, women and children across the 
frontiers, British troops had to use their bayonets, in some cases 
shooting to kill to break resistance, and occasionally employing even 
flame-throwers. There were large numbers of suicides, sometimes of 
whole families. 121 Of those presented to Stalin many were promptly 
shot. The rest lingered on in the camps, their existence unknown or 
forgotten, until in due course Solzhenitsyn drew attention to the vast 
scale of this particular infamy. But of course forcible repatriation 
was only one aspect of the problem raised for the Anglo-Saxon 
powers by their now triumphant totalitarian ally. 



THIRTEEN 

Peace by Terror 



On 10 January 1946 the Tory MP and diarist 'Chips' Channon 
attended a society wedding in London and remarked to another 
guest, Lady ('Emerald') Cunard, 'how quickly normal life had been 
resumed. "After all", I said, pointing to the crowded room, "this is 
what we have been fighting for." "What," said Emerald, "are they 
all Poles?'" 1 

It was, indeed, all too easy to forget Poland. Yet Poland was the 
cause of the war in the sense that, if Poland had not existed, the war 
would have taken a radically different course. And Poland termi- 
nated the war too in the sense that it provoked the collapse of the 
wartime Alliance and the beginning of democratic— Communist con- 
frontation. The tale was resumed where it had left off when Stalin 
and Hitler signed the pact of August 1939, and Soviet Russia now 
represented the acquisitive totalitarian principle on the world stage. 
Poland was the awkward piece on the global chessboard, a reminder 
that the war had not been so much a conflict between right and 
wrong as a struggle for survival. 

Of course the notion that the 'Grand Alliance' was in any way 
altruistic had been an illusion from the start. It was largely the 
creation of Roosevelt, partly for his own political purposes, partly 
because he believed it. Those of his countrymen who had long 
professional experience of dealing with Stalin and his government 
were hotly, despairingly, opposed to Roosevelt's line. Ambassador 
Laurence Steinhardt, who succeeded Davies in Moscow, shared the 
hard-line State Department view, known as the 'Riga school': 

Approaches by Britain or the United States must be interpreted here as signs 
of weakness . . . the moment these people here get it into their heads that we 
are appeasing them, making up to them or need them, they immediately 
stop being co-operative .... My experience has been that they respond only 
to force and if force cannot be applied, to straight oriental bartering. 2 

432 



PEACE BY TERROR 433 

Roosevelt would have none of this. The moment Hitler's declaration 
of war made Russia America's ally, he devised procedures for 
bypassing the State Department and the Embassy and dealing with 
Stalin directly. 3 His intermediary was Harry Hopkins, a political 
fixer who reported back that Stalin, naturally, was delighted with the 
idea: '[he] has no confidence in our ambassador or in any of our 
officials'. 4 Roosevelt also wanted to bypass Churchill, whom he 
thought an incorrigible old imperialist, incapable of understanding 
ideological idealism. He wrote to him, 18 March 1942: 'I know you 
will not mind my being brutally frank when I tell you that I think 
that I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign 
Office or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top 
people. He thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to 
do so.' 5 This vanity, so reminiscent of Chamberlain's belief that he 
alone could 'handle' Hitler, was compounded by an astonishing 
naivety. He did not believe Stalin wanted territory. He rebuked 
Churchill: 'You have four-hundred years of acquisitive instinct in 
your blood and you just don't understand how a country might not 
want to acquire land somewhere if they can get it.' 6 'I think', he said 
of Stalin, 'that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing 
from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything 
and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.' 7 

The menace Roosevelt's blindness constituted to the post-war 
stability of Europe first became apparent at the Teheran Conference 
which Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin attended in November 1943. 
The chairman of the British chiefs of staff, Sir Alan Brooke, summed 
it up: 'Stalin has got the President in his pocket.' 8 Churchill 
complained to one of his Ministers of State, Harold Macmillan: 
'Germany is finished, though it may take some time to clean up the 
mess. The real problem now is Russia. I can't get the Americans to 
see it.' 9 Throughout 1944, though the invasion of Europe was 
successfully launched, Churchill's anxieties increased. After the 
Allied breakout of July— August 1944, the pace of the advance slowed 
down. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander, refused to 
accept the salient point that the degree to which his troops pene- 
trated into Central Europe would in fact determine the post-war 
map: 'I would be loath to hazard American lives for purely political 
purposes,' he insisted. 10 As the Soviets advanced, they made their 
hostile intentions plain enough. Seizing the German experimental 
submarine station in Gdynia, they refused Allied naval experts access 
to its secrets, though the battle of the Atlantic was still raging and the 
convoys carrying arms to Russia were still under fierce U-boat 
attacks. 11 The American generals wanted to preserve the maximum 
co-operation with the Soviet armed forces so that, at the earliest 



434 PEACE BY TERROR 

possible moment, they could transfer troops to the East to finish 
Japan (with, they hoped, massive Soviet support), and then all go 
home. As Churchill saw it, that would leave the British, with twelve 
divisions (about 820,000 men), facing 13,000 Soviet tanks, 16,000 
front-line aircraft and 525 divisions totalling over 5 million. 12 His 
task, as a Foreign Office memo put it, was to discover how 'to make 
use of American power', to steer 'this great unwieldy barge' into 'the 
right harbour'; otherwise it would 'wallow in the ocean, an isolated 
menace to navigation'. 13 

Churchill decided to pursue a two-fold policy: to bargain realisti- 
cally with Stalin when he could, and to seek to screw Roosevelt up to 
the sticking-point at the same time. In October 1944 he went to 
Moscow and thrust at Stalin what he called a 'naughty document', 
which set out, since 'Marshal Stalin was a realist', the 'proportion of 
interests' of the Great Powers in five Balkan countries: Yugoslavia 
and Hungary were to be split 50-50 between Russia and the rest; 
Russia was to have 90 per cent in Romania and 75 per cent in 
Bulgaria; while Britain, in accord with the USA, was to have 90 per 
cent in Greece. According to the minutes taken by the British 
Ambassador, Sir Archibald Clark-Kerr, Stalin haggled over Bulga- 
ria, where he evidently wanted 90 per cent; then he signed the paper 
with a tick of a blue pencil. He also agreed to hold back the Italian 
Communists. 14 

The 'naughty document' was in effect an attempt to exclude 
Russia from the Mediterranean at the price of giving her Romania 
and Bulgaria as satellites. Churchill calculated that Greece was the 
only brand to be saved from the burning, for British troops were 
already in place there: what he secured in Moscow was Stalin's 
agreement to give Britain a free hand - and it was promptly used. On 
4 December, when civil war broke out in Athens, Churchill deter- 
mining to use force to crush the Communists: he worked late into 
the night sending out cables, 'sitting gyrating in his armchair and 
dictating on the machine to Miss Layton, who did not bat an eyelid 
at the many blasphemies with which the old man interspersed his 
official phrases'. His key cable to General Scobie, the British 
commander, insisted: 'We have to hold and dominate Athens. It 
would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if 
possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.' 15 Bloodshed was 
necessary; but Greece was saved for democracy. Indeed, though 
stability in the Mediterranean theatre was not assured until the 
Communists lost the Italian elections in April 1948, Churchill 
effectively, and almost singlehandedly, kept totalitarianism out of 
the Mediterranean for a generation by his vigorous policy in late 
1944 - his last great contribution to human freedom. 



PEACE BY TERROR 435 

But Churchill was powerless to save Eastern Europe. As he put it 
in a cabinet minute: 

It is beyond the power of this country to prevent all sorts of things crashing 
at the present time. The responsibility lies with the United States and my- 
desire is to give them all the support in our power. If they do not feel able to 
do anything, then we must let matters take their course. 16 

But at the critical meeting at Yalta in January 1945, Roosevelt 
deliberately blocked Churchill's attempts to co-ordinate Anglo- 
American policy in advance: he did not wish, said Averell Harriman, 
to 'feed Soviet suspicions that the British and Americans would be 
operating in concert'. 17 When Poland came up, Roosevelt settled for 
a Russian agreement to elections in which 'all democratic and 
anti-Nazi parties shall have the right to take part', but he did not 
back the British demand for international supervision of the poll. 
Instead he produced a typical piece of Rooseveltian rhetoric, a 
'Declaration on Liberated Europe', with vague commitments to 'the 
right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which 
they will live'. The Russians were happy to sign it, especially after 
they heard Roosevelt's staggering announcement that all American 
forces would be out of Europe within two years: that was just what 
Stalin wanted to know. 18 

The Cold War may be said to date from the immediate aftermath 
of the Yalta Conference, to be precise from March 1945. Of course 
in a sense Soviet Russia had waged Cold War since October 1917: it 
was inherent in the historical determinism of Leninism. The pragma- 
tic alliance from June 1941 onwards was a mere interruption. It was 
inevitable that Stalin would resume his hostile predation sooner or 
later. His mistake was to do so too quickly. It was not that he was 
impatient, like Hitler. He did not believe in an imminent eschatology. 
But he was greedy. He was too cautious to follow Hitler's example of 
systematically creating opportunities for plunder, but he could not 
resist taking such opportunities when they presented themselves. His 
sensible tactic was to hold his hand until the Americans had vanished 
to the other side of the Atlantic. Instead, seeing the Polish fruit was 
ripe, he could not resist taking it. Roosevelt's aide Admiral Leahy, 
the most hard-headed member of the American delegation, had 
complained even at Yalta that the Polish agreement was 'so elastic 
that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington 
without ever technically breaking it'. 19 But once the commission set 
up by Yalta to fulfil the free election pledge met on 23 February, it 
became clear Stalin intended to ignore his pledges. The critical 
moment came on 23 March, when Molotov announced the elections 
would be held Soviet-style. When Roosevelt got Harriman's account 



436 PEACE BY TERROR 

of this meeting two days later, he banged his fist on his wheelchair: 
'Averell is right. We can't do business with Stalin. He has broken 
every one of the promises he made at Yalta.' 20 Roosevelt's political 
education was assisted by a series of thirteen forceful messages 
Churchill sent him, 8 March-12 April 1945; and disillusioned at last, 
he went to Warm Springs to die, telling a journalist that either Stalin 
was not in control or was 'not a man of his word'. 21 

Nevertheless, in his last weeks Roosevelt did nothing to encourage 
Eisenhower to push on rapidly towards Berlin, Vienna and Prague, as 
the British wanted. The Americans could not understand', General 
Montgomery wrote sadly, 'that it was of little avail to win the war 
strategically if we lost it. politically.' 22 The new President, Harry 
Truman, was not a member of the wealthy, guilt-ridden East Coast 
establishment and had none of Roosevelt's fashionable progressive 
fancies. He was ignorant, but he learnt fast; his instincts were 
democratic and straightforward. At 5.30 on 23 April he summoned 
Molotov to Blair House (he had not yet moved into the White House) 
and told him Russia must carry out what it had agreed at Yalta on 
Poland: 'I gave it to him straight. I let him have it. It was the straight 
one-two to the jaw.' Molotov: 'I have never been talked to like that in 
my life.' Truman: 'Carry out your agreements and you won't get 
talked to like that.' 23 But Truman could not transform American 
military policy in the last days of the war. General Bradley calculated it 
would cost 100,000 US casualties to take Berlin; General Marshall 
said that capturing Prague was not possible; General Eisenhower was 
opposed to anything which ended military co-operation with the Red 
Army; all wanted Soviet assistance against Japan. 24 So Eastern Europe 
and most of the Balkans were lost to totalitarianism. 

It was unclear for some time whether Western Europe could be 
saved too. Even at the political and diplomatic level, it took precious 
weeks and months to reverse the Roosevelt policy. In the first half of 
1945 the State Department was still trying to prevent the publication 
of any material critical of Soviet Russia, even straight factual 
journalism, such as William White's Report on the Russians. 15 At 
Potsdam, in July, Truman had at his elbow ex-Ambassador Davies, 
now the proud holder of the Order of Lenin, who urged, 'I think 
Stalin's feelings are hurt. Please be nice to him.' 26 Churchill, defeated 
at the elections on 25 July, had a dream in which he saw himself lying 
under a white sheet, his feet stretched out: dead. 27 His Labour 
successors, obsessed with home problems and Britain's appalling 
financial plight, talked vaguely of rebuilding a European alliance with 
France, but they were more afraid of a resurgent Germany than a 
Soviet steamroller. 28 There were many who thought the game was up. 
Harriman, back from Moscow, told the Navy Secretary, James 



PEACE BY TERROR 437 

Forrestal, that 'half and maybe all of Europe might be Communist by 
the end of next winter'. 29 

Again, it was Stalin's greed which led him to overplay his hand and 
so reverse the process of American withdrawal. And it was a greed 
not only for land and power but for blood. He arrested sixteen lead- 
ing non-Communist Polish politicians, accused them of 'terrorism' and 
set in motion the machinery for the last of his show-trials. 30 Ameri- 
can envoys and commanders on the spot sent messages confirming 
the same pattern everywhere: Robert Patterson from Belgrade re- 
ported that anyone seen with a British or American was immediately 
arrested; Maynard Barnes cabled details about a bloodbath of 
20,000 in Bulgaria; Arthur Schoenfeld described the imposition of a 
Communist dictatorship in Hungary; Ellery Stone in Rome advised 
that a Communist putsch was likely in Italy. William Donovan, head 
of the Office of Strategic Services, then America's nearest approach 
to an intelligence agency, advised measures to co-ordinate Western 
defence on the basis of the cumulatively terrifying reports flowing 
into his office from American agents all over Europe. 31 But it was 
Stalin's policies which supplied the raw material for these reports. 
And it was Stalin's brand of intransigent diplomacy, conducted 
through Molotov, which brought matters to a head at the Foreign 
Ministers Conference in Moscow in December 1945. There, Ernest 
Bevin, Britain's new Foreign Secretary, bluntly called Molotov's 
arguments 'Hitlerite philosophy'; and James Byrnes, Secretary of 
State, said Russia was 'trying to do in a slick-dip way what Hitler 
tried to do in domineering smaller countries by force'. 32 When 
Byrnes reported back on 5 January 1946, Truman made his mind up: 
'I do not think we should play compromise any longer .... I am tired 
of babying the Soviets.' 33 The next month a well-timed 8,000-word 
cable arrived from George Kennan in Moscow, which crystallized 
what most people in the Administration were beginning to feel about 
the Soviet threat: the 'Long Telegram', as it came to be known. 'It 
reads exactly', its author wrote, 'like one of those primers put out by 
alarmed congressional committees or by the Daughters of the 
American Revolution, designed to arouse the citizenry to the dangers 
of the Communist conspiracy.' 34 

A fortnight later, on 5 March, Churchill made the Cold War a 
public fact when he delivered a speech, under Truman's sponsorship, 
at the university of Fulton: 

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has 
descended across the continent. Beyond that line lie all the capitals of the 
ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe . . . what I must call the Soviet 
sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet 



438 PEACE BY TERROR 

influence but to a very high and in many cases increasing measure of control 
from Moscow. 

Since, he added, the Russians respected military strength, America 
and Britain must continue their joint defence arrangements, so that 
there would be 'no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its 
temptation to ambition and adventure' but an 'overwhelming assu- 
rance of security'. Afterwards, at a dinner given by the owner of 
Time, Henry Luce, the triumphant orator gobbled caviare: 'You 
know, Uncle Joe used to send me a lot of this. But I don't suppose I 
shall get any more now.' By speaking at precisely the right time - by 
May US polls showed that 83 per cent of the nation favoured his idea 
of a permanent military alliance — Churchill had averted any 
possibility of a repetition of the tragic American withdrawal from 
Europe in 1919. He claimed he lost $75 playing poker with Truman, 
'But it was worth it.' 35 

Stalin continued to draw the Americans deeper into Cold War. In 
March 1946 he missed the deadline for the withdrawal of his 
troops from Iran, and finally did so only after an angry confrontation 
at the new United Nations Security Council. In August the Yugoslavs 
shot down two American transport planes and the same month 
Stalin began putting pressure on Turkey. The Americans responded 
accordingly. The prototype of the cia was set up, and at a White 
House party to celebrate, Truman handed out black hats, cloaks and 
wooden daggers, and stuck a fake black moustache on Admiral 
Leahy's face. 36 America and Canada formed a joint air and anti- 
submarine defence system. The British and US air forces began 
exchanging war plans; their intelligence agencies resumed contact. 
By midsummer the Anglo— American alliance was in unofficial exis- 
tence again. Truman undertook a purge of his Administration to 
eliminate the pro-Soviet elements. The last of the New Dealers in the 
cabinet was Henry Wallace, Agriculture Secretary, a profound 
admirer of Stalin, Anglophobic, anti-Churchill: 'nothing but a cat- 
bastard', as Truman put it. In July he sent the President a 5,000-word 
private letter, advocating unilateral disarmament and a massive 
air-and-trade programme with Russia, then leaked it. Truman con- 
fided to his diary: 'Wallace is a pacifist 100 per cent. He wants us to 
disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets and trust a 
bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo .... The Reds, 
phonies and the parlour pinks seem to be banded together and are 
becoming a national danger. I am afraid they are a sabotage front for 
Uncle Joe Stalin.' 37 The next day he sacked Wallace; not a mouse 
stirred. By October Churchill was able to claim: 'What I said at 
Fulton has been overpassed by the movement of events.' 



PEACE BY TERROR 439 

In 1947-9 America undertook a series of formal commitments to 
Europe which became the basis of Western global policy for the next 
generation. The process began with a desperate signal from Britain that 
she could no longer support the posture of a world power. The war had 
cost her $30 billion, a quarter of her net wealth. She had sold $5 billion 
of foreign assets and accumulated $ 1 2 billion of foreign debts. America 
had given her a post-war loan, but this did not cover the gap in her trade 
- exports in 1945 were less than a third of the 1938 figure - nor her 
outgoings as a slender pillar of stability in Europe, the Mediterranean 
and the Middle East. In 1946 Britain spent 19 per cent of her Gross 
National Product on defence (against 10 per cent in the USA). By the 
beginning of 1947 she had spent $3 billion on international relief 
programmes, $320 million feeding Germany in 1946 alone, $330 
million keeping the peace in Palestine, and cumulative totals of $540 
million on Greece and $375 million on Turkey. On 6 January, a 
snowstorm heralded the worst winter in more than a century, which 
continued until the end of March. The coal froze in the pit-head stocks 
and could not be moved. Electricity cuts shut factories and put 2 million 
out of work. The Fuel Minister, Manny Shinwell, spoke of 'a condition 
of complete disaster'. The loan was virtually gone; $100 million were 
pouring from the reserves each week. 

On 21 February the British informed Truman they would have to cut 
the Greek— Turkey commitment. Three days later Truman decided he 
would have to take it on. There was a tense meeting in the Oval Office on 
26 February to outline the idea to leading Congressmen. General 
Marshall, the new Secretary of State, fumbled the job, and his deputy, 
Dean Acheson, decided to chip in. He said that 'Soviet pressure' on the 
Near East had brought it to the point where a breakthrough 'might open 
three continents to Soviet penetration'. Like 'apples in a barrel infected 
by one rotten one', the 'corruption' of Greece would 'infect Iran and all 
the East'. It would 'carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and 
Egypt' and 'to Europe through Italy and France'. Soviet Russia 'was 
playing one of the greatest gambles in history at minimal cost' . It did no t 
need to win them all: 'even one or two offered immense gains'. America 
'alone' was 'in a position to break up the play'. These were the stakes 
that British withdrawal offered 'to an eager and ruthless opponent'. 
This was followed by a long silence. Then Arthur Vandenberg, a former 
isolationist, spoke for the Congressmen: 'Mr President, if you will say 
that to the Congress and the country, I will support you, and I believe 
most of its members will do the same.' 38 

Truman announced the 'Truman Doctrine' on 12 March. 'I believe 
that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples 
who are resisting attempted sub j ugation by armed minorities or outside 
pressure. . .we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies 



440 PEACE BY TERROR 

in their own way.' The help must be 'primarily' economic. He asked 
for money for Greece and Turkey, plus civil and military experts, for 
a start: and got it with two-to-one majorities in both houses. Thus 
isolationism died, by act of Joseph Stalin. Two months later, on 5 
June, the Secretary of State unveiled the Marshall Plan at the 
Harvard Commencement. It was vague; as Acheson paraphrased it: 
'If the Europeans, all or some of them, could get together on a plan of 
what was needed to get them out of the dreadful situation ... we 
would take a look at their plan and see what aid we might practically 
give.' 39 Eventually twenty-two European nations responded. The 
Czechs and Poles wished to do the same; Stalin vetoed it. 

The programme began in July 1948, continued for three years, and 
eventually cost the American government $10.2 billion. It made 
excellent sense because the American export surplus, by the second 
quarter of 1947, was running at an annual rate of $12.5 billion. As 
Hugh Dalton, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer, put it: 'The 
dollar shortage is developing everywhere. The Americans have half 
the total income of the world, but won't either spend it in buying other 
people's goods or lending it or giving it away. . . . How soon will the 
dollar shortage bring a general crisis?' The US average consumption of 
3,300 calories a day contrasted with 1,000 to 1,500 for 125 million 
Europeans. Marshall Aid recycled part of the surplus, narrowed the 
calorie difference and laid the foundation for a self-reliant Western 
and Southern Europe. By 1950 it was manifestly an overwhelming 
success. 40 It began the process of eliminating the gap between North 
American and European living standards and in the process opened an 
equally cataclysmic one between Western and Eastern Europe: the 
Iron Curtain became the frontier between plenty and shortage. 

But as yet America had no definite military commitment to defend 
Europe. With successive blows, Stalin made it unavoidable. He had 
only about 500 soldiers in Czechoslovakia; but his men in its 
government controlled the police. Czechoslovakia had a mixed 
government. Marshall considered it part of the Soviet bloc. But for 
Stalin it was not enough. Greed dictated more. On 19 February 1948 
he sent his Deputy Foreign Minister, V.A.Zorin, to Prague. The next 
day twelve non-Communist ministers submitted their resignations. 
After five days of crisis, a new government emerged and the country 
was a satellite. The US Ambassador, Laurence Steinhardt, thought 
the Czechs might have resisted, like the Finns and Iranians. He 
blamed the cowardice of President Benes and Foreign Minister 
Masaryk, who committed suicide after capitulating. 41 But the lack of 
forceful American policy was likewise a factor, and tempted Stalin 
further. On 24 June Stalin blocked access to the Western zones of 
Berlin, and cut off their electricity. 



PEACE BY TERROR 441 

Unable to agree on a peace formula for one Germany, the rival 
blocs had begun creating two Germanies in 1946. On 18 June 1948 
the three Western Allies announced a new German currency for their 
zone. That was the pretext for the Soviet move. It is significant that 
General Lucius Clay, head of the US zone, had been the most 
reluctant of the Cold Warriors. Now he changed decisively. He 
admitted that Allied access to Berlin was only 'oral agreement . . . 
implied in almost three years of application'. Now he proposed a 
judicious use of force to examine the 'technical difficulties' which the 
Russians said were blocking the route. He asked permission 'to use 
the equivalent of a constabulary regiment reinforced with a recoilless 
rifle troop and an engineer battalion .... Troops would be ordered 
to escort the convoy to Berlin. It would be directed ... to clear all 
obstacles even if such an action brought on an attack.' 42 

This response was discussed at length in Washington and rejected. 
Forrestal, the new Secretary for Defence, told Marshall: 'the Joint 
Chiefs of Staff do not recommend supply to Berlin by armed convoy 
in view of the risk of war involved and the inadequacy of United 
States preparations for global conflict.' 43 What were the risks? 
Nikita Khrushchev later admitted that Stalin was merely 'prodding 
the capitalist world with the tip of a bayonet'. His real gamble was in 
Yugoslavia, where he had broken with Marshall Tito and expelled 
him from the Cominform, the co-ordinating body for national 
Communist parties he had set up in 1947; this took place four days 
after Russia blocked the Berlin routes. Khrushchev added: 'I'm 
absolutely sure that if the Soviet Union had a common border with 
Yugoslavia, Stalin would have intervened militarily.' 44 It is hard to 
see Stalin, involved in a showdown within his empire, allowing a 
Berlin probing operation - which he could cancel or resume anytime 
he wished - to get out of hand. 

But if the risks were arguable, the inadequacy of US military 
power was clear enough. The Joint Chiefs of Staff calculated that the 
Red Army had now stabilized at 2,500,000 plus 400,000 security 
forces. To balance this the Americans had a nuclear monopoly. But it 
was a theoretical rather than an actual one. On 3 April 1947 Truman 
had been told, to his horror, that though materials for twelve 
A-bombs existed, none at all was available in assembled state. An 
arsenal of 400 was then ordered, to be ready by 1953, but not 
enough had yet been delivered by mid-1948 to carry through even 
the Air Force's 'Operation Pincher', which called for the complete 
destruction of the Soviet oil industry. 45 Some sixty B29s, known as 
'Atomic Bombers', were flown to Britain in a blaze of publicity; but 
by no means all had atomic bombs. Instead the decision was taken to 
mount a technical demonstration of US air-power and to supply 



442 PEACE BY TERROR 

Berlin by plane. It worked: the airlift was flying in 4,500 tons a day by 
December, and by spring 8,000 tons a day, as much as had been 
carried by road and rail when the cut-off came. 46 On 12 May 1949 the 
Russians climbed down. It was a victory of a sort. But the Americans 
had missed the opportunity to meet the 1940s equivalent of the 1936 
Rhineland crisis and force a major surrender by the Russians. 

The Berlin blockade was nevertheless a decisive event because it 
obliged the Western Allies to sort out their ideas and take long-term 
decisions. It led them to rationalize the fait accompli of a divided 
Germany and set about the creation of a West German state. Its 
constitution was written by February 1949, adopted in May and came 
into effect in the autumn. Such a Germany would have to be rearmed, 
and that meant embedding it in a formal Western defence structure. 
Hence on 4 April 1949 the North Atlantic Treaty was signed in 
Washington by eleven democratic powers. The assumption behind 
American policy was that there were only five regions on earth where 
the sources of modern military strength were found: the USA itself, 
the UK, the Rhine-Ruhr industrial area, Japan and the Soviet Union. 
The object of American policy must be to ensure that the Soviet leaders 
were limited to the one they held already. The geopolitical philosophy 
of 'containment' had been outlined in an article, 'The Sources of Soviet 
Conduct', published in Foreign Affairs, July 1947. Though signed 'X' 
it was in fact by George Kennan. It postulated that Russia, while 
anxious to avoid outright war, was determined to expand by all means 
short of it; and that America and her Allies should respond by 'a 
long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian 
expansive tendencies', involving 'the adroit and vigilant application of 
counterforce at a series of constantly shifting geographical and 
political points'. 47 The Berlin crisis provided the impetus to give this 
containment philosophy practical shape. 

In February-March 1949 a group of State Department and Defence 
officials drafted a document called 'National Security Council 68', 
which laid down the main lines of American foreign and defence 
policy for the next thirty years. 48 It enshrined the proposition that 
America, as the greatest free power, had moral, political and 
ideological obligations to preserve free institutions throughout the 
world, and must equip herself with the military means to discharge 
them. She must provide sufficient conventional as well as nuclear 
forces - a resolve confirmed on 3 September 1949, when a B29, on 
patrol at 18,000 feet in the North Pacific, produced positive evidence 
that the Russians had exploded their first nuclear device at the end of 
August. 49 The atomic monopoly was over and America must now 
settle down to the long haul of covering large areas of the world with 
her multi-purpose military protection, 'nsc-68' noted that Soviet 



PEACE BY TERROR 443 

Russia devoted 13.8 per cent of its gnp to arms, as against America's 
6—7 per cent. If necessary America could go up to a figure of 20 per 
cent. The document was finally approved in April 1950. It repre- 
sented a historic reversal of traditional American policy towards the 
world. Gradually it produced military commitments to forty-seven 
nations and led American forces to build or occupy 675 overseas 
bases and station a million troops overseas. 50 

It would be a mistake, however, to give American policy a logic 
and global coherence it did not actually possess. There was never a 
master-plan; more a series of makeshift expedients, with huge holes 
and gaps and many contradictions. It was rather like the British 
Empire in fact. Moreover, like that empire, it was not all set up at the 
same time. While the Americans, with some success, were laying 
down the foundations of West European military and economic 
stability in 1948-9, their roseate vision of the Far East, conjured up 
in the light of their stupendous victory in 1945, was dissolving. Here 
again they were made to pay dearly for Roosevelt's illusions and 
frivolity. Roosevelt's emotional attachment to China was unlike 
anything he felt for any other foreign nation. To him, China was not 
a problem; it was a solution. He considered it one of the four great 
powers, which ought to and could become the chief stabilizing force 
in East Asia. Once America was in the war he worked hard to 
convert this vision, or illusion, into reality. Stalin laughed. Churchill 
fumed: 'That China is one of the world's four great powers', he 
wrote to Eden, 'is an absolute farce.' He was prepared to be 
'reasonably polite' about 'this American obsession' but no more. 51 
Roosevelt brought China into the Big Four system; though, charac- 
teristically, he left it out when convenient, above all in the vital Yalta 
secret treaty over Japan, which let the Russians into Manchuria. 
Afterwards, perhaps feeling guilty, he saw Chiang Kai-shek: 'The 
first thing I asked Chiang was, "Do you want Indo-China?" He said: 
"It's no help to us. We don't want it. They are not Chinese.'" 52 

The notion of Chiang as the architect of East Asian post-war 
stability was absurd. He never at any stage of his career effectively 
controlled more than half of China itself. He was a poor adminis- 
trator; an indifferent general. As a politician he lacked the sense to 
grasp that what China needed was leadership which combined 
radicalism with patriotic fervour. Moreover, he knew little, and 
cared less, about the peasants. His ideal partner therefore was Mao 
himself, with his peasant following and his radical nationalism. Mao 
had worked with Chiang before and was willing to do so again; 
though after the Long March had established his paramountcy in the 
Communist movement his terms were higher. In February 1942 he 
began his first big ideological campaign: 'rectification' he called it, to 



444 PEACE BY TERROR 

cure the ccp of barren abstract Marxism and make it aware of 
Chinese history. In 1944 he praised American democracy and said 
'the work we Communists are carrying on today' was essentially the 
same as that of 'Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln'. 53 But while 
Mao moved to the centre, Chiang veered off to the Right. In January 
1941 his kmt forces murdered 9,000 of Mao's troops south of the 
Yellow River. Thereafter the two Chinese groups fought separate 
wars against the Japanese, neither of them very effective. Often they 
fought each other. In late 1943 Chiang published China's Destiny, in 
which he denounced Communism and liberalism as equally bad for 
China and held up the conservatism of Confucius as the ideal. The 
text was so hostile to the West that it had to be censored when it 
appeared in an English version. In 1944 the Americans worked hard to 
bring Chiang's and Mao's troops together, with a coalition kmt-ccp 
government and a joint army command, supplied and financed by 
America. Chiang turned it down. Mao was enthusiastic, and in 
October was in the curious position of openly defending the Anglo- 
Saxons against Chiang's attacks, a passage he later cut from his 
collected works. 54 

When the war ended, efforts were again made by the Americans to 
bring about a coalition. But Chiang insisted Mao disband his army. 
Stalin thought the demand reasonable. His advice to Mao was 'join 
the government and dissolve [the] army' since 'the development of 
the uprising in China has no prospect'. 55 Mao refused. He would 
take the number two role but he would not abase himself (and risk 
execution too). He had already started his own 'personality cult' 
with his April 1945 Party Constitution, which insisted 'the Thought 
of Mao Tse-tung' was essential to 'guide the entire work' of the 
party and praised him as 'not only the greatest revolutionary and 
statesman in Chinese history but also the greatest theoretician and 
scientist'. Most of this was written by Mao himself. 56 Mao was an 
ambitious romantic who had had a good war and wanted to better 
himself in the peace. Chiang was the man in possession who could 
not bear the idea of an eventual successor, especially one with 
intellectual pretensions. Hence there was no historical inevitability 
about the Chinese Civil War. It was a personal conflict. 

Nor was the outcome of the war due to deep-rooted economic and 
class forces. The great majority of China's vast population played no 
part in it, from start to finish. It is true that Mao had some success in 
mobilizing peasant energy and discontent for his purposes. But this 
was due in part to the kmt's highly successful literacy programme, 
which by 1940 had reached most of the villages. It is true, too, that 
some peasants feared a victory by Chiang because they associated 
him with landlordism. But Mao did not lead a crusade to 'give' the 



PEACE BY TERROR 445 

people their land. In the areas where he was strongest they already 
had it. The estate system was not as widespread as outsiders 
believed. Land was worked by its owners in four-fifths of the north, 
three-fifths of central China, and half the south. 57 In most places 
the main issue was not ownership of land, but who could provide 
security and peace. 

In short, the Civil War of 1945-9 was the culmination of the 
war-lord period of instability introduced by the destruction of the 
monarchy. Success was determined throughout by the same factors: 
control of the cities and communications, and the ability to hold 
together armies by keeping them paid, supplied and happy. In the 
circumstances of the post-war period, Mao proved a more success- 
ful war-lord than Chiang, chiefly by keeping his armies out of the 
urban economy. If any one factor destroyed the kmt it was infla- 
tion. Inflation had become uncontrollable in the last phase of the 
Japanese Empire, of which urban China was a salient part. In 1945 
in Japan itself, paper currency became worthless and a virtual 
barter-economy developed. The disease spread to the Chinese cities 
and up the great rivers. Chiang's regime, when it took over in the 
last months of 1945, inherited an underlying hyper-inflation and 
failed to take adequate steps to kill it. The Americans were gener- 
ous in money and supplies. Chiang had been eligible for Lend-Lease 
and got it in considerable quantities. He received a $500 million 
economic stabilization loan and a total of $2 billion in 1945-9. But 
once the Civil War began in earnest and brought the hyper-inflation 
to the surface again, American assistance proved irrelevant. 
Chiang's government was not only incompetent; it was also cor- 
rupt. Inflation created military weakness and military failure pro- 
duced yet more inflation. 

Chiang compounded the problem by denying it existed. His 
strength declined slowly in 1947, rapidly in the first half of 1948. In 
Peking, prices multiplied five times from mid-September to mid- 
October. The Peiping Chronicle recorded Chiang's comment: 'Press 
reports of recent price increases and panic buying were greatly 
exaggerated . . . during his personal inspection of Peiping, Tientsin 
and Mukden he saw nothing to support these allegations.' 58 Yet in 
Manchuria and North China inflation had brought industry to a 
virtual standstill. Many workers were on hunger-strike, provoked 
by a chronic rice-famine. The American consul-general in Mukden 
reported: 

Puerile efforts have been made towards price control and to combat 
hoarding . . . the results . . . have been largely to enforce requisitioning of 
grain at bayonet-point for controlled prices and enable the resale of 



446 PEACE BY TERROR 

requisitioned grain at black market prices for the benefit of the pockets of 
rapacious military and civil officials. 59 

In Shanghai commodity prices rose twenty times between 19 August 
and 8 November 1948, and on the latter date alone, rice jumped 
from 300 Chinese dollars per picul (133 pounds) in the morning to 
1,000 at noon and 1800 by nightfall. 60 Hundreds died in the street 
every day, their bodies collected by municipal refuse trucks. Chiang 
put his son, General Chiang Ching-kuo, in charge as economic 
dictator. His 'gold-dollar' currency reform - there was nothing gold 
about it - changed hyper-inflation into uncontrolled panic, and he 
alienated one of Chiang's most faithful sources of support, Shan- 
ghai's gangster community, by squeezing $5 million (US) out of them 
for his own 'war chest'. 61 

Granted the principles of war-lordism, the economic collapse was 
reflected in army strengths. In summer 1948, in secret session, the 
kmt parliament was told that in August 1945 their army had been 
3.7 million strong with 6,000 big guns. The ccp forces had then 
numbered 320,000, of which no more than 166,000 were armed. But 
Red units were accustomed to live off the land and scour the towns. 
kmt troops were paid in paper which, increasingly, did not buy 
enough food to feed them. So they sold their personal weapons and 
any other army equipment they could obtain. The officers were 
worse than the men and the generals worst of all. By June 1948 the 
kmt army was down to 2.1 million; the ccp army had risen to 1.5 
million, equipped with a million rifles and 22,800 pieces of artillery, 
more than the kmt (21,000); virtually all these weapons had been 
bought from government troops. The Americans, who had supplied 
Chiang with $1 billion worth of Pacific War surplus, thus equipped 
both sides in the conflict. 62 

There was a series of clear Communist victories in the closing 
months of 1948, culminating in the decisive battle of Hsuchow at the 
end of the year. By December virtually all Manchuria and North 
China was in Mao's hands. Tientsin fell in January 1949 and Peking 
surrendered. Hsuchow cost the kmt 400,000 casualties. But of these, 
200,000 prisoners, unpaid and hungry, were immediately integrated 
in the ccp army, with 140,000 US rifles. On 1 February 1949, the 
US Army Department reported that the kmt had possessed 
2,723,000 troops at the beginning of 1948 and less than 1,500,000 
at the end, of which half a million were non-combatants. In the same 
period the ccp forces had swollen to 1,622,000, virtually all 
combat-effective. At this point, though Chiang was already prepar- 
ing to evacuate to Taiwan (Formosa), Stalin was still advising Mao 
to settle for a division of China, with a ccp North and a kmt South. 



PEACE BY TERROR 447 

Chiang did not give Mao the chance for he rejected proposals for a 
compromise. In April 1949 Mao crossed south of the Yangtze and 
took Nanking the same month. By October he controlled all of 
mainland China and had restored, after a fashion, the precarious 
unity of imperial days. 63 

Thus, after forty years of ferocious civil conflict, in which millions 
had died, none of Sun Yat-sen's original aims, which included 
parliamentary democracy, freedom of the press and habeas corpus, 
had been secured, and China was back where it had started, with a 
despotism - albeit a much more confident and oppressive one. Mao's 
first act was to extend his 'land reform', already begun in the North, 
to the entire country. It was aimed at 'local bullies and evil gentry' 
and he urged peasants to kill 'not one or two but a goodly number' of 
each. 64 At least 2 million people perished, half of them the tyrannical 
owners of less than thirty acres. Mao, the revolutionary romantic, 
launched the largest nation on earth into a frenzy of violent activism 
which was to rival the social engineering of Hitler and Stalin. 

The American policy-makers watched in bewilderment the disinte- 
gration of Roosevelt's great pillar of stability. It left behind it a 
gigantic vacuum. How to fill it? Though they rated Japan as one of the 
four key areas they had to hold, they had never hitherto conceived it as 
the focus of their position in the Far East, as Britain was in Europe. By 
miraculous dispensation of providence, the Russians had entered the 
war against Japan too late to make any claim to share in the 
occupation. So the Americans had a free hand there, under the 
Potsdam declaration. General MacArthur ruled the country as a 
surrogate constitutional Tenno. As late as the summer of 1947 it was 
proposed to cast Japan adrift, by signing a peace treaty and evacuating 
it, though the country was disarmed, had no central police system to 
combat Communist subversion and, since Soviet Russia controlled the 
Kurile Islands, south Sakhalin and North Korea, faced a semi-circle of 
active hostility. 65 Before this plan could be put into operation, the 
disaster of 1948-9 in China induced America to have second 
thoughts. As Soviet Russia had no official presence, America could act 
unilaterally and did so. Beginning in 1 949, US policy was reversed: the 
occupation was lifted from the backs of the Japanese government and 
economy; the emphasis shifted from punishment to expansion, and 
from neutralism and de-militarization to the integration of Japan in 
the Western system through a generous peace treaty. 

'Containment' implied precise lines, which the Russians would 
cross at their peril. In Europe they were now clear enough. In Asia, 
by 1949, Japan was firmly under the American umbrella. But where 
did the lines run elsewhere? On 12 January 1950 Dean Acheson 
made a very foolish speech to the National Press Club in Wash- 



448 PEACE BY TERROR 

ington. In it he appeared to exclude from the American defence 
perimeter not only Taiwan and Indo-China but Korea, from which 
both Soviet and US troops had withdrawn, and which was divided 
into North and South zones, with only five-hundred US military 
training personnel in the South. Acheson's main point was that the 
Communization of China was not an unmitigated loss, since China 
and Russia would soon be at each other's throats. He thought that 
the Soviet 'absorption' of the whole or part of 'the four northern 
provinces of China' (Outer and Inner Mongolia, Sinkiang and 
Manchuria) was 'the most important fact in the relations of any 
foreign power with Asia'. America must not antagonize China and so 
'deflect from the Russians to ourselves the righteous anger and the 
wrath and the hatred of the Chinese people which must develop'. In 
fact Acheson was misinformed. He relied on a briefing by General 
W.E.Todd, head of the Joint Chief of Staff intelligence section, that 
in any ranking of Soviet targets for aggression, 'Korea would be at 
the bottom of that list'. Nor did he know that at the time he spoke 
negotiations were taking place leading to the Russians handing over 
the Manchurian railway and Port Arthur to China. 66 

Behind Stalin's uncharacteristic generosity was his anxiety not to 
repeat with Mao the mistake he had made with Tito - that is, to treat 
him as a puppet, instead of as a fellow-dictator who had established 
his regime by his own efforts. Stalin seems to have decided to put his 
Eastern European empire in order in the summer of 1947, after the 
Marshall Plan was announced. He held the first meeting of the 
Cominform in Belgrade, to show that Yugoslavia was an integral 
part of the system. But its object was in fact to replace local 
Communist leaders with some national standing by ones who owed 
everything to Stalin and Russian backing. The Czech coup of 
February 1948 was part of this process. Stalin also planned to 
destroy Tito, whom he had never forgiven for a rude wartime 
message: 'If you cannot help us at least don't hinder us by useless 
advice.' 67 The same month as he was swallowing the Czech leader- 
ship, Stalin had gathered in Moscow Dmitrov, the Bulgarian Com- 
munist leader, whom he humiliated, and Edward Kardelj and 
Milovan Djilas from Yugoslavia, one of whom, if pliable enough, he 
intended to make Tito's replacement. He ordered them to knock 
Yugoslavia and Bulgaria into an economic federation on the lines of 
Benelux, which he thought consisted of Belgium and Luxembourg. 
Told that it also included the Netherlands, he denied it and shouted 
angrily, 'When I say no it means no!' Then, switching to bribery, he 
offered the Yugoslavs the bait of Mussolini's little victim: 'We agree 
to Yugoslavia swallowing Albania', he said and made a gesture of 
sucking the forefinger of his right hand. 68 



PEACE BY TERROR 449 

When Tito got a report of the meeting he smelt a putsch against 
himself. Like Stalin, he was an experienced political gangster familiar 
with the rules of survival. His first act was to cut off information from 
Yugoslavia's inner party organs, police and army, to their counterparts 
in Moscow. On 1 March he brought the crisis to the boil by having 
his Central Committee throw out Stalin's proposed treaty. In the 
subsequent theological dispute, which began on 27 March, Tito was 
accused of anti-Sovietism, of being undemocratic, unself-critical, 
lacking in class-consciousness, of having secret links with the West 
and engaging in anti-Soviet espionage; and eventually the entire party 
was branded as Menshevist, Bukharinist and Trotskyist, the accusa- 
tion culminating in a crude threat to Tito's life: 'We think that the 
career of Trotsky is quite instructive.' 69 On 28 June the new 
Cominform dutifully warned that Tito's plan was to 'curry favour 
with the imperialists' as a prelude to setting up 'an ordinary bourgeois 
republic' which would in time become 'a colony of the imperialists'. It 
called on 'healthy elements' within the Yugoslav party to 'replace the 
present leaders'. 

The rage and violent language of Stalin's communications reflected 
his growing realization that Tito was a step ahead of him at each stage 
of the dispute, which merely served to identify those in his party whose 
primary loyalty was to Moscow. Tito broke two of his principal 
colleagues, shot his wartime chief of staff, gaoled the deputy political 
head of his army and, in all, put 8,400 party, police and army suspects 
behind bars, the arrests continuing into 1950. 70 Stalin imposed 
economic sanctions, held manoeuvres on Yugoslavia's borders and, 
from 1949, mounted show- trials in the satellites with Tito as the 
arch-villain. But Tito's ability to hold his party together around a 
nationalist line ('no matter how much each of us loves the land of 
socialism, the USSR, he can in no case love his own country less') 
persuaded Stalin that he could not topple the regime without an open 
invasion by the Red Army and large-scale fighting, possibly involving 
the West. Tito never formally moved under the Western umbrella, but 
the safeguard was implicit. When he visited London in 1953, 
Churchill (again Prime Minister) told him: 'should our [wartime] ally, 
Yugoslavia, be attacked, we would fight and die with you.' Tito: This 
is a sacred vow and it is enough for us. We need no written treaties.' 71 

Khrushchev later said that the Tito row could all have been settled 
by discussion. 72 Stalin came to agree, though he never admitted it. The 
failure of his Yugoslav policy was apparent by the summer of 1948 
and Zhdanov, who had presided over Tito's excommunication, died 
suddenly on 31 August 1948, probably murdered on Stalin's orders. 73 
With Mao, recognizing that he was master in his own house, Stalin 
pursued quite different tactics. He seems to have decided to bind the 



450 PEACE BY TERROR 

new Chinese regime to the Soviet bloc not by threats and interlocking 
economic machinery but by raising the military temperature in the 
Far East. The Acheson speech of January 1950, with its wishful 
thought that, left alone by the West, China must break with Russia, 
suggested the danger; its pointed omission of Korea pointed to the 
remedy. A limited proxy war in Korea would be the means to teach 
China where its true military interests lay. If this was Stalin's 
reasoning it proved correct. The Korean War postponed the 
Soviet— Chinese break for a decade. Not that Stalin exactly planned 
the war. He seems to have agreed in the spring of 1950 that Kim 
Il-sung, the North Korean Communist dictator, could make a limited 
push across the 38th parallel in November. 74 But Kim was not a 
biddable man. He described himself in his own newspaper as 'the 
respected and beloved leader', as 'a great thinker and theoretician' 
responsible for 'the guiding idea of the revolution of our era', a 'great 
revolutionary practitioner who has worked countless legendary 
miracles', a 'matchless iron-willed brilliant commander who is 
ever-victorious', as well as 'the tender-hearted father of the people 
. . . embracing them in his broad bosom'. He turned Stalin's cunning 
probe into an attack by his entire army and launched it on 25 June, 
with sufficient success to panic the Americans. 

The Korean War was a characteristic 20th-century tragedy. It was 
launched for ideological reasons, without a scintilla of moral justifi- 
cation or any evidence of popular support. It killed 34,000 Ameri- 
cans, a million Koreans, a quarter of a million Chinese. It achieved 
no purpose. All its consequences were unintended. Its course was a 
succession of blunders. Kim and Stalin underestimated America's 
response. Truman judged the invasion to be a prelude to an attack on 
Japan and a direct challenge to America's willingness to uphold 
international law through the United Nations. Hitherto that body 
had been designed to reflect great power agreement and its Security 
Council, with its veto system, underpinned the principle. Truman 
had no need to invoke the UN at all. The Potsdam agreement gave 
America ample powers to act alone. 75 But Truman wanted the un's 
'moral authority'. So he bypassed the Security Council and got 
authorization by the un's General Assembly, which America then 
dominated, on a mere counting-heads basis. Thus the first long-term 
consequence of Korea was to undermine the concept of the UN as a 
useful, but limited body, and set it on a course which transformed it 
into an instrument of ideological propaganda. Of course the reason 
Truman wanted UN backing was that he took America into the war 
without getting Congressional approval first. This was the second 
unintended consequence: the elevation of the Presidency into a 
supra-constitutional war-making executive, especially in a Far Eas- 



PEACE BY TERROR 451 

tern context. A third consequence was, indeed, to place a sword 
between an American-Chinese rapprochement, as Stalin had 
wished, but in a manner he could not possibly have foreseen. 

Stalin assumed the proxy war would increase China's military 
dependence on Soviet Russia. The reverse happened. General 
MacArthur quickly dealt with the North Koreans; in three months 
he had recaptured the capital of the South, Seoul. But he was no 
more biddable than Kim. He told Washington: 'Unless and until the 
enemy capitulates, I regard all of Korea open to our military 
operations' and pushed up to the Chinese frontier on the Yalu. Under 
cover of the crisis the Chinese first swallowed quasi-independent 
Tibet (21 October 1950), another unintended consequence; then 
attacked MacArthur with a huge 'volunteer' army (28 December). 
He was beaten and in April 1951 sacked, something Truman should 
have done the previous autumn. With difficulty the UN forces 
re-established the front near the 38th parallel (October 1951) and 
armistice talks began. But they were marked by intense bitterness 
and frustration on America's part. According to entries in Truman's 
journal, he thought of using nuclear weapons on 27 January and 
again on 18 May 1952. When General Eisenhower succeeded him as 
President, the threat of nuclear war was conveyed to China through 
the Indian government. 76 

As a result of the Chinese-American confrontation, Mao turned 
China for the first time into a military power of the front rank, 
something Stalin certainly never intended. Indeed Mao induced 
Stalin's successors to help China become a nuclear power. He refused 
to allow Soviet forces to establish nuclear bases on Chinese soil. 
Instead he pushed ahead with an independent nuclear programme, 
which the Russians felt obliged to assist. Khrushchev later com- 
plained Russia gave the Chinese 'almost everything they asked for. 
We kept no secrets from them. Our nuclear experts co-operated with 
their engineers and designers who were busy building a bomb.' 
According to his account the Russians were about to hand over a 
prototype bomb when they suddenly had second thoughts. The 
Chinese say it was 20 June 1959 when 'the Soviet government 
unilaterally tore up the agreement . . . and refused to provide China 
with a sample of an atomic bomb.' 77 But the impetus Soviet help 
gave to the Chinese programme could not be halted. By the time the 
Sino-Soviet break came, in 1963, China was on the eve of her first 
A-bomb test; and at only her sixth test she exploded a multi-megaton 
thermonuclear device. Stalin's ploy delayed the quarrel for a decade 
but made it far more serious when it eventually came. From that 
point Russia had to deal with another major military power on her 
south-eastern borders. 



452 PEACE BY TERROR 

Such a change in the balance was all the more serious in that 
another unintended consequence of the Korean probe was a fun- 
damental acceleration in rearmament. Although the Czech and 
Berlin crises pushed America into a collective security system, it was 
Korea which provoked the permanent arms-race. Truman had taken 
the decision to build the H-bomb in January 1950 but until the 
North Koreans started a hot war he was finding great difficulty in 
getting through Congress the funding for the nsc-68 programme. 
Defence spending in the fiscal year 1950 was only $17.7 billion. 
Korea revolutionized the Congressional and national attitude to 
defence: defence allocations jumped to $44 billion in fiscal 1952 and 
passed the $50 billion watershed the following year. The increases 
made possible the development of tactical nuclear weapons, four 
extra divisions for Germany, the rapid construction of overseas 
air-bases, a world-wide deployment of the Strategic Air Command, a 
nuclear carrier fleet and mobile conventional capability. 78 By Febru- 
ary 1951 American aircraft production was back to its peak 1944 
level. America's allies also rearmed and the remilitarization of 
Germany became a reality. If the Cold War began over Poland it 
reached maturity over Korea and embraced the whole world. In 
effect, Stalin had polarized the earth. 

If Stalin had not intended to conjure up legions against himself, he 
cannot have regretted that his empire and its satellites were now 
divided from the rest of the world by an abyss of fear and suspicion. 
It was he who built the Iron Curtain; and it was notable that the 
empire had an inner iron curtain, which ran along the Soviet frontier 
and protected it against the bacillus of Western ideas even from the 
satellites themselves. Stalin hated 'Westerners' in the same way Hitler 
hated Jews, using the same term: 'cosmopolitanism'. This explains 
the extraordinary thoroughness and venom with which, in 1945-6, 
he destroyed or isolated in camps all those who had been in contact 
with non-Soviet ideas: not only prisoners of war but serving officers, 
technicians, journalists and party members whose wartime duties 
had taken them abroad. The number of foreigners permitted to visit, 
let alone live in, Russia was reduced to an inescapable minimum, and 
their contacts limited to those employed by the government and 
secret police. All other Russians learnt from experience that even the 
most innocent and casual contact with a foreigner risked engulfment 
in the Gulag. 

Any hopes raised by victory that the vast industries created to 
secure it would now be used to produce some modest improvement 
in the life of a nation which had suffered 20 million dead and 
unparalleled privations, were dashed on 9 February 1946 when 
Stalin announced that three and possibly four more five-year plans, 



PEACE BY TERROR 453 

centred on heavy industry, would be required to increase Soviet 
strength and prepare it for what he grimly termed 'all contingencies'. It 
was clear he intended to put the entire nation under the harrow yet 
again and his servile Politburo colleague Andrei Zhdanov was detailed 
to conduct a campaign, reaching into every aspect of Russian life, to 
fight apoliticization and instil active commitment by fear. 79 Intellec- 
tuals of all kinds were put under pressure. The witch-hunt was 
launched on 14 August 1946, characteristically in Leningrad, which 
Stalin hated all his life as passionately as Hitler hated Vienna. Objects 
of the first attack were the journals Zvezda and Leningrad, the poetess 
Anna Akhmatova, the humourist Mikhail Zoshchenko. But it soon 
spread to all the arts. Aleksandr Fadaev, who got the Stalin Prize for 
his 1946 war novel, The Young Guard, was forced to rewrite it on 
strict party lines in 1947. Muradelli was denounced for his opera The 
Great Friendship. The hunt focused on Shostakovich's Ninth Sym- 
phony; terrified, he promptly wrote an ode lauding Stalin's forestry 
plan. It switched to Khachaturian's Piano Concerto; he changed his 
style completely. Then it turned on Eisenstein, whose film Ivan the 
Terrible was criticized for belittling its subject. In June 1947 it was the 
turn of the philosophers, where the failings of G.F.Aleksandrov's 
History of West European Philosophy served as pretext for a purge. In 
economics, Jeno Varga's book describing capitalist economies in the 
war served the same purpose. From 1948 on, theoretical physics, 
cosmology, chemistry, genetics, medicine, psychology and cybernetics 
were all systematically raked over. Relativity theory was condemned, 
not (as in Nazi Germany) because Einstein was a Jew but for equally 
irrelevant reasons: Marx had said the universe was infinite, and 
Einstein had got some ideas from Mach, who had been proscribed by 
Lenin. Behind this lay Stalin's suspicion of any ideas remotely 
associated with Western or bourgeois values. He was running what 
the Chinese Communists were later to term a Cultural Revolution, an 
attempt to change fundamental human attitudes over the whole range 
of knowledge by the use of naked police power. 80 

Thousands of intellectuals lost their jobs. Thousands more went 
into the camps. Their places were taken by creatures still more pliable, 
cranks and frauds. Soviet biology fell into the hands of the fanatical 
eccentric T.D.Lysenko, who preached a theory of inherited acquired 
characteristics and what he termed 'vernalization', the transformation 
of wheat into rye, pines into firs and so on: essentially medieval stuff. 
Stalin was fascinated. He edited in advance Lysenko's presidential 
address of 3 1 July 1 948 to the Academy of Agricultural Science, which 
launched the witch-hunt in biology (Lysenko used to show to visitors a 
copy with corrections in Stalin's hand). 81 Scientific genetics was 
savaged as a 'bourgeois pseudo-science', 'anti-Marxist', leading to 



454 PEACE BY TERROR 

'sabotage' of the Soviet economy: those who practised it had their 
laboratories closed down. Glorying in the reign of terror was another 
agricultural quack, V.R.Williams. In medicine, a woman called O.B. 
Lepeshinskaya preached that old age could be postponed by bicar- 
bonate of soda enemas — an idea that briefly appealed to Stalin. In 
linguistics, N. Y.Marr argued that all human speech could be reduced 
to four basic elements: sal, her, yon and ros/7. 82 Stalin wallowed 
luxuriously in the oily cultural waters he had stirred, sometimes 
extracting its weird denizens for a brief moment of fame before 
wringing their necks. On 20 June 1950 he published in Pravda a 
10,000-word article called 'Marxism and Linguistic Problems', a real 
collector's piece. Usually, however, he left it to others to wield the 
pen on his behalf. Pravda wrote: 

If you meet with difficulties in your work, or suddenly doubt your abilities, 
think of him - of Stalin - and you will find the confidence you need. If you 
feel tired in an hour when you should not, think of him — of Stalin — and 
your work will go well. If you are seeking a correct decision, think of him — 
of Stalin - and you will find that decision. 83 

Stalin stage-managed his own apotheosis, as the embodiment of 
human wisdom, in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which was 
published from 1949 onwards. It was full of gems. The historical 
section on 'motor cars' began: 'In 1751—2, Leonty Shamshugenkov, 
a peasant in the Nizhny-Novgorod province, constructed a self- 
propelled vehicle operated by two men.' Stalin enjoyed editing the 
passages dealing with his own merits and achievements. How the 
ex-seminarist must have chuckled when he put up Leonid Leonov, a 
leading novelist who was supposed to be Christian, to propose in 
Pravda that a new calendar should be based, not on Christ's 
birth-date, but Stalin's! Black humour always jostled with mono- 
mania for possession of the cavity in Stalin's spirit. He rewrote the 
official Short Biography of Stalin, putting in the sentence: 'Stalin 
never allowed his work to be marred by the slightest hint of vanity, 
conceit or self-adulation.' 84 

In 1948-9 Stalin's anti-Westernism took more specific form in 
anti-Semitism. He had always hated Jews; he often told anti-Semitic 
jokes. Khrushchev said he encouraged factory workers to beat up 
their Jewish colleagues. 85 Stalin's last spasm of anti-Semitic fury was 
provoked when the arrival of Golda Meir to open Israel's first 
Moscow embassy was greeted with a modest display of Jewish 
enthusiasm. Yiddish publications were immediately banned. Wall 
Street bankers in Soviet cartoons suddenly sported 'Jewish' features. 
The Jewish actor Mikhoels was murdered in a fake car accident. 
Other prominent Jews vanished into the camps. Those with Russified 



PEACE BY TERROR 455 

names had their 'real' Jewish names printed in the press, an old Nazi 
technique. The campaign was run by tame Jews, a characteristic 
touch. It was mixed up in Stalin's mind with his unremitting search for 
enemies, real or imaginary, within the party. Zhdanov, having served 
his purpose, disappeared through a trap-door after the Tito fiasco. His 
followers were hounded down in 1949, during the so-called 'Len- 
ingrad affair', another witch-hunt against the detested city. Beria and 
Malenkov supplied the evidence for the purge which was carried out 
in secret, over 1,000 being shot. 86 The dead included the Politburo's 
top planner, N. A.Voznesensky, and A. A.Kuznetsov, Secretary of the 
Central Committee. To be Jewish was to expect arrest and death at 
any moment; but no one's life was safe. Marshal Zhukov had been 
sacked and sent to the provinces in 1946, for being too popular, and 
once there he kept his head down. In 1949 Stalin arrested Molotov's 
wife, Polina, and packed her off to Kazakhstan. She was Jewish and 
was accused of 'Zionist conspiracies'; but the real reason may have 
been her former friendship with Stalin's wife Nadya. He also sent to 
prison the wife of Kalinin, the Soviet Head of State. There were other 
cases of wife-persecution, one of the old man's last pleasures. 87 He 
hated the fact that so many of his relatives wished to marry Jews, and 
refused to meet five out of his eight grandchildren. 

By the second half of 1952, by which time he was manufacturing 
nuclear weapons at top speed, Stalin was seeing Jewish-tinged 
conspiracies everywhere. The top organs of the state had virtually 
ceased to function. The real work was done at lugubrious supper- 
parties in his Kuntsevo villa, where Stalin gave verbal orders, often on 
the spur of the moment, to whoever happened to be there, exactly as 
Hitler had done. He was now an elderly man, with a pockmarked face, 
yellowing eyes, discoloured teeth, 'an old battle-scarred tiger', as one 
American visitor called him, sniffing danger everywhere. He and Beria 
wove about everyone in Moscow a new web of electronic surveillance. 
That summer a bug was found in the US Great Seal in the 
Ambassador's house, what Kennan described as 'for that day a 
fantastically advanced bit of applied electronics'. 88 But the signs are 
that the web was closing round Beria too; and this would be natural 
for Stalin always destroyed his secret police killers in the end - and he 
now thought Beria was a Jew. 89 Certain unmistakable signs surround- 
ing the nineteenth Party Congress, in October 1952, indicated a new 
terror was about to burst upon the heads of Stalin's senior colleagues. 
Khrushchev later claimed that Molotov, Mikoyan and Voroshilov 
were among the destined victims. 90 

The storm broke on 4 November, when Jewish doctors attached to 
the Kremlin were arrested. Among other crimes they were accused of 
murdering Zhdanov. Their 'confessions' were to serve as the basis for 



456 PEACE BY TERROR 

fresh arrests and trials, as from 1934 on. Ordering their interroga- 
tion, Stalin shouted: 'Beat, beat and beat again!' He told the security 
chief, Ignatov, that if he could not get full admissions, 'We will 
shorten you by a head.' Circulating copies of the preliminary 
confessions to enemies, Stalin said: 'What will happen without me? 
The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize 
enemies.' 91 He was now completely self-isolated. He even had his 
last crony, his butler Vlasik, a security police general, arrested as a 
spy. His food was analysed in a laboratory before he would touch it. 
He thought the air in his house might be poisoned by a deadly 
vapour mentioned in the Yagoda trial in 1938. All this is curiously 
reminiscent of Hitler's last years. 

Stalin had completely lost touch with the normal world. His 
daughter said he talked in terms of 1917 prices, and his salary 
envelopes piled up unopened in his desk (from which they myster- 
iously vanished at his death). When she visited him on 21 December 

1952, she found him sick, refusing to let any doctor near him, and 
dosing himself with iodine. His personal physician for the last twenty 
years, he thought, had been a British spy all the time, and was now 
literally in chains. 92 Stalin had always doodled drawings of wolves 
during meetings. Now the brutes obsessed him. On 17 February 

1953, he told the last non-Communist visitor, K.P.S.Menon, how he 
dealt with his enemies: 'A Russian peasant who sees a wolf doesn't 
need to be told what the wolf intends to do - he knows! - so he 
doesn't try to tame the wolf, or argue or waste time - he kills it!' 93 
The stroke came a fortnight later on 2 March, leaving Stalin 
speechless. His daughter said that his death on 5 March was 'difficult 
and terrible', his last gesture being to lift his left hand as if to curse, 
or to ward off something. 94 As Lenin went to eternity raving of 
electricity, so Stalin departed to the howling of imaginary wolves. In 
the bewildered crowd-movements that followed, according to the 
poet Yevtushenko, Beria's men killed hundreds of people by impro- 
vising as crush-barriers their mvd lorries, whose sides dripped with 
blood. 9 * 

The agonies of Stalin's Russia, where about 500,000 people were 
judicially murdered (or just murdered) by the state in the post-war 
period up to March 1953, formed a gruesome contrast to the 
America against which it was pitted. While, in the immediate 
post-war, Stalin was piling fresh burdens on his frightened subjects, 
the Americans, contrary to predictions of government economists, 
who had prophesied heavy unemployment in the conversion period, 
were engaging in the longest and most intense consumer spending 
spree in the nation's history. It began in autumn 1946 and acceler- 
ated the following year: 'The great American boom is on', wrote 



PEACE BY TERROR 457 

Fortune, 'There is no measuring it. The old yardsticks will not do. 
. . . There is a powerful consuming demand for everything that one 
can eat, wear, enjoy, read, repair, paint, drink, see, ride, taste and 
rest in.' 96 It was the start of the longest cycle of capitalist expansion 
in history, spreading to Europe (as the Marshall Plan took effect) in 
the 1950s and to Japan and the Pacific in the 1960s; lasting, with the 
occasional dips, to the mid-1970s. For Americans, the taste of 
uninhibited prosperity was especially poignant, bringing back mem- 
ories of the 1920s lost Arcadia. 

There were other echoes of the Twenties. The xenophobic witch- 
hunting of the Woodrow Wilson administration was not repeated. 
Yet there was an air of patriotic tension, as Americans braced 
themselves to the magnitude of the global responsibility they were 
undertaking. Here again the contrast with Russia is marked and 
instructive. America was an astonishingly open society and in some 
ways a vulnerable one. It had possessed few defences against the 
systematic penetration of its organs which Stalinism practised on a 
huge scale in the 1930s. Agents of foreign governments had to 
register under the McCormack Act of 1938. Members of organiza- 
tions advocating the overthrow of the US government by force or 
violence were open to prosecution, under both the Hatch Act of 
1939 and the Smith Act of 1940. Such legislation was useless to 
prevent active Communists and fellow-travellers (including Soviet 
agents) from joining the government, which they did in large 
numbers during the New Deal and still more during the war. As 
Kennan put it, 

The penetration of the American governmental services by members or 
agents (conscious or otherwise) of the American Communist Party in the 
late 1930s was not a figment of the imagination ... it really existed; and it 
assumed proportions which, while never overwhelming, were also not 
trivial. 

He says that those who served in Moscow or in the Russian division 
of the State Department were 'very much aware' of the danger. The 
Roosevelt administration was slow in reacting: 'warnings which 
should have been heeded fell too often on deaf or incredulous ears.' 97 
Truman was more active. In November 1946 he appointed a 
Temporary Commission on Employee Loyalty, and in the following 
March he acted on its recommendations with Executive Order 9835, 
which authorized inquiries into political beliefs and associations of 
all federal employees. 98 Once this procedure got going, in 1947, it 
was reasonably effective. But it was only after this date that Congress 
and the public became aware of the real magnitude of the wartime 
errors which (it was supposed) led to the 'loss' of Eastern Europe 



458 PEACE BY TERROR 

and, in 1949, of China. Roosevelt's infatuation with Stalin and his 
fundamental frivolity were more to blame for the weakness of 
American wartime policy than any Stalinist moles. But Roosevelt 
was dead. And the moles were being dug out as the Cold War grew 
more intense and the follies of the past were scrutinized. 

No evidence so far uncovered suggests that Soviet agents brought 
about any major decision in us policy, except in the Treasury, or 
delivered any vital classified information, except in the nuclear 
weapons fields. But these were major exceptions. The Soviet agent 
Harry Dexter White was the most influential official in the Treasury, 
the man who created the post-war international monetary system, 
with the help of Keynes. In April 1944 he was responsible for the 
American government's decision to hand over to the Soviet govern- 
ment US Treasury plates to print occupation currency, a decision 
which ultimately cost the American taxpayer $225 million." In 
1945 Elizabeth Bentley, a former Communist spy, told the fbi of 
two Soviet networks in the US, one headed by the Treasury 
economist Nathan Gregory Silvermaster, another by Victor Perlo of 
the War Production Board: classified information was also transmit- 
ted from the Justice Department, the Foreign Economic Administra- 
tion and the Board of Economic Warfare, fbi and Office of Strategic 
Services (oss) raids also disclosed leakages from the Army and Navy 
departments, the Office of War Intelligence and the oss itself. Then, 
from the State Department, there was Alger Hiss, who had sat at 
Roosevelt's elbow at Yalta and, more important, had been aide to 
Edward Stettinius, whom the British regarded as Stalin's biggest (if 
unconscious) asset in the Allied camp. In the atomic field Soviet 
agents included Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Morton Sobell, David 
Greenglass, Harry Gold, J.Peters (alias Alexander Stevens), to whom 
Whittaker Chambers acted as courier, and Jacob Golos, as well as 
Klaus Fuchs, who had been cleared by British security. 

The extent of the damage these spies caused to Western interests 
cannot be known until the Soviet archives are finally opened. But the 
fact that Soviet Russia took only four years to make an A-bomb 
(1945—9), no longer than the Manhattan Project itself, was a 
stunning shock to the Truman Administration and its Defence chiefs 
(though not to some of the scientific community). It was badly 
received by the American public. It coincided with the kmt collapse 
in China. It came at a period when the problem of Soviet penetration 
of government had in fact been overcome but when the offenders 
were still being brought to trial. Not until 25 January 1950 was 
Alger Hiss found guilty of perjury in concealing his membership of 
the Communist Party. His was the case which attracted most 
attention. 



PEACE BY TERROR 459 

A fornight later Senator Joe McCarthy made his notorious speech 
in Wheeling, West Virginia, claiming that 205 known Communists 
were working in the State Department. That began the full-scale 
witch-hunt: in short, the phenomenon occurred after the realities 
which provoked it had been dealt with. McCarthy was a radical 
Republican; not a right-winger. He had become interested in espion- 
age in the previous autumn when he had seen a confidential fbi 
report (already two years out of date). Shortly before the Wheeling 
speech he dined with Father Edmund Walsh, regent of the school of 
Foreign Service at Georgetown University. This was a Conservative 
Jesuit college (the Jesuits were not radicalized until the 1960s) which 
supplied large numbers of graduates to the State Department; it was 
concerned about the number of ultra-liberals who had entered 
during the period 1933-45. The Senator smelt an issue and bran- 
dished it. He was not a serious politician but an adventurer, who 
treated politics as a game. As his most perceptive biographer put it: 
'He was no kind of fanatic ... as incapable of true rancour, spite and 
animosity as a eunuch is of marriage .... He faked it all and could 
not understand anyone who didn't.' 100 Robert Kennedy, the future 
Attorney-General, who worked for him, denied he was evil: 'His 
whole method of operation was complicated because he would get a 
guilty feeling and get hurt after he had blasted somebody. He wanted 
so desperately to be liked. He didn't anticipate the results of what he 
was doing.' 101 

McCarthy would have been of little account had not the Korean 
War broken out that summer. His period of ascendancy coincided 
exactly with that bitter and frustrating conflict — one might say that 
McCarthyism was Stalin's last gift to the American people. He was 
rapidly destroyed once it ended. McCarthy took advantage of the 
Congressional committee-system which empowers investigations. 
For the legislature to conduct quasi-judicial inquiries is legitimate. It 
was an old English parliamentary procedure, which proved invalu- 
able in establishing constitutional liberties in the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. It was grievously abused, particularly in the 
conduct of political and religious witch-hunts. Two aspects were 
particularly objectionable: the use of inquisitorial procedure, so alien 
to the Common Law, and the power to punish for contempt anyone 
who obstructs this procedure. Congress inherited both the virtues 
and vices of the system, which were inseparable. In the 1930s, the 
Congressional liberals had hounded the Wall Street community; now 
it was the turn of the liberals. In the 1960s and later it would be the 
turn of business; and in the mid-1970s the Nixon Administration. 
On the whole the advantages outweigh the defects, and therefore the 
system is kept. Besides, it contains its own self-correcting mechan- 



460 PEACE BY TERROR 

ism, which worked in this case, albeit slowly: McCarthy was repu- 
diated, censured and, in effect, extinguished by his own colleagues, 
the Senate. The damage inflicted by McCarthy on individual lives 
was due to two special factors. The first was the inadequacy of 
American libel laws, which permitted the press to publish his 
unsupported allegations with impunity, even when they were unpri- 
vileged. It was the press, especially the wire-services, which turned an 
abuse into a scandal, just as in the 1970s it was to magnify the 
Watergate case into a witch-hunt. 102 Second was the moral cowardice 
shown by some institutions, notably in Hollywood and Washington, 
in bowing to the prevailing unreason. Again, this is a recurrent 
phenomenon, to be repeated in the decade 1965-75, when many 
universities surrendered to student violence. 

Without these two factors 'McCarthyism' was nothing. The 
contrast with Zhdanovism in Russia is instructive. McCarthy had no 
police. He had no executive authority at all. On the contrary: both the 
Truman and Eisenhower administrations did all in their power to 
impede him. Above all, McCarthy was not part of the legal process. 
He had no court. Indeed, the courts were totally unaffected by 
McCarthyism. As Kennan pointed out: 'Whoever could get his case 
before a court was generally assured of meeting there with a level of 
justice no smaller than at any other time in recent American 
history.' 103 The courts resisted McCarthyism, unlike their behaviour 
twenty years later when they became strongly tinged with Watergate 
hysteria. In the last resort, McCarthy's weapon was publicity; and in a 
free society publicity is a two-edged weapon. McCarthy was des- 
troyed by publicity; and the man who orchestrated this destruction 
from behind the scenes was the new President, Dwight Eisenhower. 

Eisenhower rightly perceived that the Korean War and the uncer- 
tainty surrounding cease-fire negotiations were the source of the 
frustration and fear upon which McCarthyism played. In November 
1952 he had been elected to end the war. Peace has always been a 
vote-winning issue in the United States. Yet there is an instructive 
contrast in Democrat and Republican records. Wilson won in 1916 on 
a promise to keep America out of the war; next year America was a 
belligerent. Roosevelt won in 1940 on the same promise and with the 
same result. Lyndon Johnson won in 1964 on a peace platform 
(against Republican 'warmongering') and promptly turned Vietnam 
into a major war. Eisenhower in 1952 and Richard Nixon in 1972 are 
the only two Presidents in this century who have carried out their 
peace promises. 

Yet in Eisenhower's case his achievement has been underestimated. 
He regarded Korea as an unnecessary and repeatedly misjudged 
conflict. He was appalled by the number of occasions on which the 



PEACE BY TERROR 461 

previous administration had contemplated using nuclear weapons 
against Manchuria and China proper, and even Russia; and by its 
readiness, in addition, to consider conventional bombing against 
China on a vast scale. 104 He set about breaking the armistice- 
deadlock and, instead of planning to use nuclear force in secret, he 
employed nuclear threats in private diplomacy. This tactic worked 
and within nine months he had a settlement of sorts. He was bitterly 
criticized at the time, and since, for doing nothing to stem anti- 
Communist hysteria. 105 The truth is he grasped the essential point: 
that it was the war which made McCarthyism possible, and that once 
it had been got out of the way, the Senator could soon be reduced to 
size. He gave the peace-effort priority and only afterwards did he 
organize McCarthy's downfall. With considerable cunning and in 
great secrecy he directed his friends in the Senate to censure 
McCarthy, while using his press chief, Jim Haggerty, to orchestrate 
the publicity. The process culminated in December 1954 and is 
perhaps the best example of the 'hidden hand' style of leadership 
which Eisenhower delighted to employ and which research brought 
to light many years after his death. 106 

Eisenhower was the most successful of America's twentieth- 
century presidents, and the decade when he ruled (1953-61) the 
most prosperous in American, and indeed world, history. His 
presidency was surrounded by mythology, much of which he delib- 
erately contrived himself. He sought to give the impression that he 
was a mere constitutional monarch, who delegated decisons to his 
colleagues and indeed to Congress, and who was anxious to spend 
the maximum amount of time playing golf. His stratagem worked. 
His right-wing rival for Republican leadership, Senator Robert Taft, 
sneered, 'I really think he should have been a golf pro.' 107 His first 
biographer claimed that the 'unanimous consensus' of 'journalists 
and academics, pundits and prophets, the national community of 
intellectuals and critics' had been that Eisenhower's conduct of the 
presidency had been 'unskilful and his definition of it inaccurate .... 
[he] elected to leave his nation to fly on automatic pilot.' 108 He was 
seen as well-meaning, intellectually limited, ignorant, inarticulate, 
often weak and always lazy. 

The reality was quite different. 'Complex and devious', was the 
summing-up of his Vice-President, Richard Nixon (no mean judge of 
such things); 'he always applied two, three or four lines of reasoning 
to a single problem and he usually preferred the indirect 
approach'. 109 In the late 1970s, the opening up of the secret files kept 
by his personal secretary, Ann Whitman, phone logs, diaries and 
other personal documents, revealed that Eisenhower worked very 
much harder than anyone, including close colleagues, supposed. A 



462 PEACE BY TERROR 

typical day started at 7.30, by which time he had read the New York 
Times, Herald Tribune and Christian Science Monitor, and finished 
close to midnight (he often worked afterwards). Many of his 
appointments (especially those dealing with party or defence and 
foreign policy) were deliberately left out of lists given to the press by 
Haggerty. Long and vital meetings with the State and Defence 
secretaries, the head of the cia and other figures, took place 
unrecorded and in secret, before the formal sessions of the National 
Security Council. The running of defence and foreign policy, far from 
being bureaucratic and inflexible, as his critics supposed, in fact took 
place in accordance with highly efficient staff principles, contrasting 
strongly with the romantic anarchy of the Kennedy regime which 
followed. Eisenhower himself was in charge throughout. 110 

Eisenhower practised pseudo-delegation. All thought Sherman 
Adams, his chief of staff, took the domestic decisions. To some 
extent Adams shared this illusion. He said that Eisenhower was the 
last major world figure who actively disliked and avoided using the 
phone. 111 In fact the logs show he made multitudes of calls about 
which Adams knew nothing. Far from delegating foreign policy to 
John Foster Dulles, his Secretary of State, Eisenhower took advice 
from a number of sources of which Dulles knew nothing, and kept 
him on a secret, tight rein: Dulles reported back daily by phone, even 
when abroad. Eisenhower read a huge volume of official documents 
and maintained a copious correspondence with high-level friends at 
home and abroad in the diplomatic, business and military communi- 
ties. He used Dulles as a servant; and Dulles complained that though 
he often worked late into the night with the President at the White 
House he had 'never been asked to a family dinner'. 112 The notion 
that Dulles and Adams were prima donnas was deliberately pro- 
moted by Eisenhower, since they could be blamed when mistakes 
were made, thus protecting the presidency - a technique often used 
in the past by crowned autocrats, such as Elizabeth I. But conversely, 
Eisenhower sometimes exploited his reputation for political naivety 
to take the blame for mistakes made by subordinates, as, for 
instance, when Dulles made a series of blunders in the appointment 
of Winthrop Aldrich to the London embassy in 1953. 113 Kennan 
grasped half the truth when he wrote that on foreign affairs 
Eisenhower was 'a man of keen political intelligence and penetration. 
. . . When he spoke of such matters seriously and in a protected 
official circle, insights of a high order flashed out time after time 
through the curious military gobbledygook in which he was accus- 
tomed to expressing and concealing his thoughts.' 114 In fact Eisen- 
hower used gobbledygook, especially at press conferences, to avoid 
giving answers which plain English could not conceal; he often 



PEACE BY TERROR 463 

pretended ignorance for the same reason. Indeed he was Machiavell- 
ian enough to pretend to misunderstand his own translator when 
dealing with difficult foreigners. 115 Transcripts of his secret confer- 
ences show the power and lucidity of his thoughts. His editing of 
drafts by speechwriters and of speeches by Dulles betray the command 
of English he could exercise when he chose. Churchill was one of the 
few men who appreciated him at his correct worth. It could be said 
that they were the two greatest statesmen of the mid-century. 

Eisenhower concealed his gifts and activities because he thought it 
essential that the autocratic leadership, which he recognized both 
America and the world needed, should be exercised by stealth. He had 
three quite clear principles. The first was to avoid war. Of course if 
Soviet Russia was bent on destroying the West, resistance must be 
made, and America must be strong enough to make it. But the 
occasions of unnecessary war (as he judged Korea) must be avoided by 
clarity, firmness, caution and wisdom. In this limited aim he was 
successful. 116 He ended the Korean conflict. He avoided war with 
China. He stamped out the Suez war in 1956, and skilfully averted 
another Middle-Eastern war in 1958. Of Vietnam he said: 'I cannot 
conceive of a greater tragedy for America than to get heavily involved 
now in an all-out war in any of those regions.' Again: 'There is going 
to be no involvement . . . unless it is as a result of the constitutional 
process that is placed upon Congress to declare it.' 117 Congressional 
authorization; Allied support — those were the two conditions he laid 
down for American military involvement anywhere, and they were 
reflected in the Middle Eastern and South-East Asian systems of 
alliance he added to Nato. 

Eisenhower's second and related principle was the necessity for 
constitutional control over military endeavour. He used the cia a 
great deal and was the only American president to control it 
effectively. He skilfully presided over the cia operations in Iran and 
Guatemala without any damage to his reputation. 118 The 1958 cia 
coup in Indonesia failed because for once the work was delegated to 
Dulles. It is hard to believe Eisenhower would have allowed the 1961 
Bay of Pigs operation to proceed in the form it took. He had in 1954 
created a civilian Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence 
Activities, under a wily old diplomat, David Bruce, and this was one of 
a number of means he employed to keep the military establishment 
under his authority. 119 He disliked generals in politics. The 1952 
Chicago Republican convention, which selected him to run for the 
presidency, was so thick with generals, supporters of Senator Taft and 
MacArthur, that Eisenhower kept his chief aide, Colonel Bob Schultz, 
and his doctor, General Howard Snyder, out of town. 120 Eisenhower 
was always aware of his need to steer a difficult path between 



464 PEACE BY TERROR 

isolationism and over-activism in world affairs. He used Dulles to 
satisfy the activists of the Senate. For Dulles, who was Wilson's 
Secretary of State Robert Lansing's nephew and had been at Ver- 
sailles, the Senate's rejection of the 1919 Treaty was the 
never-to-be-forgotten lesson. He was always, wrote Kennan, 'in- 
tensely aware of the dependence of a Secretary of State on senatorial 
support for the success of his policies'. 121 Under the guidance of 
Eisenhower, who carefully vetted his statements in advance, Dulles 
used what sometimes appeared to be inflated language ('rollback', 
'go to the brink', 'agonizing reappraisal') to marry legislative support 
to military and political realism. Only the two men knew which of 
America's overseas commitments were real or rhetorical. 

Eisenhower's chief fear, in the tense atmosphere engendered by the 
Cold War, was that the government would fall into the grip of a 
combination of bellicose senators, over-eager brass-hats and greedy 
arms-suppliers - what he termed the 'military-industrial complex'. For 
his third principle, reflected in his diaries and other personal 
documents, was that the security of freedom throughout the world 
rested ultimately in the health of the American economy. Given time, 
the strength of that economy could duplicate itself in West Europe and 
Japan. But the US economy could itself be destroyed by intemperate 
spending. He said of the brass-hats: They don't know much about 
fighting inflation. This country could choke itself to death piling up 
military expenditures just as surely as it can defeat itself by not spending 
enough for protection.' Or again: 'There is no defence for any country 
that busts its own economy.' 122 But Eisenhower was equally fearful of 
reckless spending in the domestic field. He was not opposed to 
Keynesian measures to fight incipient recession. In 1958, to overcome 
such a dip, he ran up a $9.4 billion deficit, the largest ever acquired by a 
US government in peacetime. 123 But that was an emergency. What 
Eisenhower strove mightily to avoid was a huge, permanent increase in 
federal commitments. He put holding down inflation before social 
security because he thought it was ultimately the only reliable form of 
social security. He loathed the idea of America becoming a welfare 
state. He was in fact deeply conservative. He admitted in 1956: 'Taft 
was really more liberal than me in domestic matters.' 124 His real 
nightmare was a combination of excessive defence spending combined 
with a runaway welfare machine — a destructive conjunction that 
became reality in the late 1960s. While he was in charge, federal 
spending as a percentage of gnp, and with it inflation, was held to a 
manageable figure, despite all the pressures. It was a notable 
achievement and explains why the Eisenhower decade was the most 
prosperous of modern times. And that prosperity was radiating 
through an ever-increasing portion of the world. 



PEACE BY TERROR 465 

The world was more secure too. In 1950-2, the risk of a major 
war was very considerable. By the end of the decade, a sort of 
stability had been reached, lines drawn, rules worked out, alliances 
and commitments settled across the globe. The 'containment' policy 
had been applied. Militant Leninism, which had expanded rapidly in 
the 1940s in both Europe and Asia, found its impetuous march 
slowed to a crawl or even halted entirely. But no sooner was the 
system of containment complete than it ceased to be the whole 
answer. For the collapse of the old liberal empires of Europe brought 
into existence a new category of states which raised fresh and 
intractable dangers. 



FOURTEEN 

The Bandung Generation 



The same historical process which created the superpowers placed 
traditional powers in a dilemma. What was their role? The defeated 
nations, France, Germany and Japan, were driven by necessity to a 
fundamental reappraisal. But Britain had not been defeated. She had 
stood alone and emerged victorious. Could she not carry on as 
Sefore? Churchill had fought desperately for British interests. He 
rejected utterly Roosevelt's notion of America and Russia as the two 
idealist' powers and Britain as the greedy old imperialist. He knew 
of the bottomless cynicism reflected in Ambassador Maisky's remark 
that he always added up Allied and Nazi losses in the same column. 1 
He pointed out to the British Ambassador in Moscow that Russia 
had 'never been actuated by anything but cold-blooded self-interest 
and total disdain for our lives and fortunes'. 2 He was sombrely 
aware that Russia was anxious to tear the British Empire to pieces 
and feast on its members, and that America too, aided by the 
Dominions and especially Australia and New Zealand, favoured 
'decolonization'. H.V.Evatt, Australia's cantankerous Foreign Min- 
ister, got such notions written into the UN charter. 3 Churchill snarled 
at Yalta: 'While there is life in my body no transfer of British 
sovereignty will be permitted.' 4 

Six months later Churchill had been thrown out by the electorate. 
His Labour successors planned to disarm, decolonize, make friends 
with Russia and build a welfare state. In practice they found 
themselves at the mercy of events. In August 1945 Lord Keynes 
presented them with a paper showing the country was bankrupt. 
Without American help, 'the economic basis for the hopes of the 
country is non-existent'. 5 Ernest Bevin, the trades union leader 
turned Foreign Secretary, began with the slogan 'Left can talk to 
Left' and hoped to share atomic secrets with Russia. But he was soon 
telling his colleague Hugh Dalton: 'Molotov was just like a Com- 
munist in a local Labour Party. If you treat him badly, he makes the 

466 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 467 

most of the grievances, and if you treat him well he only puts his 
price up and abuses you the next day.' 6 Gradually Bevin came to 
embody Britain's determination to organize collective security. He 
told Molotov in 1949, 'Do you want to get Austria behind your Iron 
Curtain? You can't do that. Do you want Turkey and the Straits? 
You can't have them. Do you want Korea? You can't have that. You 
are putting your neck out and one day you will have it chopped off.' 7 

Bevin's foreign policy meant Britain had to stay in the strategic 
arms race. Exactly a year after Keynes delivered his bankruptcy 
report, the Chief of Air Staff indented with the government for 
nuclear bombs. Specifications for the first British atom bomber were 
laid down 1 January 1947. 8 Britain's leading nuclear scientist, 
P.S.M.Blackett, opposed a British bomb, but then he thought that 
Britain could and should adopt a posture of neutrality vis-a-vis 
America and Soviet Russia. 9 The chief scientific adviser, Sir Henry 
Tizard, was also against an independent nuclear force: 'We are not a 
great power and never will be again. We are a great nation but if we 
continue to behave like a Great Power we shall soon cease to behave 
like a great nation.' 10 But Tizard was staggered by the Soviet success 
in exploding an A-bomb as early as August 1949: he attributed it to 
theft of the material. At all events the decision to make the bomb was 
taken in January 1947, at the height of the desperate fuel crisis and 
just before Britain handed over the burden of Greece and Turkey to 
Truman. Only Attlee, Bevin and four other ministers were present. 11 
The expenditure was 'lost' in the estimates and concealed from 
parliament. When Churchill returned to office in 1951 he was 
astounded to find that £100 million had been thus secretly laid out 
and the project well advanced. 12 

The decision to make the bomb, and the brilliant success with 
which it was developed and deployed, undoubtedly kept Britain in 
the top club for another thirty years. It was the first British A-bomb 
test off Monte Bello Island in October 1952 which led the Americans 
to resume the atomic partnership. The first British H-bomb test at 
Christmas Island in May 1957 formalized this partnership by 
persuading Congress to amend the 1946 McMahon Act: the bilateral 
agreements of 1955 and 1958 could not have been obtained without 
a British nuclear capability. Once in the club, Britain was able to play 
a leading part in the test-ban negotiations of 1958-63 and the 
process which produced the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1970. In 
1960, in a famous phrase, Aneurin Bevan defended the British bomb 
to his Labour Party colleagues on the grounds that, without it, a 
British Foreign Secretary would 'go naked into the council chambers 
of the world'. But this was a misformulation. Without it, Britain 
would not have been a party to these and other negotiations in the 



468 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

first place: for, like other gentlemen's clubs, the nuclear one does not 
admit nudes into its council chamber. In 1962 the Anglo-US Nassau 
agreement gave Britain title to sixty-four modern nuclear 
launching-platforms as opposed to 1,038 for the USA and about 265 
for Soviet Russia. By 1977 the relative figures were America 11,330, 
Russia 3,826 and Britain 192: it was this fall in the British ratio 
which excluded her from the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks 
(salt), even though at that time the British 'deterrent' could 
destroy all the major industrial and population centres in Soviet 
Russia and inflict 20 million casualties. 13 

In 1945-6, then, it became an axiom of British policy to engage, in 
conjunction with the Americans, in collective security arrangements 
to contain Soviet expansion, and to contribute towards them a 
British nuclear force. Through all the changes of mood and govern- 
ment, that consistent thread ran through British policy right into the 
1980s. But it was the only stable element. All else was confusion and 
irresolution. There was a failure of vision; a collapse of will. In the 
late summer of 1945 the British Empire and Commonwealth seemed 
to have returned to the meridian of 1919. British power was 
stretched over nearly a third of the globe. In addition to legitimate 
possessions, Britain administered the Italian empire in North and 
East Africa, many former French colonies and many liberated 
territories in Europe and Asia, including the glittering empires of 
Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. No nation had ever carried 
such wide-ranged responsibilities. Twenty-five years later, everything 
had gone. History had never before witnessed a transformation of 
such extent and rapidity. 

It was often to be said, as the disintegration took place, that the 
collapse of the Empire was foreshadowed by the fall of Singapore 
early in 1941. But that is not true. There was no ignominy in 1941. 
Though there was a failure of leadership in the defence of the city, 
there was no shame in the campaign as a whole. The British in 
Malaya were not guilty of hubris in despising the Japanese. On the 
contrary they predicted accurately what would happen unless the 
garrison was reinforced and, above all, re-armed. Instead the deci- 
sion was taken to save Russia. As it was, 200,000 well-equipped and 
very experienced Japanese troops, with an overwhelming superiority 
in sea- and air-power, were held at bay for seventy days by elements 
of only three and a half divisions of Commonwealth fighting troops. 
In any event, the image of Asiatic victory was wholly erased by the 
magnitude of Japanese defeat. Britain surrendered at Singapore with 
91,000 men. When General Itagaki handed his sword to Admiral 
Mountbatten in 1945 he had 656,000 men in the Singapore com- 
mand. Elsewhere the British received the capitulation of more than a 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 469 

million. More than 3,175,000 Japanese men at arms came in from 
the cold, the greatest defeat any Asian or non-white nation has ever 
undergone. In every department, Western (i.e., white) technology 
and organization had proved not marginally but overwhelmingly 
superior. It was not only a characteristic but the very archetypal 
colonial-style victory of fire-power over muscle-power. 14 

Nor was there any physical evidence of a collapse of loyalty 
towards the British empire among the subject peoples. Quite the 
contrary. The intense efforts made by the Japanese to establish an 
'Indian National Army' and an independent regime were a total 
failure. A 'government' was established in October 1942 under 
Chandra Bose, which declared war on Britain and set up its capital in 
Rangoon. The ina disintegrated immediately it went into action 
against the Indian Army. The Japanese were never able to persuade 
or force more than 30,000 Indians, civil and military, to serve against 
Britain. Many thousands of Indian pows preferred torture and death 
to changing allegiance: for instance, of the 200 officers and men of 
the 2/15 Punjabs captured at Kuching, virtually all were murdered 
by April 1945, some being beaten to death, others beheaded or 
bayoneted. Opposition to the war by part of India's 'political nation' 
had no effect on the 'military nation'. Whereas 1,457,000 Indians 
served in the army in 1914-18, during the Second World War the 
number passed the 2,500,000 mark: Indians awarded Victoria 
Crosses rose from eleven to thirty-one. 15 

Who spoke for India? The 'political nation'? The 'military nation'? 
Could anyone speak for India? In 1945 India was over 400 million 
people: 250 million Hindus, 90 million Muslims, 6 million Sikhs, 
millions of sectarians, Buddhists, Christians; 500 independent 
princes and maharajahs; 23 main languages, 200 dialects; 3,000 
castes, with 60 million 'untouchables' at the bottom of the heap; 80 
per cent of the nation lived in 500,000 villages, most of them 
inaccessible even by surfaced road. Yet for all practical purposes the 
decision had been taken in 1917, under the Montagu reforms, to 
begin the process of handing power over this vast and disparate 
nation not to its traditional or its religious or racial or economic or 
military leaders - or all combined - but to a tiny elite who had 
acquired the ideology and the techniques and, above all, the vernacu- 
lar of Western politics. The decision had been confirmed by the 
reaction to Amritsar. That indicated the British Raj was no longer 
determined to enforce the rule of law at all costs. The 1935 Act set 
the process of abdication in motion. The British establishment, 
whatever public noises it might make, knew exactly what was 
happening. As Baldwin's eminence grise, J. C.C.Davidson, reported 
to him: 



470 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

The fact is that the British government, the Viceroy and to a certain extent 
the states have been bounced by Gandhi into believing that a few half- 
baked, semi-educated urban agitators represent the views of 365 million 
hard-working and comparatively contented cultivators. It seems to me that 
the elephant has been stampeded by the flea. 16 

India illustrates the process whereby the full-time professional 
politician inherited the earth in the twentieth century. Reforms 
created an alien system of representation. A class of men, mainly 
lawyers, organized themselves to manipulate it. In due course the 
governing power was handed over to them. The dialogue was 
entirely between the old and the new elites. The ordinary people did 
not come into the play, except as a gigantic walk-on crowd in the 
background. The process was to be repeated all over Asia and Africa. 
The forms of the Westminster, Paris or Washington model were 
preserved. The substance was only tenuously present; or absent 
entirely. Lenin's Bolsheviks of 1917, Mao's ccp cadres of 1949 and 
the Congressmen of India came to power by different routes. But 
they had this in common. All three new ruling groups were men who 
had never engaged in any other occupation except politics and had 
devoted their lives to the exploitation of a flexible concept called 
'democracy'. 

Lenin had asserted his mandate to rule by the methods of a 
caudillo; Mao by those of a war-lord. Gandhi and Nehru stepped 
into a vacuum created by the collapse of the will to rule. The 1935 
Act had made the Raj unworkable, except by permanent repression. 
In 1942, partly under pressure from Roosevelt, Churchill agreed to a 
declaration giving India self-government after the war. On 28 July he 
lunched with George vi, whose diary records: 'He amazed me by 
saying that his colleagues & both, or all 3, parties in Park, were quite 
prepared to give up India to the Indians after the war.' 17 This proved 
to be completely accurate. The arguments in 1945-7 were entirely 
about the manner and timing, not the fact, of Britain's departure. 
The actual Indian Independence bill, which became law 18 July 
1947, was passed by both Houses of Parliament without a division 
and against a background of almost complete public indifference. 

Indeed, had Britain not abdicated, quickly and wearily, it is 
difficult to see quite how Indian independence could have been 
secured. Gandhi was not a liberator but a political exotic, who could 
have flourished only in the protected environment provided by 
British liberalism. He was a year older than Lenin, with whom he 
shared a quasi-religious approach to politics, though in sheer cranki- 
ness he had much more in common with Hitler, his junior by twenty 
years. In his local language, Gujarati, Gandhi means 'grocer', and 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 471 

both he and his mother, from whom he inherited chronic constipation, 
were obsessed by the bodily functions and the ingress and egress of 
food. This preoccupation was intensified when he went to London 
and moved in vegetarian circles. We know more about the intimacies 
of his life than that of any other human being in history. He lived in 
public in his ashram or religious camp, attended by a numerous 
entourage of devoted women, most of them willing to describe his 
ways in the most minute detail. By the mid-1970s more than four 
hundred biographies of him were in existence, and the English edition 
of his utterances, compiled by fifty researchers and thirty clerks of the 
Indian Information Ministry, which set up a special department for 
this purpose, will fill eighty volumes averaging 550 pages each. 18 

Gandhi's first question, on rising, to the women who waited on 
him every morning was 'Did you have a good bowel movement this 
morning, sisters?' One of his favourite books was Constipation and 
Our Civilization, which he constantly reread. He was convinced that 
evil sprang from dirt and unsuitable food. So although he ate heartily 
- 'He was one of the hungriest men I have ever known', a disciple 
said — his food was carefully chosen and prepared. A mixture of 
bicarbonate of soda, honey and lemon-juice was his drink, and all his 
vegetarian dishes were assisted by munching quantities of crushed 
garlic, a bowl of which stood by his plate (he had no sense of smell, a 
useful attribute in India). 19 In middle age, Gandhi turned against his 
wife and children, indeed against sex itself. He thought women were 
better than men because he assumed they did not enjoy sex. He 
carried out his so-called Brahmacharya experiments of sleeping with 
naked girls solely for warmth. His only seminal emission in his 
middle and later years was in his sleep in 1936, when he was aged 
66: it disturbed him a great deal. 20 

Gandhi's eccentricities appealed to a nation which venerates sacral 
oddity. But his teachings had no relevance to India's problems or 
aspirations. Hand-weaving made no sense in a country whose chief 
industry was the mass-production of textiles. His food policy would 
have led to mass starvation. In fact Gandhi's own ashram, with his 
own very expensive 'simple' tastes and innumerable 'secretaries' and 
handmaidens, had to be heavily subsidized by three merchant princes. 
As one of his circle observed: 'It costs a great deal of money to keep 
Gandhiji living in poverty.' 21 About the Gandhi phenomenon there 
was always a strong aroma of twentieth-century humbug. His 
methods could only work in an ultra-liberal empire. 'It was not so 
much that the British treated him forbearingly', George Orwell wrote, 

as that he was always able to command publicity .... It is difficult to see 
how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the 



472 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. 
Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to 
appeal to outside opinion but to bring a mass-movement into being .... Is 
there a Gandhi in Russia at this moment? 22 

All Gandhi's career demonstrated was the unrepressive nature of 
British rule and its willingness to abdicate. And Gandhi was expen- 
sive in human life as well as money. The events of 1920-1 indi- 
cated that though he could bring a mass-movement into existence, 
he could not control it. Yet he continued to play the sorcerer's 
apprentice, while the casualty bill mounted into hundreds, then 
thousands, then tens of thousands, and the risks of a gigantic 
sectarian and racial explosion accumulated. This blindness to the law 
of probability in a bitterly divided sub-continent made nonsense of 
Gandhi's professions that he would not take life in any circum- 
stances. 

There was a similar element of egregious frivolity in Jawaharlal 
Nehru. He was a brahmin, from a priestly caste which had in 
modern times (characteristically) turned to law and politics. He was 
an only son, a mother's boy, brought up by governesses and 
theosophists, then as an expatriate at Harrow, where he was known 
as Joe, and Cambridge. As a young man he led a fashionable life in 
London and the spas, on £800 a year. He was easily bored. He 
allowed his father, a hard-working Allahabad lawyer, to pick a wife 
for him, another Kashmiri brahmin. But he never (like Lenin) 
showed the smallest desire to take a job to support his family. As his 
father complained: 

Have you had any time to attend to the poor cows . . . reduced to the 
position of cows by nothing short of culpable negligence on your part and 
mine - I mean your mother, your wife, your child and your sisters? ... I do 
not think that a man who is capable of starving his own children can be 
much good to the nation. 23 

Nehru drifted into politics in the wake of Gandhi's campaign, and 
in 1929 the Mahatma made him Congress president. He dabbled in 
peasant life: 'I have had the privilege of working for them, of mixing 
with them, of living in their mud-huts and partaking in all reverence 
of their lowly fare', as he put it. He was in gaol for agitation at the 
same time as Hitler's spell in Landsberg: 'It will be a new experience, 
and in this blase world it is something to have a new experience.' 
India, he thought, might be saved by 'a course of study of Bertrand 
Russell's books'. In many ways he was a Bloomsbury figure, a 
politicized Lytton Strachey, transplanted to an exotic clime. 'An 
intellectual of the intellectuals', wrote Leonard Woolf. 'The last 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 473 

word in aristocratic refinement and culture dedicated to the salvation 
of the underdog', enthused Mrs Webb. 24 He swallowed the European 
Left pharmacopoeia whole, enthusing for Republican Spain, accept- 
ing Stalin's show-trials at their face-value, an Appeaser and a 
unilateral disarmer. He spent most of the war in gaol, following a 
putative revolt in 1942 which received very little support, and thus 
acquired an extensive knowledge of Indian penology. But of the 
process of wealth-creation and administration, by which 400 million 
people were fed and governed, he knew nothing, Until the end of the 
1940s he seems to have thought that India was underpopulated. 25 
Almost until the last minute he refused to believe - because he knew 
so little about the real India - that if the British Raj handed over 
power to Congress the Muslims would demand a separate state. 
Even more astounding was his view that violent sectarianism, which 
had been endemic before the nineteenth century and had begun again 
only after the Gandhi movement and Amritsar, had been essentially 
created by British rule. He told Jacques Marcuse in 1946: 'When the 
British go, there will be no more communal trouble in India.' 26 

In fact the post-war Indian elections, in which the Muslim League 
captured virtually all the seats reserved for Muslims with its pro- 
gramme of partition, indicated that division was inevitable and 
large-scale violence probable. The transfer of power has been 
presented as a skilful exercise in Anglo-Indian statesmanship. The 
reality is that the British government simply lost control. Lord 
Mountbatten was appointed Viceroy on 20 February 1947, with the 
British economy on the verge of collapse, and told to do what he 
liked {'carte blanche' as he told the King) provided he stuck to the 
June 1948 deadline for independence. 27 The massacres had begun 
even before he reached India. Churchill took the view that 'a 
fourteen-month time interval is fatal to an orderly transfer of 
power' since it gave extremists on both sides time to organize. Lord 
Wavell, the previous Viceroy, felt Britain should hand over a united 
country, leaving it to the Indians themselves to divide it if they 
wished. General Sir Francis Tuker, who had prepared a contingency 
plan for division, judged that partition was inevitable if the transfer 
was rushed. Mountbatten rushed the transfer. He made a decision in 
favour of partition within a fortnight of his arrival. Sir Cyril 
Radcliffe, who headed the boundary commission, had to make the 
awards alone as the Hindu and Muslim members were too terrified 
to make independent decisions. 

The result was like the break-up of the Habsburg Empire in 
1918-19: the unifying principle was removed and the result created 
more problems than it solved. The princes were abandoned. The 
minority sects and clans were simply forgotten. The untouchables 



474 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

were ignored. All the real difficulties — the Punjab, Bengal, Kashmir, 
the North-West Frontier, Sind, British Baluchistan - were left to 
resolve themselves. Mountbatten had a genius for public relations 
and kept up a brave front. But the transfer and partition were 
catastrophic shambles, an ignominious end to two centuries of 
highly successful rule based on bluff. Some 5 to 6 million people ran 
for their lives in each direction. A procession of terrified Hindus and 
Sikhs, for instance, stretched for fifty-seven miles from the West 
Punjab. The boundary force of 23,000 was too weak and some of its 
troops may have joined the killing themselves. 28 The carnage reached 
even into Lutyens's incomparable palace, for many of Lady Mount- 
batten's Muslim staff were murdered; she helped to move their 
corpses into the mortuary. Gandhi, who had made it all possible, 
confessed to her: 'Such a happening is unparalleled in the history of 
the world and it makes me hang my head in shame.' 29 Nehru, who 
had seen liberated Indians as so many Bloomsberries, now admitted 
to Lady Ismay: 'People have lost their reason completely and are 
behaving worse than brutes? 30 

Gandhi was among the victims, murdered in January 1948 by one 
of the fanatics whose hour had come. How many went with him will 
never be known. Estimates of the dead at the time ranged from 1 to 2 
million. More modern calculations are in the 200,000 to 600,000 
range. 31 But there has been a general desire to minimize and forget 
the event for fear of repeating it. In the anarchy, other great injustices 
took place. In Kashmir, Nehru's home state, he used troops to 
enforce Indian rule, despite the fact that most Kashmiris were 
Muslims, on the grounds that the ruler was a Hindu: the Muslims 
there were 'barbarians'. In Hyderabad, where the majority were 
Hindus and the ruler a Muslim, he reversed the principle and again 
used troops on the grounds that 'madmen are in charge of Hyder- 
abad's destinies'. 32 Thus Kashmir, the most beautiful province of 
India, was itself partitioned and remains so more than thirty years 
later; and the ground was prepared for two wars between India and 
Pakistan. 

Nehru ruled India for seventeen years and founded a parliament- 
ary dynasty. He was a popular ruler, though not an effective one. He 
did his best to make India's parliament, the Lok Sabha, work and 
spent much time there. But he was too autocratic to allow cabinet 
government to flourish: his rule was a one-man show - 'I think my 
leaving might well be in the nature of a disaster', he admitted 
complacently. 33 The view was generally shared abroad: 'The greatest 
figure in Asia', wrote Walter Lippmann. 'If he did not exist,' said 
Dean Acheson, 'he would have to be invented.' 'A world titan', 
pronounced the Christian Science Monitor. 'Mr Nehru, without 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 475 

boasting, may say that Delhi is the School of Asia', echoed the 
Guardian. Adlai Stevenson thought him one of the few men entitled 'to 
wear a halo in their own lifetimes'. 34 Privately Nehru came to doubt it 
all. 'It is terrible to think that we may be losing all our values and sinking 
into the sordidness of opportunist polities', he wrote in 1948. He put 
through a land reform but it benefited only a few richer peasants and did 
nothing for agricultural productivity. As for planning, he thought it 
would 'change the picture of the country so completely that the world 
will be amazed'. But nothing much happened. In 1 953 he confessed that 
on economics 'I am completely out of touch'. At one time he liked to 
open a dam or two; later his interest waned. In general: 'We function 
more and more as the old British government did,' he wrote to 
Governor-General Rajagopalachari, 'only with less efficiency.' 35 
Nehru did not seem to know how to rule. He spent four to five hours 
every day just dictating to as many as eight typists answers to the 2,000 
letters which Indians with grievances wrote daily to his office. 36 

What Nehru really enjoyed was holding forth about international 
morality on the world stage. In the 1950s he became the leading 
exponent of the higher humbug. At home he practised acquisitiveness. 
In 1952 he subdued the Naga tribesmen by using the army (though he 
vetoed machine-gunning them from the air). When the Portuguese 
Goans obstinately refused to rise and unite themselves with India, he 
sent in 'volunteers' and liberated them by force. Abroad, however, he 
denounced 'imperialism', at any rate when practised by the West. He 
thought that their behaviour in Korea showed the Americans to be 
'more hysterical as a people than almost any others, except perhaps the 
Bengalis' (who continued to massacre each other into the 1950s). The 
Anglo-French operations against Egypt in 1956 were 'a reversal of 
history which none of us can tolerate'. 'I cannot imagine a worse case of 
aggression.' 37 

But for the Communist world he adopted a quite different standard. 
To the end, his bible on Russia remained the Webbs' mendacious 
volumes: 'the great work', as he termed it. Visiting the country in 1 955 
he found the people 'happy and cheerful . . . well fed'. He thought civil 
liberty was not missed. There was a 'general impression' of 'content- 
ment', with everyone 'occupied and busy'; and 'if there are complaints 
they are about relatively minor matters'. 38 He never showed the 
slightest interest in Soviet colonialism or even recognized that it existed. 
When Sir John Kotelawala, Prime Minister of Ceylon, criticized the 
Soviet system of puppet-states in Eastern Europe, Nehru turned on him 
furiously. He refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 
1 956, pleading 'lack of information', and contented his conscience with 
a tiny private complaint. 39 Of course there was nothing Nehru could do 
about Hungary. But he might have saved Tibet from invasion and 



476 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

absorption by China, whose claims were purely imperialistic. Many 
Indians wanted him to take action but he did nothing. He thought 
the aggression had to be understood in terms of 'Chinese psychology' 
with its 'background of prolonged suffering'. 40 He did not explain 
why the suffering Chinese needed to take it out on the helpless 
Tibetans, whose ancient society was smashed like a matchbox and 
whose people were hustled off into central China, being replaced by 
Chinese 'settlers'. The arguments Nehru used to defend China were 
identical with those used on Hitler's behalf in the mid-1930s: Nehru 
was not only the last of the Viceroys, he was also the last of the 
Appeasers. 

At the time Nehru was anxious to act as impresario and introduce 
the new China to the international community. He basked in Chou 
En-lai's oily flattery ('Your Excellency has more knowledge of the 
world and Asia than I have'). He hero-worshipped the virile and 
militaristic Mao, and was quite taken by his fierce and sinister 
neighbour, Ho Chi Minh ('Fine, frank face, gentle and benign'). In 
China, he was 'amazed' by the 'tremendous emotional response from 
the Chinese people' to his visit. 41 It does not seem to have occurred 
to him that China and India had fundamental conflicts of interest 
and that in building up Chinese prestige he was knotting an almighty 
scourge. The first punishment came in 1959 when the Chinese, 
having got everything they needed out of the Pandit, started to rectify 
their Himalayan frontier and build military roads. Nehru was hoist 
with his own petard of respecting China's 'rights' in Tibet. The big 
crisis came in 1962 when the harassed Nehru, misled by the 
overconfidence of his own generals, blundered into war and was 
badly beaten. He was then driven to the humiliation of asking for 
immediate American aid, for in his panic he feared a Chinese 
paratroop drop on Calcutta. So the 'neo-colonialist' C130s were 
provided by Washington, and the 'imperialist' Seventh Fleet moved 
to his succour up the Bay of Bengal. Then, mysteriously, the Chinese 
steamroller halted and Nehru, mopping his anxious brow, was glad 
to take US advice and accept a ceasefire. 42 But by then he was an old 
man who had ceased to count much. 

Up to the mid-1950s, however, he was the cynosure of a new 
entity which progressive French journalists were already terming le 
tiers monde. The concept was based upon verbal prestidigitation, the 
supposition that by inventing new words and phrases one could 
change (and improve) unwelcome and intractable facts. There was 
the first world of the West, with its rapacious capitalism; the second 
world of totalitarian socialism, with its slave-camps; both with their 
hideous arsenals of mass-destruction. Why should there not come 
into existence a third world, arising like a phoenix from the ashes of 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 477 

empire, free, pacific, non-aligned, industrious, purged of capitalist 
and Stalinist vice, radiant with public virtue, today saving itself by its 
exertions, tomorrow the world by its example? Just as, in the 
nineteenth century, idealists had seen the oppressed proletariat as the 
repository of moral excellence - and a prospective proletarian state as 
Utopia - so now the very fact of a colonial past, and a non-white skin, 
were seen as title-deeds to international esteem. An ex-colonial state 
was righteous by definition. A gathering of such states would be a 
senate of wisdom. 

The concept was made flesh at the Afro-Asian Conference held 
18-24 April 1955 in Bandung, at the instigation of Indonesia's 
President Sukarno. Some twenty-three independent states from Asia 
and four from Africa were present, plus the Gold Coast and the Sudan, 
both soon to be free. The occasion was the apogee of Nehru's world 
celebrity and he chose it as a brilliant opportunity to introduce Chou 
En-lai to the world. But the many other stars included U Nu of Burma, 
Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, Mohammed Ali of Pakistan, 
Kwame Nkrumah, Africa's first black president-to-be, Archbishop 
Makarios of Cyprus, the black Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, 
and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. 43 It was calculated that 1,700 
secret police were in attendance. Some of those present were 
subsequently to plot to murder each other; others to end their lives in 
gaol, disgrace or exile. But at the time the Third World had not yet 
publicly besmirched itself by invasions, annexations, massacres and 
dictatorial cruelty. It was still in the age of innocence when it was 
confidently believed that the abstract power of numbers, and still 
more of words, would transform the world. 'This is the first 
inter-continental conference of coloured peoples in the history of 
mankind', said Sukarno in his opening oration. 'Sisters and brothers! 
How terrifically dynamic is our time! . . . Nations and states have 
awoken from a sleep of centuries!' The old age of the white man, 
which had ravaged the planet with its wars, was dying; a better one 
was dawning, which would dissolve the Cold War and introduce a 
new multi-racial, multi-religious brotherhood, for 'All great religions 
are one in their message of tolerance.' The coloured races would 
introduce the new morality: 'We, the people of Asia and Africa ... far 
more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilize 
what I have called the Moral Violence of Nations in favour of peace.' 44 
After this striking phrase, a Lucullan feast of oratory followed. 
Among those overwhelmed by it all was the black American writer 
Richard Wright: 'This is the human race speaking', he wrote. 45 

Sukarno was eminently suited to preside over this gathering. No one 
illustrated better than he the illusions, the political religiosity and the 
inner heartlessness of the post-colonial leadership. The Dutch East 



478 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

Indies had been cobbled together into an administrative unit from 
thousands of islands. It was an empire in itself. Until 1870 it had 
been run on principles of pure cupidity. Thereafter, under the 
inspiration of the great Islamic scholar C. Snouck Hurgronje, a 
combination of Westernization, 'association' and the creation of 
native elites was introduced under the name of 'ethical policy'. 46 It 
was well-intended but it was really a reflection of Dutch nationalism; 
it had no answer when a rival, Javanese, nationalism appeared in the 
1930s. This seems to have been worked out from 1927 onwards, by 
Sukarno and others, in the internment camp for native agitators at 
Upper Digul in New Guinea. 47 It was an unimpressive mixture of 
Islamic, Marxist and European liberal cliches, but garnished by 
resounding phraseology. Whatever else he was, Sukarno was the 
great phrase-maker of his time. When the Dutch were ousted in 1941 
their will to rule collapsed. In 1945 the Javanese nationalists began 
to take over. The Dutch left, taking 83 per cent of the mixed races 
with them. The Chinese became an unrepresented and increasingly 
persecuted minority. The non-Javanese majority, many of them in 
primitive tribal confederations, found themselves colonial subjects of 
a Javanese empire named 'Indonesia'. 

Sukarno had no more moral mandate to rule 100 millions than 
Nehru had in India; rather less in fact. He too was devoid of 
administrative skills. But he had the gift of words. Faced with a 
problem, he solved it with a phrase. Then he turned the phrase into 
an acronym, to be chanted by crowds of well-drilled illiterates. He 
ruled by Konsepsi, concepts. His party cadres painted buildings 
with the slogan 'Implement President Sukarno's Concepts'. His first 
concept in 1945 was Pant j a Sila, or the Five Fundamental Principles: 
Nationalism, Internationalism (Humanitarianism), Democracy, 
Social Prosperity, Belief in God. These were 'the Essence of the 
Indonesian Spirit'. 48 The cabinet was nasakom, uniting the three 
main streams of the 'revolution': Nasionalisme, Agama (religion) 
and Komunisme. The constitution was usdek. His political man- 
ifesto was manipol. A cabinet coalition was gotong-rojong, "mutual 
help'. Then there were musjawarah and mufakat, 'Deliberation 
leading to Consensus' and 'functional representation' (his term for 
corporatism). Dissatisfied with party government, he made a 'Bury 
the Parties' speech, followed by the introduction of what he termed 
'guided democracy' or Demokrasi Terpimpin. This introduced a 
'Guided Economy' or Ekonomi Terpimpin which expressed 'Indone- 
sian identity', Kepribadian Indonesia. He felt himself called to do the 
guiding or, as he put it, 'President Sukarno has called on Citizen 
Sukarno to form a government.' 49 

As Sukarno's internal difficulties mounted in the 1950s, he spent 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 479 

more time and words on foreign matters. He spoke of Tree and active 
neutralism'; then of the dichotomy of 'old established' and 'new 
emerging forces'; then of the 'Djakarta-Phnom-Penh-Peking- 
Pyongyang Axis'. He harassed his Chinese subjects. He attacked the 
international Boy Scout movement. One of his axioms was 'A Nation 
Always Needs an Enemy'. So he introduced another Konsepsi, 
'Greater Indonesia', which meant expansion into Dutch New Guinea, 
which he re-christened West Irian, Malaysia, Portuguese Timor and 
the Australian territories. For this purpose he invented the term 
'confrontation', coined the phrase Ganjang Malaysia, 'Crush Malay- 
sia!' and developed a technique of staging 'controlled demonstrations' 
outside foreign embassies, occasionally letting them become 'over- 
enthusiastic' (as in 1963 when the British Embassy was burned down). 
The crowd was given a slogan for every occasion. For foreign abuse 
there was nekolim ('Neo-Colonialism, Colonialism and Imperial- 
ism'). When foreign aid was cut off or he was criticized by the UN there 
was berdikari ('standing on one's own feet'). 1962, when he got 
hold of West Irian, was 'the year of triumph'; 1963, when he failed 
with Malaysia, was 'the year of living dangerously'. This last, Tahun 
Vivere Pericoloso, and his stock resopim ('Revolution, Indonesian 
socialism, natural leadership') reflect the curious amalgam of Dutch, 
Indonesian, French, Italian and English words (and ideas) with which 
Sukarno kept his tottering empire going. 50 

If anyone believed in living dangerously it was the talkative, 
hyperactive, pleasure-loving Sukarno. Practising multiracialism, he 
acquired a notably varied collection of wives and mistresses, and 
extended his research still further on his numerous foreign jaunts. The 
Chinese secret police filmed him in action and so preserved his sexual 
Konsepsi for posterity. Khrushchev, already briefed in this respect by 
private Tass reports, was still deeply shocked, on his visit in 1960, to 
see the President chatting gaily with a naked woman. 51 But as the 
1960s progressed, the Indonesian economy moved closer to collapse. 
The virtual extinction of the Chinese minority destroyed the internal 
distribution system. Food rotted in the countryside. The towns 
starved. Foreign investment vanished. Apart from oil, which still 
flowed, industry was nationalized and slowly subsided under a 
rapacious bureaucracy. By autumn 1965 foreign debt amounted to 
over $2,400 million, and credit was exhausted. Sukarno had run out 
even of slogans. Not knowing what to do, Sukarno appears to have 
given the go-ahead to a coup by the Indonesian Communist Party 

(PKIj. 

The putsch took place in the early hours of 1 October. The plan was 
to destroy the leadership of the armed forces. General Abdul Yani, the 
Army Chief of Staff, and two other generals were shot on the spot. The 



480 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

Defence Minister, General Nasution, escaped by climbing over the 
wall of his house, though his daughter was murdered. Three other 
generals were captured and then tortured to death, in ritual fashion, 
by the women and children of the pki: their eyes were gouged out 
and their genitals sliced off, then their bodies thrown into the 
Lubang Buaja, the Crocodile Hole. 52 The events were later inves- 
tigated by a special military tribunal, whose voluminous transcripts 
leave no doubt about Communist guilt. 53 But the movement, 
termed Gestapu, was a failure. General Suharto, the Strategic 
Reserve Commander, took over. A fearful retribution followed. The 
revenge killings began on 8 October when the pki Djakarta head- 
quarters was burned. The massacres were organized in the local 
collective fashion, so that all were equally involved in responsibility, 
and entire families expiated the guilt. It was one of the great 
systematic slaughters of the twentieth century, the age of slaughter. 
The toll may have been as high as 1 million, though the consensus 
of authorities puts it in the region of 200,000 to 250,000. 54 Su- 
karno, under house arrest in his palace, repeatedly but impotently 
called for an end to the killing, for the dead were essentially his 
supporters. But he was ignored, and his offices gradually stripped 
from him by a process of slow political torture. At each progressive 
stage in his degradation, one of his wives left him, and only one 
remained when he died, of kidney disease, on 21 June 1970, 
forgotten and speechless. 

But this, too, was in the future. At Bandung in 1955 the all- 
conquering word still held sway. Among those present was the 
Egyptian president, Gamal Abdul Nasser, a handsome newcomer to 
the new humbug but already an accomplished rhetorician in his 
own right. Israel, undoubtedly an Afro— Asian state, was not repre- 
sented at the Conference. Therein lay a long and complex tale, 
produced by the bisection of two of the strongest and most para- 
noid twentieth-century forces: the insatiable demand for oil and the 
evil of anti-Semitism. 

Britain had moved into the Middle Eastern oilfields in 1908 and 
had been followed by America in 1924. By 1936 Britain controlled 
524 million tons of proven reserves, against 93 million by America; 
in 1944 the figures had jumped to 2,181 million and 1,768 million; 
and by 1949 American output, coming chiefly from the richest 
fields of all in Saudi Arabia, had passed British. 55 By the early 
1940s it was already recognized that the Middle East held most of 
the world's oil reserves: 'The centre of gravity of world oil produc- 
tion', said Everett DeGolyer, head of the US Petroleum Commission 
in 1944, 'is shifting until it is firmly established in that area.' At the 
same time there were the first hints that America might run out of 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 481 

domestic oil - by 1944 the calculation was that only fourteen years' 
supply remained. 56 Four years later Defence Secretary Forrestal was 
telling the oil industry: 'Unless we had access to Middle East oil, the 
American automobile companies would have to devise a four- 
cylinder motor car.' 57 European dependence increased much faster. 
By the time of Bandung its oil consumption was growing by 13 per 
cent annually, and the Middle East proportion had jumped from 25 
per cent in 1938 to 50 per cent in 1949 and now stood at over 80 per 
cent. 58 

The growing dependence of US and European industry on a single 
source of oil was itself worrying. What turned it into an intractable 
problem was its conflation with the irreconcilable claims of Arabs 
and Jews to Palestine. The Balfour Declaration and the idea of a 
Jewish National Home was one of the post-dated cheques Britain 
signed to win the Great War. It might conceivably have been 
honoured without detriment to the Arabs - for it did not imply a 
Zionist state as such - but for one critical British mistake. In 1921 
they authorized a Supreme Muslim Council to direct religious 
affairs; and it appointed Mohammed Amin al-Husseini, head of the 
biggest landowning clan in Palestine, to be senior judge or Mufti of 
Jerusalem for life. It was one of the most fatal appointments in 
modern history. The year before he had been given ten years' hard 
labour for provoking bloody anti-Jewish riots. He had innocent blue 
eyes and a quiet, almost cringing manner, but he was a dedicated 
killer who devoted his entire adult life to race-murder. There is a 
photograph of him taken with Himmler: the two men smile sweetly 
at one another; beneath, a charming inscription by the ss chief to 'His 
Eminence the Grossmufti': the date was 1943 when the 'Final 
Solution' was moving into top gear. 

The Mufti outrivalled Hitler in his hatred for Jews. But he did 
something even more destructive than killing Jewish settlers. He 
organized the systematic destruction of Arab moderates. There were 
many of them in 1920s Palestine. Some of them even welcomed 
Jewish settlers with modern agricultural ideas, and sold land to them. 
Arabs and Jews might have lived together as two prosperous 
communities. But the Mufti found in Emile Ghori a terrorist leader 
of exceptional ability, whose assassination squads systematically 
murdered the leading Arab moderates - the great majority of the 
Mufti's victims were Arabs - and silenced the rest. By the end of the 
1930s Arab moderate opinion had ceased to exist, at least in public, 
the Arab states had been mobilized behind Arab extremism, the 
British Foreign Office had been persuaded that continued access to 
oil was incompatible with continued Jewish immigration, and the 
1939 White Paper virtually brought it to an end and, in effect, 



482 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

repudiated the Balfour Declaration: 'a gross breach of faith', as 
Churchill put it. 59 

Then in 1942 came the first authenticated reports of the 'Final 
Solution'. They aroused not pity but fear. America tightened its visa 
regulations. Seven Latin-American countries followed suit; so did 
Turkey. 60 At this stage Chaim Weizmann still believed agreement 
could be reached with Britain to resume the flow of immigrants. In 
October 1943, Churchill (with Attlee present to represent the Labour 
Party) told him that partition was acceptable, and on 4 November 
1944 he promised Weizmann that 1 to 1.5 million Jews could go to 
Palestine over ten years. 61 But Churchill was virtually the only 
Zionist at the top of British politics. More worthwhile, because 
concrete and immediate, was his creation, within the British army, of 
an independent Jewish brigade, whose members ultimately formed 
the professional nucleus of the Haganah, the defence force of the 
Jewish Agency, when it turned itself into an army. 

At this stage Churchill still thought Britain could control the 
destiny of Palestine. In fact it was already slipping from her grasp. 
There were two main factors. The first was Jewish terrorism. This 
was created by Abraham Stern, a Polish Jew who had become a 
fascist and an Anglophobe at Florence University, and later tried to 
get Nazi finance for his organization through Vichy Syria. Stern was 
killed by police in 1942 but his gang continued, as did a much bigger 
terrorist group, the Irgun, commanded from 1944 by Menachem 
Begin. This was a fateful development, because for the first time 
modern propaganda was combined with Leninist cell-structure and 
advanced technology to advance political aims through murder. 
During the next forty years the example was to be followed all over 
the world: a cancer of modern times, eating at the heart of humanity. 
Churchill, with his unfailing gift for driving to the root of events, 
warned of the tragedy 'if our dreams of Zionism are to end in the 
smoke of an assassin's pistol and the labours for its future produce a 
new set of gangsters worthy of Nazi Germany'. Weizmann promised 
that the Jewish people 'will go to the utmost limits of its power to cut 
off this evil from its midst'. 62 Haganah, in fact, attempted to destroy 
both Irgun and the Stern gang. But as the war ended and the efforts 
of Jews to reach Palestine became more frantic, it devoted its energies 
to the legitimate object of assisting illegal immigration. The 'Final 
Solution' did not end anti-Semitism. Thus, on 5 July 1946 in the 
Polish town of Kielce, a rumour that Jews were engaged in the ritual 
killing of Gentile children stirred up a mob which, with the conni- 
vance of the Communist police and army, beat to death forty Jews. 63 
This was one of many incidents which accelerated the stampede. 

With Haganah preoccupied, the gangs flourished, egged on by the 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 483 

rabid elements in the American press. Typical was what Ruth Gruber 
wrote in the New York Post of the Palestine police: 

These men who loathed the idea of fighting their friends, the Nazis, embraced 
with passion the idea of fighting Jews. They walked around the streets of 
Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, the city built by Jews, singing the Horst WesselSong. 
They marched into crowded markets giving the Heil Hitler salute. 64 

On 22 July 1946 Irgun blew up Jerusalem's principal hotel, the King 
David, killing forty-one Arabs, twenty-eight British, seventeen Jews 
and five others. Part of the hotel was a British government office and 
Begin claimed that the object of the bomb was to destroy secret records. 
But in that case, as Haganah pointed out, the bomb should have been 
exploded outside office hours. Begin claimed a warning was given: in 
fact it reached the phone-operator two minutes before, and as he was 
telling the hotel manager the bomb went off. 65 This crime became the 
prototype terrorist outrage for the decades to come. The first to imitate 
the new techniques were, naturally, the Arab terrorists: the future 
Palestine Liberation Organization was an illegitimate child of Irgun. 

Jewish terrorism was counterproductive in other respects. On 30 July 
1947 two captured British sergeants were murdered in cold blood, and 
their bodies booby-trapped. The Jewish Agency called it 'the dastardly 
murder of two innocent men by a set of criminals'. 66 There were 
anti-Semitic riots in Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow and London; in 
Derby a synagogue was burnt down. But the effect of this particular 
episode, coming on top of others, was to turn the British Army 
anti-Jewish. As in India, Britain had used too little severity. The figures 
show that, from August 1945 to 18 September 1947 (leaving out the 
King David deaths), 141 British died, forty-four Arabs, twenty-five 
Jewish non-terrorists; in addition thirty-seven Jewish terrorists were 
killed in gun-fights but only seven executed (two committed suicide in 
prison). 67 The British troops knew they were being unjustly judged. As 
a result, when the evacuation took place, officers and men conspired to 
hand over weapons, posts and supplies to the Arabs. The military 
consequences were very serious. In effect, Jewish terrorism cost the 
Jewish state the Old City of Jerusalem and the West Bank of the Jordan, 
which were not taken until 1967, and then without legal title. 

Terrorism led Britain to wash her hands, like Pilate, of the Palestine 
problem. Ernest Bevin, in charge from July 1945, was an old-fashioned 
working-class anti-Semite, though not a vicious one. He told the 
Labour Party congress in 1946 that the American idea for another 
100,000 immigrants in Palestine was proposed from 'the purest 
motives — they did not want too many Jews in New York'. 68 Terrorism 
made him bitter. He thought that if Britain pulled out the Jews would all 
be massacred, and that British troops were being murdered by those 



484 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

whose lives they were protecting. But by the beginning of 1947 he 
had had enough. The fuel crisis tipped the balance in favour of 
scuttle. On 14 February — the same month Attlee decided to get out 
of India straight away and hand over responsibility for Greece and 
Turkey to America — Bevin had the Jewish leaders into his office and 
told them he was transferring the problem to the UN. There was no 
electricity; only candles. Bevin joked, There's no need for candles as 
the Israels are here.' 69 

The second factor was the impingement of America. David 
Ben-Gurion visited the US in 1941 and felt 'the pulse of her great 
Jewry with its five millions'. 70 For the first time he sensed that, with 
the help of America's Jews, Zionism could be achieved in the 
immediate future, and thereafter he hustled Weizmann along to- 
wards this object. Whether it was right to turn the concept of a 
Jewish national home into a state is still a matter of argument. 
Weizmann had the magnanimity to recognize that the cost to the 
Arabs must be heavy. He told the Anglo— American Committee of 
Inquiry set up after the war that it was not a choice between right 
and wrong but between greater and lesser injustice. Ben-Gurion took 
a deterministic view: 'History had decreed that we should return to 
our country and re-establish here the Jewish state.' 71 But this was to 
speak with the voice of Lenin or Hitler. There is no such person as 
History. It is human beings who decree. 

The truth is, during the war years the American Jewish community 
first developed its collective self-confidence and began to exert the 
political muscle its numbers, wealth and ability had created. In the 
immediate post-war it became the best-organized and most influen- 
tial lobby in America. It was able to show that it held the voting key 
to swing states like New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania. Roosevelt 
had a strong enough political base to ignore this pressure. With 
characteristic frivolity, he seems to have turned anti-Zionist when, 
on returning from Yalta, he had a brief meeting with the King of 
Saudi Arabia. 'I learned more about the whole problem', he told 
Congress, ' ... by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes than I could 
have learned in an exchange of two or three dozen letters.' 72 David 
Niles, the passionately pro-Zionist presidential assistant, testified: 
'There are serious doubts in my mind that Israel would have come 
into being if Roosevelt had lived.' 73 Truman was politically much 
weaker. He felt he had to have the Jewish vote to win the 1948 
election. He was genuinely pro-Zionist too, and distrusted the 
Arabism of 'the "striped-pants boys" in the State Department'. 74 In 
the event it was his will which pushed the partition scheme through 
the UN (29 November 1947) and recognized the new Israeli state 
which Ben-Gurion declared the following May. There were vast 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 485 

forces against it. Max Thornburg of Cal-Tex, speaking for the oil 
interests, wrote that Truman had 'prevailed upon the Assembly to 
declare racial and religious criteria the basis of political statehood' and 
thereby 'extinguished' the 'moral prestige of America' and 'Arab faith 
in her ideals'. 75 The State Department prophesied ruin. Defence 
Secretary Forrestal was appalled: 'no group in this country', he wrote 
bitterly of the Jewish lobby, 'should be permitted to influence our 
policy to the point where it could endanger our national security.' 76 

It is likely, indeed, that if the crisis had come a year later, after the 
Cold War had really got into its stride, the anti-Zionist pressures on 
Truman would have been too strong. American backing for Israel in 
1947-8 was the last idealistic luxury the Americans permitted 
themselves before the Realpolitik of global confrontation descended. 
The same time-scale influenced Russia. It backed Zionism in order to 
break up Britain's position in the Middle East. It not only recognized 
Israel but, in order to intensify the fighting and the resultant chaos, it 
instructed the Czechs to sell it arms. 77 These considerations would not 
have prevailed a year later, when the rush for Cold War allies was on. 
Israel slipped into existence through a crack in the time continuum. 

Hence the notion that Israel was created by imperialism is not only 
wrong but the reverse of the truth. Everywhere in the West, the foreign 
offices, defence ministries and big business were against the Zionists. 
Even the French only sent them arms to annoy the British, who had 
'lost' them Syria. The Haganah had 21,000 men but, to begin with, 
virtually no guns, armour or aircraft. It was the Communist Czechs, 
on Soviet instructions, who made Israel's survival possible, by turning 
over an entire military airfield to shuttle arms to Tel Aviv. 78 Virtually 
everyone expected the Jews to lose. There were 10,000 Egyptian 
troops, 4,500 in Jordan's Arab Legion, 7,000 Syrians, 3,000 Iraqis, 
3,000 Lebanese, plus the 'Arab Liberation Army' of Palestinians. That 
was why the Arabs rejected the UN partition scheme, which gave the 
Jews only 5,500 square miles, chiefly in the Negev Desert. By 
accepting it, despite its disadvantages (it would have created a state 
with 538,000 Jews and 397,000 Arabs), the Zionists showed they 
were willing to abide by the arbitration of international law. The 
Arabs chose force. 

It was a small-scale, heroic struggle. Like the Trojan War, it 
involved many famous personalities: General Neguib, Colonel 
Nasser, Hakim Amir, Yigal Allon, Moshe Dayan. At the heart of the 
Arab failure was the hatred between their field commander, Fawzi 
al-Qawukji, and the Mufti and his gruesome family. The Mufti 
accused Qawukji of 'spying for Britain . . . drinking wine and running 
after women'. 79 The Iraqis and the Syrians had no maps of Palestine. 
Some of the Arab armies had good equipment, but all were badly 



486 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

trained except for the Jordanians, and King Abdullah of Jordan only 
wanted Old Jerusalem, which he got. He had no desire to see an Arab 
Palestinian state with the Mufti in charge. As he told Golda Meir at a 
secret meeting: 'We both have a common enemy — the Mufti.' 80 In 
retrospect it is clear that the only chance the Arabs had was an 
overwhelming success in the first days of the war. Ben-Gurion took this 
from them by a pre-emptive strike in April 1948, the most important 
decision of his life, which he was able to carry through with Czech 
Communist weapons. 81 Thereafter, despite anxious moments, Israeli 
power increased steadily : by December it had a properly equipped army 
of 100,000 and had established a military ascendency it retained into 
the 1980s. 

The creation of Israel finally ended European anti-Semitism, except 
behind the Iron Curtain. It created the Arab refugee problem. This was 
the work of extremists, on both sides. The Arab population of Palestine 
was 93 per cent in 1918, when the Balfour Declaration first began to 
take effect, and 65 per cent in 1947, when the crisis broke. The Arabs 
could then have had their independent state, plus a major share in the 
running of Israel. But by then the Mufti and his assassination squads 
had done their work. On 14 October 1947, when Azzam Pasha, 
Secretary-General of the Arab League, met the Jewish negotiator Abba 
Eban in London, he told him bluntly that the time for reason was past: if 
he accepted the partition he would, he said, be 'a dead man within hours 
of returning to Cairo'. 82 

Here we see a classic case of the evil which political murder brings. 
For by the beginning of the actual fighting, Azzam himself was speaking 
the language of horror on the radio : 'This will be a war of extermination 
and a momentous massacre', he announced. 83 Even before the fighting 
began, 30,000 mainly well-to-do Arabs had left Palestine temporarily, 
expecting to return in triumph. They included the muhktars, judges and 
caids. With no administration to protect them, many poor Arabs fled. 
When the Jews captured Haifa, 20,000 Arabs had gone and most of the 
remaining 50,000 left afterwards despite Jewish pleas to remain. 
Elsewhere the Arab League ordered the Arabs to remain in their homes; 
there is no evidence to j us tify Jewish claims that Arab governments were 
responsible for the flight of the refugees. 84 The Arab exodus was 
undoubtedly assisted by the fearful massacre carried out by the Irgun at 
the village of Deir Yassin on 9 April 1948, right at the start of the 
fighting. About 250 men, women and children were murdered. An 
Irgun spokesman said on the evening of this atrocity: 'We intend to 
attack, conquer and keep until we have the whole of Palestine and 
Trans Jordan in a greater Jewish state .... We hope to improve our 
methods in future and make it possible to spare women and children.' 85 
The Irgun units were thrown out of the Israeli Army during the June 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 487 

truce in the middle of the fighting; and it was the honourable soldiers 
of the Haganah who, for all practical purposes, created and saved 
Israel. 

By then the damage had been done. When the smoke cleared there 
were over half a million Arab refugees (the UN figure was about 
650,000; the Israeli figure 538,000). 86 To balance this, 567,000 Jews 
in ten Arab countries were forced to flee in the years 1948— 57. 87 
Nearly all went to Israel and all who did had been resettled by 1960. 
The Arab refugees might likewise have been resettled, as were 
comparable numbers of refugees, on both sides, after the Greek- 
Turkish conflicts of 1918-23. Instead the Arab states preferred to 
keep the refugees in the camps, where they and their descendants 
remained, as human title-deeds to a Palestinian reconquest, and the 
justification for further wars in 1956, 1967 and 1973. 

Granted Abdullah's willingness to compromise, the Arab-Israeli 
conflict might have been quickly resolved. He had the best historical 
title to leadership of the Arab cause. But his country had only 300,000 
indigenous inhabitants and an income of less than £1,200,000. It was 
the British who, to assist their war effort, had encouraged the Arabs to 
create a League; and since they directed the war from Cairo, and since 
Egypt was the largest country in the area, the League had become an 
essentially Egyptian and Cairene institution. Hence Egypt led the pack 
against Israel. This was both an anomaly and a tragedy. For 
geographical reasons, Egypt and Israel were natural allies; and in 
antiquity they had been so. The 'pure' Arabs of the Hejaz, like 
Abdullah, did not regard Egyptians as Arabs at all: he said they were 
poor, miserable and backward Africans. Egypt's playboy king, 
Farouk, aroused his particular contempt: when he mentioned his 
name to visitors, Abdullah would spit into the corner of his carpeted 
tent. 88 The Egyptians, by contrast, saw themselves as the inheritors of 
the oldest civilization in the world and the natural leaders of the Arab 
cause: Farouk had a vision of Egypt as an authoritarian Muslim state 
embracing gradually all Arabs, even all Muslims. Hence he identified 
the continuing campaign against Israel with Egypt's own self-respect 
and aspirations for leadership in the region. From this essentially 
frivolous set of notions sprang the tragedy which turned Egypt into 
Israel's bitter enemy for a quarter-century. 

The element of instability was increased by Britain's growing 
disinclination to act as paramount power in the area. As early as 
October 1946 Britain decided to pull most of its troops out of the 
Middle East to East Africa, with Simonstown near Capetown 
replacing the big naval base at Alexandria. Attlee disliked the Arab 
leaders: 'I must say I had a very poor view of the governing classes.' 89 
The Palestine mess, even more than the debacle in India, disgusted 



488 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

British public opinion with the whole idea of imperial responsibili- 
ties. It shook even Churchill: 'Simply such a hell-disaster', he told 
Weizmann in 1948, 'that I cannot take it up again . . . and must, as 
far as I can, put it out of my mind.' 90 But that was only the start. 
Farouk's grotesquely luxurious lifestyle and the corruption of his 
regime (the 1948 defeat was blamed on an arms scandal) had led to 
growing criticism, which came to a head when he married a new 
queen, Princess Narriman, and took her on a much-publicized honey- 
moon during Ramadhan in 1951. To distract the public, he unilat- 
erally abrogated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty on 8 October. Early the 
next year he began guerrilla warfare against the Canal Zone, where 
Britain had a vast base: thirty-eight camps and ten airfields, capable 
of accommodating forty-one divisions and thirty-eight squadrons. 
Old-style monarchs are ill-advised to invite the mob on stage. On 26 
January it took over Cairo, murdering Europeans, Jews and the rich of 
all nations. The young officers, who had bitterly resented the higher 
direction of the war against Israel, saw an opening. Six months later 
their Free Officers Committee sent Farouk packing on his yacht, 
loaded with his lifetime collection of trinkets and pornography. 

The leading spirit was Colonel Gamal Abdul Nasser, who soon 
elbowed aside the popular general, Mohammed Neguib, initially set 
up as figurehead. The son of a postal-clerk and a coal-merchant's 
daughter, he began with some radical ideals. In the disaster of 1948 
he told an Israeli staff officer that he envied the socialist kibbutz 
system of farming, which he contrasted with Egypt's absentee 
landlordism. As this stage he blamed the British, not the Jews: 'They 
manoeuvred us into this war. What is Palestine to us? It was all a 
British trick to divert us from their occupation of Egypt.' 91 His 
Philosophy of the Revolution was a frothy mixture of Marxist tags, 
western liberalism and Islam: good, flatulent stuff. He was an 
archetypal member of the 'Bandung generation': adept at words, but 
not much else. Like Sukarno, he was brilliant at devising slogans and 
titles: he often changed the name of the party he created and of the 
gimcrack Arab federations he negotiated. His particular speciality 
was crowd-manipulation. His windy rhetoric went down well, 
especially with the students, and he seems to have been able to goad 
the Cairo mob into chanting any slogans he wished, often changing 
them from day to day. 92 

Once in power, Nasser was soon corrupted by it. Like Sukarno, he 
dissolved the parties. He set up People's Courts and accumulated 
3,000 political prisoners. He always maintained a modest degree of 
terror. It was 'necessary'. Egypt was a poor country with a rapidly 
growing population (40 million by the 1970s) and a cultivable area 
smaller than Belgium. Nasser's philosophy did not embrace work- 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 489 

able ideas for the creation of wealth. Such ideas as he had promoted its 
consumption. So terror was not enough. Like Sukarno, he needed a 
foreign enemy; preferably several. His rule was a deafening series of 
overseas crises to cover the sad silence of misery at home. First he 
intensified the campaign against the Suez base. But the British agreed 
to evacuate it, leaving behind only care and maintenance units. The 
agreement signed 27 July 1954 gave Nasser almost everything he 
asked for. When Churchill's colleagues defended it in the Commons, 
the old man sat with head bowed. So Nasser turned on the Sudan, a 
potential satellite. But it slipped from his grasp and moved towards 
independence. 

Then Nasser went to Bandung. It completed his corruption, as it did 
for other young nationalist politicians. Why sweat at the thankless 
task of keeping a poor country fed and clothed when the world stage 
beckoned? Bandung opened Nasser's eyes to the opportunities the age 
offered to an expert publicist and sloganizer, especially one prepared 
to play the anti-colonialist card. And he had been holding one in his 
hand all the time: the Jews! Israel was easily rationalized into a general 
imperialist conspiracy theory. Azzam Pasha had produced the ex- 
culpatory mythology as long ago as 16 July 1948. The Arabs had lost 
because of the West: 'England and America followed every Arab effort 
to obtain arms and opposed it with all their force, while at the same 
time they worked resolutely and vigorously to assure the flow of war 
materials and troops to the Jews.' 93 After Bandung, then, Nasser 
reversed his earlier analysis. He worked to build up a coalition of 
'anti-imperialist' Arab states, to overthrow the decision of 1948 and 
then to create an Arab superstate with himself at the helm. 

The Cold War played into his hands. As part of the containment of 
the Soviets, Britain and America had been constructing a Middle 
Eastern alliance, embracing Turkey, Iran and Pakistan. It was known 
as the 'northern tier'. Much against America's will, Britain was 
anxious to tie this grouping to its own system of Arab clients, notably 
Iraq and Jordan. Anthony Eden, who had at last succeeded Churchill 
as Prime Minister, wanted to bolster Britain's sagging leadership in the 
area with American assistance. The new regime in Russia of Nikita 
Khrushchev, eager to retrieve Stalin's mistakes in 1948, saw Nasser's 
emergence as a chance to leap over the northern tier and create client 
states of their own. The Russians offered to back Nasser's anti-Israeli 
coalition with a huge supply of Iron Curtain arms on credit. Nasser 
was delighted. So at one bound, the Russians were over the tier, and he 
was in business as a Third World soldier-statesman. 

Nasser did not forget the other lesson of Bandung: non-alignment. 
The idea was to play off East and West against each other. That meant 
dealing with both and being the property of neither. The Bandung 



490 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

philosophy was for the new nations to create their own industrial 
bases as fast as possible, making themselves independent of 'imper- 
ialism'. Provided the money is there, it is actually easier and quicker 
— and of course much more spectacular — to build a steel plant than 
raise agricultural productivity. Nasser returned from Bandung deter- 
mined to hasten a project to build a giant high dam on the Nile at 
Aswan. It would provide power for industrialization and extra water 
for irrigation, raising the cultivable area by 25 per cent. 94 But the 
dam required a World Bank loan of $200 million, mainly from 
America. There were a great many economic and environmental 
objections to the scheme, objections which in the end proved fully 
justified — the net effect of the dam, completed by the Russians in 
1970, was actually to increase unemployment and lower agricultural 
productivity. At all events, after much havering, the Americans 
turned down the project on 19 July 1956. This was the kind of blow 
a high-risk regime like Nasser's could not suffer in silence. He 
retaliated by nationalizing the Anglo-French Suez Canal. 

The Suez crisis of 1956—7 was one of those serio-comic inter- 
national events, like Abyssinia in 1935, which illustrate historical 
trends rather than determine them. Britain's decline as a world 
power was perhaps inevitable. The rate of decline, however, was 
determined by its own national will. Post-war events had suggested 
the will was virtually non-existent. Relative industrial decline had 
$lso been resumed, with a vengeance, as the economic crisis of 
autumn 1955 suggested. Sir Anthony Eden, who had waited so long 
in Churchill's shadow, was not the man to retrieve a lost game. He 
was nervous, excitable, intermittently sick, and with a fatal propens- 
ity to confuse the relative importance of events. In the 1930s he had, 
at one time, considered Mussolini more formidable than Hitler. 
Now, obsessed with the need for Britain to play a Middle Eastern 
role independently of America, he saw Nasser as another Duce. 'I 
have never thought Nasser a Hitler,' he wrote to Eisenhower, 'but 
the parallel with Mussolini is close.' 95 This was the wrong way* to 
play it. Nasser needed and wanted dramas. Indifference was the 
easiest way to shrivel him. That was Eisenhower's tactic, mainly 
because it was election year and 'peace' has always proved the 
highroad to American voters' hearts. The difficulty was that Eden 
needed a drama himself. His first year in power out of Churchill's 
shadow had been a let-down. He was criticized, especially in his own 
party, for lacking 'the smack of firm government'. As the Daily 
Telegraph put it: 'There is a favourite gesture with the Prime 
Minister. To emphasize a point, he will clench one fist to smack the 
open palm of the other hand. But the smack is seldom heard.' It was a 
measure of Eden's unfitness that he allowed himself to be mortally 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 491 

rattled by this jibe, which evoked from him 'a pained and pungent 
oath'. 96 He would give them a smack all right! 

The evening Eden got the news of Nasser's nationalization decree, 
he called the service chiefs to Downing Street. He asked them to 
prepare an invasion of Egypt. They reported back that it was 
impossible in under six weeks. That should have settled the matter. A 
country which cannot invade a small Arab state in less than six 
weeks is not a great power and had better devise other ways of 
pursuing its interests. Besides, it was not clear that Nasser had done 
anything illegal. He had not broken the 1888 convention which 
governed the Canal. To nationalize foreign assets with due compen- 
sation (as he proposed) was the right of every sovereign state. When 
the Iranian regime of Mohammed Mussadeq had nationalized the 
British oil refinery at Abadan in 1951, Britain - after, it must be said, 
much huffing - had sensibly left it to the ci A to knock Mussadeq off 
his perch. In any case the Canal agreement was due to run out in 
twelve years. By the time the first flush of anger had worn off, all this 
had become clear. Eden should have tied Nasser up in negotiations, 
waited until Eisenhower was re-elected and then concerted with him 
means to pick the Colonel off. But the Prime Minister wanted his 
smack. The French were of like mind. The Fourth Republic was on 
its last legs. It had lost Indo-China; it had lost Tunisia and was in the 
process of losing Morocco; it was embroiled in an Algerian revolt 
which Nasser was noisily abetting. The French wanted to pull him 
down and they preferred to do it by frontal assault rather than 
intrigue. They, too, wanted a drama. 

An Anglo-French seizure of Alexandria, termed 'Operation Mus- 
keteer', was ready for 8 September. 97 This scheme, though crude, 
would probably have worked if pursued with resolution. But Eden 
kept postponing and eventually scrapped it, in favour of a much 
slower and more difficult occupation plan for the Canal itself, which 
seemed to him more legal. The truth is, Eden could not make up his 
mind either to go right outside legality, or stick firmly within it. A 
perfectly viable alternative was to allow the Israelis to dislodge 
Nasser. She and the Arab states were still technically at war. The 
Egyptians were blockading Israel's access to the Indian Ocean, in 
itself an act of war, and they refused her ships passage through the 
Canal, in flagrant breach of the 1888 convention. Much more 
serious, however, was that Nasser was clearly building up the 
military strength, with Soviet help, and the systematic military and 
diplomatic alliances, to launch a concerted assault on Israel, which 
would end in genocide. The process was actually concluded on 25 
October 1956, when he formed a unified Egypt-Syrian-Jordan 
command. This process provided moral justification for an Israeli 



492 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

pre-emptive strike at Egypt. The French approved such a course and 
were in fact supplying Israel with arms to pursue it, including 
modern fighters. But she lacked the bombers to knock out Egypt's air 
force and so guarantee her cities from air attack. Only Britain could 
supply those. But Eden turned this option down too. It went against 
his deepest instincts, which were pro-Arab. 

The scheme he finally settled for, after much dithering, might have 
been calculated to get him the worst of all possible worlds. On 
22-24 October, at secret meetings in Sevres, near Paris, British, 
French and Israeli representatives cooked up an immensely compli- 
cated plot, under which Israel would attack Egypt on 29 October. 
This would provide Britain with a righteous pretext to reoccupy the 
Canal to protect lives and shipping there. Britain would issue an 
ultimatum which Israel would accept. Egypt's refusal would allow 
Britain to bomb the airfields. Then the Anglo-French would land by 
force at Port Said. Much ink has been spilt over this 'collusion', 
which both Eden and his Foreign Secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, denied to 
their dying day. 98 But the French and Israeli participants later 
insisted there was a concerted scheme. General Moshe Dayan, the 
Israeli army commander, reported Lloyd as urging 'that our military 
action not be a small-scale encounter but a "real act of war", 
otherwise there would be no justification for the British ultimatum 
and Britain would appear in the eyes of the world as an aggressor'. 99 

Even this absurd scheme might have worked if Eden had possessed 
the will to go through with it to the bitter end. But he was an 
honourable man. He made a half-hearted Machiavelli. As a proxy- 
aggressor he was wholly incompetent. The transparency of the plot 
was obvious to all. The Labour opposition repudiated it and set up 
an uproar. The cabinet, kept imperfectly informed, was uneasy from 
the start and terrified at the violence of the American reaction once 
the invasion got under way. In letters of 2 and 8 September 
Eisenhower had warned Eden in the most emphatic terms not to use 
force, which he was sure would be counter-productive: 'Nasser 
thrives on drama.' 100 He was infuriated by Eden's springing this 
ill-conceived mine beneath him in the last stages of his election 
campaign. He literally ground his teeth, a habit of his when angry, 
and instructed the US Treasury to sell sterling, something a great 
many other people were already doing. This had an immediate effect 
on Eden's cabinet, where he was already sandwiched between two 
would-be successors: the old Appeaser, R.A.Butler, who wished to 
pull the party in the direction of the Left, and Harold Macmillan, 
who wished to pull it in the direction of himself. Both behaved in 
character. Butler said nothing but opposed the scheme behind the 
scenes. Macmillan urged boldness; then, when failure loomed, 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 493 

switched sides and, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, urged that there 
was no alternative but to comply with Eisenhower's wishes for a 
cease-fire. Eden collapsed on 6 November, only a week after the 
adventure was launched and twenty-four hours after the first Anglo- 
French landings took place. His capitulation followed a particularly 
fierce message from Eisenhower, which may have included the threat of 
oil sanctions. 101 Thereafter he retreated into sickness and resignation. 

The episode was a striking victory for the Bandung generation. 
Nehru, administering moral rebukes all round, was in his element. 
Nasser emerged with enhanced prestige because in all the excitement it 
was scarcely noticed that the Israelis had inflicted a shattering defeat, in 
less than a week, on his large, Soviet-armed forces. Any Egyptian 
discomfort was attributed to the Anglo— French forces. Thus what 
might have been a fatal blow to Nasser's prestige actually enhanced it, 
for 'collusion' gave solid substance to the Arab mythology that Israel 
was merely an imperialist proxy. Suez confirmed the Bandung view of 
the world, mythology made flesh. 

Suez is often said to have dealt the final blow to Britain's status as a 
great world power. That is not true. The status had been lost in 1947. 
Suez simply made it plain for all the world to see. The underlying cause 
was a failure of will, not of strength, and the Suez fiasco merely reflected 
that failure, of which Eden was a pathetic sacrificial victim. Macmillan, 
who succeeded him, drew the moral that in a world of superpowers, a 
medium-sized power survives by virtue of good public relations rather 
than battleships. The real loser in the long term was the United States. 
Eisenhower appeared to act decisively, and he got his way fast enough. 
Britain came to heel. He preserved his reputation as a man of peace. But 
in the process he helped to prepare a mighty scourge for America's own 
back, in the shape of the tendentious concept of 'world opinion' first 
articulated at Bandung and now, by Eisenhower's own act, transferred 
to the UN. 

Until the early 1950s, the Americans had controlled the UN. Their 
first mistake was to involve it in Korea, especially through the forum of 
the General Assembly, a pseudo-representative body which spoke only 
for governments, a growing proportion of which were undemocratic. 
Korea broke Trygve Lie, the Norwegian Secretary-General, who was 
loyal to the principles of the old Western alliance. He resigned when the 
Russians boycotted him and got the Left to stir up his own Secretariat 
against him. At this point the Western democracies should have 
dropped the UN and concentrated instead on expanding nato into a 
world-wide security system of free nations. 

Instead, after much bad temper, the powers appointed a senior 
Swedish diplomat called Dag Hammarskjold. A worse choice could not 
be imagined. He came from a highly successful family of public servants 



494 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

in a nation uneasily aware that it had grown immensely prosperous 
by staying out of two world wars. He was guilt personified and he 
was determined that the West should expiate it. Severe, well-read, 
humourless, unmarried (though not homosexual: 'In Hammarsk- 
jold's life', wrote his official biographer, 'sex played little or no 
part' 102 ), he exuded a secular religiosity. It was characteristic of him 
and of the advanced Fifties good taste he faithfully reflected, that he 
transformed the old UN Meditation Room, a plain and unpretentious 
chamber, into a dark and dramatic cavern, with striking perspective 
and lighting and, in its centre, a vast rectangular block of iron-ore 
illuminated by a single shaft of light. What did it symbolize? Relative 
morality perhaps. It was Hammarskjold's manifest intention to cut 
the umbilical cord which linked the UN to the old wartime Western 
alliance, and to align the organization with what he regarded as the 
new emergent force of righteousness in the world: the 'uncommitted' 
nations. In short he too was a member of the Bandung generation, 
despite - or rather because of - his pallid face. When Eisenhower 
turned on Eden at Suez, broke him, and handed the whole problem 
to the un, he gave Hammarskjold exactly the opportunity he had 
been waiting for. 

The Secretary-General set to work to oust the Anglo-French force 
and the Israelis and replace them with a multi-nation un 'peace- 
keeping' contingent. He saw a role for himself as a world statesman, 
driven by the engine of non-alignment. Hence, though affecting 
impartiality, he threw his weight entirely behind the Afro-Asian 
camp. That meant treating Israel not as a small and vulnerable 
nation but as an outpost of imperialism. There was on record a 1951 
un resolution, passed before his time, calling on Egypt to allow 
Israeli vessels through the Canal. At no point did Hammarskjold 
make any attempt to get the resolution implemented. Nor would he 
allow that Arab denial of freedom of navigation to Israeli shipping in 
the Gulf of Aqaba was a threat to peace - though in fact it was this 
denial, tightened by the three-power Arab military pact of 25 
October 1956, which was the immediate cause of the Israeli attack. 
He repeatedly declined to condemn Nasser's seizure of the canal, and 
other arbitrary acts. So far as he was concerned, the Israeli attack 
and the Anglo-French intervention were wholly unprovoked acts of 
aggression. He said he was 'shocked and outraged' by such behav- 
iour. On 31 October he took the unprecedented step of publicly 
rebuking the British and French governments. The Soviet invasion of 
Hungary, which took place under cover of the Suez crisis, he treated 
as a tiresome distraction. His friendliness to the Egyptians through- 
out, and his cold hostility to Britain, France and Israel, made it plain 
where his emotional sympathies lay. He set his heart on the public 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 495 

humiliation of the three powers and he got it. In deploying the UN 
emergency force, to move into the vacuum created by the three- 
power withdrawal, he insisted that its presence was by grace and 
favour of Egypt: as he put it, 'the very basis and starting point has 
been the recognition by the General Assembly of the full and 
unlimited sovereign rights of Egypt'. 103 It had therefore to be 
withdrawn at Egypt's simple request, a right exercised by Egypt in 
1967 as soon as it believed itself strong enough to destroy Israel. 
Hammarskjold thus bequeathed another Middle Eastern war to his 
successors. More important still, however, was his demonstration of 
the way in which the UN could be used to marshal and express hatred 
of the West. In 1956 it was the turn of Britain and France. Soon it 
would be America's own. 

America was also the loser by the impact of Suez on France. If Suez 
simply pushed Britain slightly faster down its chosen slope, in France 
it helped to bring to a head the national crisis created by the agony of 
French Algeria. Algeria was the greatest and in many ways the 
archetype of all the anti-colonial wars. In the nineteenth century the 
Europeans won colonial wars because the indigenous peoples had 
lost the will to resist. In the twentieth century the roles were reversed, 
and it was Europe which lost the will to hang onto its gains. But 
behind this relativity of wills there are demographic facts. A colony is 
lost once the level of settlement is exceeded by the growth-rate of the 
indigenous -peoples. Nineteenth-century colonialism reflected the 
huge upsurge in European numbers. Twentieth-century decoloniza- 
tion reflected European demographic stability and the violent expan- 
sion of native populations. 

Algeria was a classic case of this reversal. It was not so much a 
French colony as a Mediterranean settlement. In the 1830s there 
were only 1.5 million Arabs there, and their numbers were dwind- 
ling. The Mediterranean people moved from the northern shores to 
the southern ones, into what appeared to be a vacuum: to them the 
great inland sea was a unity, and they had as much right to its shores 
as anyone provided they justified their existence by wealth-creation. 
And they did: they expanded 2,000 square miles of cultivated land in 
1830 to 27,000 by 1954. 104 These pieds noirs were only 20 per cent 
French in origin (including Corsicans and Alsacians). They were 
predominantly Spanish in the west, Italian (and Maltese) in the east. 
But rising prosperity attracted others: Kabyles, Chaouias, Mzabite, 
Mauritanians, Turks and pure Arabs, from the mountains, the west, 
the south, the east. And French medical services virtually eliminated 
malaria, typhus and typhoid and effected a prodigious change in the 
non-European infant mortality rates. By 1906 the Muslim popula- 
tion had jumped to 4.5 million; by 1954 to 9 million. By the 



496 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

mid-1970s it had more than doubled again. If the French population 
had risen at the same rate, it would have been over 300 million by 
1950. The French policy of 'assimilation', therefore, was nonsense, 
since by the year 2000 Algerian Muslims would have constituted 
more than half the French population, and Algeria would have 
'assimilated' France rather than the reverse. 105 

By the 1950s there were not enough pieds noirs for long-term 
survival as a dominant class or even an enclave. Only a third of 
Algiers' 900,000 inhabitants were Europeans. Only in Oran were they 
in a majority. Even in and most heavily settled part, the Mitidja, 
the farms were worked by Muslim labour. In 1914 200,000 Euro- 
peans had lived off the land; by 1954 only 93,000. By the 1950s 
most pieds noirs had ordinary, poorly paid city jobs Arabs could do 
just as well. The social structure was an archaeological layer-cake of 
race prejudice: 'the Frenchman despises the Spaniard, who despises 
the Italian, who despises the Maltese, who despises the Jew; all in 
turn despise the Arab.' 106 There was no pretence at equality of 
opportunity: in 1945 1,400 primary schools catered for 200,000 
European children, 699 for 1,250,000 Muslims. Textbooks began: 
'Our ancestors, the Gauls . . . .' 

More serious, however, was the fraudulence of the electoral 
system. Either the reforms passed by the French parliament were not 
applied at all, or the votes were cooked by the local authorities 
themselves. It was this which cut the ground beneath the many 
well-educated Muslim moderates who genuinely wanted a fusion of 
French and Muslim culture. As one of the noblest of them, Ahmed 
Boumendjel, put it: 'The French Republic has cheated. She has made 
fools of us.' He told the Assembly: 'Why should we feel ourselves 
bound by the principles of French moral values . . . when France 
herself refuses to be subject to them?' 107 The elections of 1948 were 
faked; so were those of 1951. In such circumstances, the moderates 
had no effective role to play. The men of violence moved forward. 

There was a foretaste in May 1945, when the Arabs massacred 
103 Europeans. The French reprisals were on a savage scale. 
Dive-bombers blew forty villages to pieces; a cruiser bombarded 
others. The Algerian Communist Party journal Liberie called for the 
rebels to be 'swiftly and pitilessly punished, the instigators put in 
front of the firing-squad'. According to the French official report, 
1,020 to 1,300 Arabs were killed; the Arabs claimed 45,000. Many 
demobilized Arab soldiers returned to find their families dead, their 
homes demolished. It was these former ncos who formed the 
leadership of the future Front de Liberation Nationale (fln). As the 
most conspicuous of them, Ahmed Ben Bella, put it: 'The horrors of 
the Constantine area in May 1945 persuaded me of the only path: 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 497 

Algeria for the Algerians.' The French commander, General Duval, 
told the pieds noirs: 'I have given you peace for ten years.' 

That proved to be entirely accurate. On 1 November 1954, the 
embittered ncos were ready: Ben Bella, by now an experienced 
urban terrorist, linked forces with Belkacem Krim, to launch a 
national rising. It is important to grasp that the object, from start to 
finish, was not to defeat the French Army. That would have been 
impossible. The aim was to destroy the concept of assimilation and 
mutli-racialism by eliminating the moderates on both sides. The first 
Frenchman to be murdered was a liberal, Arabophile schoolteacher, 
Guy Monnerot. The first Arab casualty was a pro-French local 
governor, Hadj Sakok. Most fln operations were directed against 
the loyal Muslim element: employees of the state were murdered, 
their tongues cut off, their eyes gouged out, then a note, 'fln', pinned 
to the mutilated bodies. 108 This was the strategy pioneered by the 
Mufti in Palestine. Indeed many of the rebel leaders had served him. 
The ablest, Mohamedi Said, commander of 'Wilaya 3' in the Kabyle 
mountains, had joined the Mufti's 'Muslim ss legion', had para- 
chuted into Tunisia as an Abwehr agent, and declared: 'I believed 
that Hitler would destroy French tyranny and free the world.' He still 
wore his old ss helmet from time to time. His disciples included some 
of the worst killers of the twentieth century, such as Ait Hamouda, 
known as Amirouche, and Ramdane Abane, who had sliced off 
breasts and testicles in the 1945 massacres, read Marx and Mein 
Kampf'm jail, and whose dictum was: 'One corpse in a suit is always 
worth more than twenty in uniform.' These men, who had absorbed 
everything most evil the twentieth century had to offer, imposed their 
will on the villages by sheer terror; they never used any other 
method. Krim told a Yugoslav paper that the initiation method for a 
recruit was to force him to murder a designated 'traitor', mouchard 
(police spy or informer), French gendarme or colonialist: 'An assassi- 
nation marks the end of the apprenticeship of each candidate.' A 
pro-FLN American reporter was told: 'When we've shot [the Muslim 
victim] his head will be cut off and we'll clip a tag on his ear to show 
he was a traitor. Then we'll leave the head on the main road.' Ben 
Bella's written orders included: 'Liquidate all personalities who want 
to play the role of interlocuteur valable' 'Kill any person attempting 
to deflect the militants and inculcate in them a bourguibien spirit.' 
Another: 'Kill the caids .... Take their children and kill them. Kill all 
those who pay taxes and those who collect them. Burn the houses of 
Muslim ncos away on active service.' The fln had their own 
internal reglements des comptes, too: the man who issued the last 
order, Bachir Chihani, was accused (like Roehm) of pederasty and 
sadistic sex-murders, and chopped to pieces along with eight of his 



498 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

lovers. But it was the Muslim men of peace the fln killers really 
hated. In the first two-and-a-half years of war, they murdered only 
1,035 Europeans but 6,352 Arabs (authenticated cases; the real 
figure was nearer 20,000). 109 By this point the moderates could only 
survive by becoming killers themselves or going into exile. 

The fln strategy was, in fact, to place the mass of the Muslims in a 
sandwich of terror. On one side, the fln killers replaced the 
moderates. On the other, fln atrocities were designed to provoke 
the French into savage reprisals, and so drive the Muslim population 
into the extremist camp, fln doctrine was spelt out with cold- 
blooded precision by the Brazilian terrorist Carlos Marighela: 

It is necessary to turn political crisis into armed conflict by performing 
violent actions that will force those in power to transform the political 
situation of the country into a military situation. That will alienate the 
masses, who, from then on, will revolt against the army and the police .... 
The government can only intensify its repression, thus making the lives of its 
citizens harder than ever . . . police terror will become the order of the 
day .... The population will refuse to collaborate with the authorities, so 
that the latter will find the only solution to their problems lies in the 
physical liquidation of their opponents. The political situation of the 
country will [then have] become a military situation. 110 

Of course this odious variety of Leninism, if pursued ruthlessly 
enough, has a certain irresistible force. The French government in 
1954 was composed, on the whole, of liberal and civilized men, 
under the Radical-Socialist Pierre Mendes-France. They shared the 
illusion - or the vision - that Algeria could become a genuine 
multi-racial society, on the principles of liberty, equality and fratern- 
ity. Mendes-France, who had happily freed Indo-China and Tunisia, 
told the Assembly: 'The Algerian departements are part of the French 
Republic . . . they are irrevocably French . . . there can be no 
conceivable secession.' On Algeria, said his Interior Minister, 
Franqois Mitterrand, 'the only possible negotiation is war'. 111 Both 
men believed that, if France's own principles were now at last fully 
and generously turned into an Algerian reality, the problem would be 
solved. They sent out as Governor-General Jacques Soustelle, a 
brilliant ethnologist and former resistance-fighter, to create this 
reality. What they did not realize was that the fln's object was 
precisely to transform French generosity into savagery. 

Soustelle saw the fln as fascists. He thought he could defeat them 
by giving the Arabs genuine democracy and social justice. He created 
400 detachments of Kepis bleus (sas) in remote areas to protect 
loyalists. He brought in dedicated liberals like Germaine Tillion and 
Vincent Monteil to set up networks of centres sociaux and maintain 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 499 

contacts with Muslim leaders of opinion. 112 He sought desperately 
to bring Muslims into every level of government. His instructions to 
the police and army forbade terror and brutality in any form and 
especially collective reprisals. 113 It is unlikely that Soustelle's policy 
of genuine integration could have succeeded anyway, once the 
French themselves realized what it involved: France did not want to 
become a half-Arab, half-Muslim nation, any more than most Arabs 
wanted to become a French one. But in any case the fln systemati- 
cally murdered the instruments of Soustelle's liberal policy, French 
and Arab. They strove hardest to kill those French administrations 
who loved the Arabs; and usually succeeded. One such victim was 
Maurice Dupuy, described by Soustelle as a 'secular saint'. At his 
funeral Soustelle was in tears as he pinned the Legion d'honneur on 
the eldest of Dupuy's eight orphaned children, and it was then he 
first used the word 'revenge'. 114 

In the summer of 1955 the fln went a stage further and adopted a 
policy of genocide: to kill all French without distinction of age or 
sex. On 20 August the first massacres began. As always, they 
embraced many Arabs, such as Allouah Abbas, nephew of the 
moderate nationalist leader Ferhat Abbas, who had criticized fln 
atrocities. But the main object was to provoke French army reprisals. 
At Ain-Abid near Constantine, for instance, thirty-seven Europeans, 
including ten under fifteen, were literally chopped to pieces. Men had 
their arms and legs cut off; children their brains dashed out; women 
were disemboweled - one pied-noir mother had her womb opened, 
her five-day-old baby slashed to death, and then replaced in her 
womb. This 'Philippeville massacre' succeeded in its object: French 
paratroopers in the area were given orders to shoot all Arabs and (by 
Soustelle's account) killed 1,273 'insurgents', which fln propaganda 
magnified to 12,000. It was the 1945 massacre over again. As 
Soustelle put it, 'there had been well and truly dug an abyss through 
which flowed a river of blood'. French and Muslim liberals like 
Albert Camus and Ferhat Abbas, appearing on platforms together to 
appeal for reason, were howled down by all sides. 115 

From this point the Soustelle experiment collapsed. The war 
became a competition in terror. The focus switched to the Algiers 
Casbah, where every square kilometre housed 100,000 Algerians. It 
began with the execution of a crippled murderer, Ferradj, who had 
killed a seven-year-old girl and seven other civilians. The fln 
commander, Ramdane Abane, ordered one hundred French civilians 
to be murdered for every execution of an fln member. On 21-24 
June 1956, his chief killer, Saadi Yacef, who controlled a network of 
bomb-factories and 1,400 'operators', carried out forty-nine mur- 
ders. The violence grew steadily through the second half of 1956 - 



500 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

parallel with the build up to the Suez adventure. The French Mayor 
of Algiers was murdered, and a bomb carefully exploded in the 
middle of the funeral ceremony: Yacef secretly ordered all his 
operators out of the area in advance, to make certain that in the 
subsequent wild reprisals only innocent Muslims were killed. 116 

The Suez debacle was important because it finally convinced the 
army that civilian governments could not win the war. Robert 
Lacoste, Soustelle's socialist successor, conceded the point. On 7 
January 1957 he gave General Jacques Massu and his 4,600 men 
absolute freedom of action to clean the fln out of Algiers. For the 
first time all restraints on the army, including the banning of torture, 
were lifted. Torture had been abolished in France on 8 October 
1789. Article 303 of the Penal Code imposed the death penalty for 
anyone practising it. In March 1955 a secret report written by a 
senior civil servant recommended the use of supervised torture as the 
only alternative to prevent much more brutal unauthorized torture. 
Soustelle had flatly rejected it. Now Massu authorized it, as he later 
admitted: Tn answer to the question: "was there really torture?" I 
can only reply in the affirmative, although it was never either 
institutionalized or codified.' 117 The argument was that successful 
interrogation saved lives, chiefly of Arabs; that Arabs who gave 
information would be tortured to death, without restraint, by the 
fln, and it was vital for the French to make themselves feared more. 
It was the Arab belief that Massu operated without restraints, as 
much as the torture itself, which caused prisoners to talk. But 
non-Muslims were tortured too. One, a Communist Jew called Henri 
Alleg, wrote a best-selling book which caused an outburst of moral 
fury throughout France in 1958. 118 Massu claimed that interroga- 
tions by his men left no permanent damage. On seeing Alleg, looking 
whole and well, on the steps of the Palais de Justice in 1970, he 
exclaimed: 

Do the torments which he suffered count for much alongside the cutting off 
of the nose or of the lips, when it was not the penis, which had become the 
ritual present of the fellaghas to their recalcitrant 'brothers'? Everyone 
knows that these bodily appendages do not grow again! 119 

But the notion that it was possible to supervise limited torture 
effectively during a war for survival is absurd. In fact, the liberal 
Secretary-General of the Algiers Prefecture, Paul Teitgen, testified 
that about 3,000 prisoners 'disappeared' during the Algiers battle. At 
all events Massu won it. It was the only time the French fought the 
fln with its own weapons. Algiers was cleansed of terrorism. 
Moderate Arabs dared to raise their voices again. But the victory was 
thrown away by a new policy of regroupement of over a million poor 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 501 

fellahs, a piece of crude social engineering calculated to play into fln 
hands. Besides, the Massu experiment set up intolerable strains 
within the French system. On the one hand, by freeing army units 
from political control and stressing the personalities of commanders, 
it encouraged private armies: colonels increasingly regarded them- 
selves as proprietors of their regiments, as under the monarchy, and 
began to manipulate their generals into disobedience. In the moral 
confusion, officers began to see their primary obligation as towards 
their own men rather than the state. 120 

At the same time, news leaking out of what the army had done in 
Algiers began to turn French liberal and centre opinion against the 
war. From 1957 onwards, many Frenchmen came to regard Algerian 
independence, however distasteful, as preferable to the total corrup- 
tion of the French public conscience. Thus the demand for the 
restoration of political control of the war - including negotiations 
with the fln — intensified just as the French army was, as it believed, 
winning by asserting its independence. This irreconcilable conflict 
produced the explosion of May 1958 which returned General de 
Gaulle to power and created the Fifth Republic. 

De Gaulle was not a colonialist. He thought the age of colonies 
was over. His body seemed in the past but his mind was in the future. 
He claimed that at Brazzaville in 1944, when marshalling black 
Africa behind the Resistance, he had sought 'to transform the old 
dependent relationships into preferential links of political, economic 
and cultural co-operation'. 121 He saw the half-hearted continuation 
of French colonialism as the direct result of the weakness of the 
Fourth Republic's constitution, which he despised, and the 'regime of 
the parties', incapable of 'the unequivocal decisions decolonization 
called for'. 'How could it', he asked, 'have surmounted and if 
necessary broken all the opposition, based on sentiment, habit or 
self-interest, which such an enterprise was bound to provoke?' The 
result was vacillation and inconsistency, first in Indo-China, then in 
Tunisia and Morocco, finally and above all in Algeria. Naturally, he 
said, the army 'felt a growing resentment against a political system 
which was the embodiment of irresolution'. 122 

The coup was detonated, probably deliberately, by the fln 
decision on 9 May 1958 to 'execute' three French soldiers for 
'torture, rape and murder'. Four days later, white students stormed 
the government headquarters in Algiers. Massu asked Lacoste, who 
had fled to France, whether he had permission to fire on the white 
mob. He was not given it. That night, at a Brecht play attacking 
generals, a left-wing audience applauded deliriously. 123 But not one 
was actually prepared to fight for the Fourth Republic. In Algiers, the 
generals took over, and called for de Gaulle's return. Some 30,000 



502 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

Muslims went to the government forum to demonstrate their appro- 
val. They sang the 'Marseillaise' and the army song, 'Chant des 
Africains': a spontaneous demonstration in favour of French civiliza- 
tion and against the barbarism of the fln. Massu said: 'Let them 
know that France will never abandon them.' 124 When the generals 
called for de Gaulle they were lying, for they saw him merely as a 
battering-ram, to smash the Republic and take power themselves. De 
Gaulle thought Algeria was untenable and would destroy the French 
army. Indeed, he feared even worse might happen. On 24 May a 
detachment from Algeria landed in Corsica. The local authorities 
fraternized. Police sent from Marseilles allowed themselves to be 
disarmed. De Gaulle took over to avert an invasion of France itself, 
which would probably have succeeded or, alternatively, produced 
civil war. He saw ominous parallels with the beginning of the 
Spanish catastrophe in 1936. It would, he thought, finally destroy 
France as a great civilizing power. If Paris was worth a mass, France 
herself was worth a few lies. 

So, having taken power, he went to Algiers to deceive. On 4 June 
he told the howling colon mob in Algiers: 'Je vous ai compris' 'I 
tossed them the words,' he wrote, 'seemingly spontaneous but in 
reality carefully calculated, which I hoped would fire their enthusi- 
asm without committing me further than I was willing to go.' 125 He 
had said the previous year, privately: 'Of course independence will 
come but they are too stupid there to know it.' 'Long live French 
Algeria!' he chanted publicly in June 1958; privately: 'VAfrique est 
foutue et VAlgerie avecV He called French Algeria 'a ruinous 
Utopia'. Publicly he continued to reassure the colons and the army. 
'Independence? In twenty-five years' (October 1958). 'The French 
army will never quit this country and I will never deal with those 
people from Cairo and Tunis' (March 1959). 'There will be no Dien 
Bien Phu in Algeria. The insurrection will not throw us out of this 
country.' 'How can you listen to the liars and conspirators who tell 
you that in granting free choice to the Algerians, France and de 
Gaulle want to abandon you, to pull out of Algeria and hand it over 
to the rebellion?' (January 1960). 'Independence ... a folly, a 
monstrosity' (March I960). 126 

Meanwhile, he got an ever-tighter grip on the state. On 28 
September 1958 the French adopted the constitution of the Fifth 
Republic, concentrating power in the president. On 21 December he 
was elected President. The same referendum which created the new 
constitution gave all French overseas territories the right of associa- 
tion or departure. The notion of consent thus became universal. One 
by one, de Gaulle broke or removed the men who had hoisted him to 
office. In February 1960 he demanded and received 'special powers'. 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 503 

Four months later he opened secret talks with the fln leaders. In 
January 1961 he held a referendum offering Algeria freedom in 
association with France, and got an overwhelming 'Yes' vote. It was 
the end of Algerie franqaise and it brought its extremist supporters 
out into the open, bombs in hand. 

If the army leadership had insisted on taking power in May 1958, 
it could have done so, with or without de Gaulle. By April 1961, 
when it finally grasped de Gaulle's deception and sought to over- 
throw him, the chance had been missed. French opinion had moved 
on. The conscripts had transistor radios; they could hear the news 
from Paris; they refused to follow their officers. The revolt collapsed; 
its leaders surrendered or were hunted down and gaoled. That left the 
way open for a complete scuttle. Captured fln leaders were released 
from prisons to join the talks just as the rebel French generals were 
beginning their sentences. 

White terrorism, the oas (Organization de VArmee Secrete), took 
longer to deal with. It operated at full blast for over a year, using 
bombs, machine-guns and bazookas, killing over 12,000 civilians 
(mainly Muslims) and about 500 police and security men. It illus- 
trates the fearful power of political violence to corrupt. Indeed, in 
many ways it was the mirror-image of the fln. On 23 February 
1962, its leader General Salan, who had had a distinguished career as 
an honourable soldier, issued orders for 

a generalized offensive .... The systematic opening of fire against crs and 
gendarmerie units. "Molotov cocktails" will be thrown against their 
armoured vehicles . . . night and day .... [The objective is] to destroy the 
best Muslim elements in the liberal professions so as to oblige the Muslim 
population to have recourse to ourselves ... to paralyse the powers that be 
and make it impossible for them to exercise authority. Brutal actions will be 
generalized over the whole territory ... at works of art and all that 
represents the exercise of authority in a manner to lead towards the 
maximum of general insecurity and the total paralysis of the country. 127 

Nor did the corruption stop at the oas. For in order to beat them 
and to protect de Gaulle himself (twice nearly murdered), the state 
built up its own official terror units, which murdered and tortured 
prisoners with impunity, and on a wide scale. 128 In this case, neither 
liberal France nor the international community raised a whisper of 
protest, oas terrorism finally killed the idea of a white settlement. At 
the end of 1961 de Gaulle's closest adviser, Bernard Tricot, reported 
back from Algiers: 'The Europeans . . . are so hardened in opposition 
to everything that is being prepared, and their relations with the 
majority of the Muslims are so bad, that . . . the essential thing now 
is to organize their return.' 129 



504 THE BANDUNG GENERATION 

The end came in March 1962, in an orgy of slaughter and 
intolerance. The Muslim mob, scenting victory, had already sacked 
the Great Synagogue in the heart of the Casbah, gutting it, ripping 
the Torah scrolls, killing the Jewish officials and chalking on the 
walls 'Death to the Jews' and other Nazi slogans. On 15 March the 
oas raided Germaine Tillion's social centre, where handicapped 
children were trained, took out six men and shot them to death, 
beginning with the legs. One of them was Mouloud Feraoun, friend 
of Camus, who had termed him 'last of the moderates'. He had 
written: 'There is French in me, there is Kabyle in me. But I have a 
horror of those who kill .... Vive la France, such as I have always 
loved! Vive VAlgerie, such as I hope for! Shame on the criminals!' 130 
The cease-fire with the fln, 19 March 1962, brought a further burst 
of oas killing: eighteen gendarmes and seven soldiers were mur- 
dered. The French commander, General Ailleret, retaliated by 
destroying the last redoubt of Algerie franqaise, the pied noir 
working-class quarter of Bab-el-Oued, with its 60,000 inhabitants. 
He attacked it with rocket-firing dive-bombers, tanks firing at 
point-blank range and 20,000 infantry. It was the suppression of the 
1870 Commune all over again; but this episode does not figure in the 
Marxist textbooks. 131 That was effectively the end of Algeria as a 
multiracial community. The exodus to France began. Many hospi- 
tals, schools, laboratories, oil terminals and other evidence of French 
culture and enterprise — including the library of the University of 
Algiers — were deliberately destroyed. About 1,380,000 people 
(including some Muslims) left in all. By 1963, of a large and historic 
Mediterranean community, only about 30,000 remained. 132 

The Evian Agreements, under which France agreed to get out, 
contained many clauses designed to save France's face. They were 
meaningless. It was a straight surrender. Not even paper protection, 
however, was given to 250,000 Muslim officials, many of a very 
humble kind, who had continued to serve France faithfully to the 
end. De Gaulle was too busy saving France by extricating it from 
the horror, to give them a thought. When a Muslim deputy, ten of 
whose family had already been murdered by the fln, told de Gaulle 
that, with self-determination, 'we shall suffer', he replied coldly: 'Eh, 
bien - vous souffrirez.' They did. Only 15,000 had the money and 
means to get out. The rest were shot without trial, used as human 
mine-detectors to clear the minefields along the Tunisian border, 
tortured, made to dig their own tombs and swallow their military 
decorations before being killed; some were burned alive, castrated, 
dragged behind trucks, fed to the dogs; there were cases where entire 
families including tiny children were murdered together. The French 
army units that remained, their former comrades-in-arms, stood by, 



THE BANDUNG GENERATION 505 

horrified and powerless, for under the Agreements they had no right 
to interfere. French soldiers were actually employed to disarm the 
Muslim harkis, telling them they would be issued with more modern 
weapons, although in fact they were about to be slaughtered. It was a 
crime of betrayal comparable to the British handing over Russian 
pows to Stalin's wrath; worse, indeed. Estimates of the number put 
to death vary from 30,000 to 150,000. 133 

Who knows? A great darkness descended over many aspects of the 
new Algeria, a darkness which has never been lifted since. The lies 
continued to the end. 'France and Algeria', said de Gaulle on 18 
March 1962, would 'march together like brothers on the road to 
civilization'. 134 The truth is, the new nation owed its existence to the 
exercise of cruelty without restraint and on the largest possible scale. 
Its regime, composed mainly of successful gangsters, quickly ousted 
those of its members who had been brought up in the Western 
tradition; all were dead or in exile by the mid-1960s. 

Exactly twenty years after the independence agreement was 
reached, one of the chief signatories and Algeria's first President, Ben 
Bella himself, summed up the country's first two decades of indepen- 
dent existence. The net result, he said, had been 'totally negative'. 
The country was 'a ruin'. Its agriculture had been 'assassinated'. 'We 
have nothing. No industry — only scrap iron.' Everything in Algeria 
was 'corrupt from top to bottom'. 135 No doubt Ben Bella's bitterness 
was increased by the fact that he had spent most of the intervening 
years imprisoned by his revolutionary comrades. But the substance 
of his judgement was true enough. And unfortunately the new 
Algeria had not kept its crimes to itself. It became and for many years 
remained the chief resort of international terrorists of all kinds. A 
great moral corruption had been planted in Africa. It set a pattern of 
public crime and disorder which was to be imitated throughout the 
vast and tragic continent which was now made master of its own 
affairs. 



FIFTEEN 

Caliban's Kingdoms 



In March 1959 Evelyn Waugh, visiting East Africa, wrote to his wife: 
'I spent one day with the Masai .... They had a lovely time during 
the Mau Mau rising. They were enlisted and told to bring in all the 
Kikuyus' arms. Back they proudly came with baskets of severed 
limbs.' 1 Waugh had provided a gruesomely imaginative foretaste of 
independent Africa in his pre-war novels Black Mischief and Scoop. 
Now the anarchist in him joyfully scented fiction come true: the 
confusion of aims and tongues, the disintegration of ephemeral 
order, the return to chaos. 

We have seen in Chapter Four that it is impossible to make any 
truthful generalization about colonialism. The same is true of the 
decolonizing process. The most that can accurately be said is: it 
occurred. All the rest is propaganda; ex post facto rationalization. 
Colonialism has been presented as a conspiracy of capitalist states; 
decolonization as a further conspiracy when it became economically 
more prudent to switch to 'neocolonialism'. But if there was a 
conspiracy, why did the conspirators never meet or exchange plans 
and ideas? The truth is colonialism was born in intense rivalry and 
died in it. The colonial powers did not conspire against the natives. 
They conspired against each other. Each colonial power hated all the 
rest, despised their methods, rejoiced in their misfortunes and 
happily aggravated them when convenient. They would not co- 
operate even when imperative self-interest demanded. In August 
1941, on the eve of the Japanese onslaught, it was found that, though 
Britain and the Netherlands had been wartime allies for fourteen 
months, nothing whatever had been done to co-ordinate the defence 
plans of their South-East Asian empires. 2 During the entire process 
of decolonization, 1945-75, the colonial powers never once met 
together to decide how they were going to do it, nor do there seem to 
have been even informal efforts at co-ordination. The historian who 
looks for evidence of such contacts finds nothing but a hole. 

506 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 507 

One reason there was no alignment of policy for decolonization 
was that neither of the two biggest colonial powers, Britain and 
France, actually possessed one. Both made logical noises. In reality 
all was expediency. When de Gaulle set up his Free French standard 
in 1940, France's Arab and Indo-Chinese territories stuck to Vichy; 
only black Africa rallied to him. As a result, at the January 1944 
Brazzaville Conference, he opened for them the road to freedom. But 
the colonial officials who attended it made a different interpretation: 
The formation of independent governments in the colonies, however 
far off, cannot be contemplated,' they reported. 'We visualize empire 
in the Roman, not the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term.' 3 De Gaulle's 
post-war government abolished forced labour and the hated penal 
code for natives; but a rising in Madagascar in 1947 was put down 
with astonishing ferocity, 80,000 natives dying. 4 As late as 1957, 
Francois Mitterrand declared: 'Without Africa, France will have no 
history in the twenty-first century.' Until the debacle in Algeria, 
French policy was a maze of contradictions: old-style paternalism in 
the jungle and the bush, with colon firebrands and highly educated 
black nationalists sitting cheek by jowl in the Paris Assembly. 
Sometimes an 'African' deputy moved from a 'white' to a 'black' 
constituency, as did the Colonial Under-Secretary, Dr Aujoulat, in 
1951, changing his politics in the process and campaigning under the 
slogan 'His face may be white but his heart is as black as a black 
man's.' 5 

When de Gaulle returned to power in May 1958 and surveyed the 
shattered Fourth Republic and the mess in Algeria, he abruptly 
decided to turn French black Africans loose. In the 28 September 
referendum, they were given the choice of voting 'Yes' (interdepen- 
dence) or 'No' (separation). All but Guinea and Madagascar voted 
'Yes'; but it was independence by another name. De Gaulle wanted 
to keep some kind of union together. On 12 December 1959, at a 
meeting of French African heads of state at St Louis, he told them: 
'As the Pilgrims of Emmaus said to the traveller: "Abide with us: for 
it is towards evening, and the day is far spent."' 6 But they chose 
'association', meaning aid and military backing, rather than 'com- 
munity'. Some of these African leaders, such as Houphouet-Boigny 
(Ivory Coast), Philibert Tsiranana (Malagasy), Leopold Senghor 
(Senegal), Hamani Diori (Niger), Ahmadou Ahidjo (Cameroon), 
Leon M'Ba (Gabon), Francois Tombalbaye (Chad), and Mokhtar 
Ould Daddah (Mauritania), formed a personal relationship with the 
mesmeric general: they 'became my intimates' as he put it. 7 But this 
was transitory; all went their separate ways. All these territories, the 
Ivory Coast excepted, were very poor. Some were more 'fit' for 
independence than others; some not at all. But it is impossible to 



508 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

discern any principles behind the process by which they secured it, 
other than France's decision to have done with them. 

In theory the British Empire, latterly Commonwealth, had always 
worked on a quite different supposition: that all territories were to 
be prepared for independence, and given it when ready. The British 
White Paper of June 1948 stated: The central purpose of British 
colonial policy ... is to guide the colonial territories to responsible 
self-government within the Commonwealth in conditions that ensure 
to the people concerned both a fair standard of living and freedom 
from oppression in any quarter.' 8 But both qualifications were 
invariably abandoned when expediency beckoned. Up to the 
mid-1950s the pace was too slow; from 1960 it was too fast. In 
neither case did it reflect the real readiness and needs of the 
territories concerned, but rather the pressures on the British govern- 
ment and its will, or lack of it, to resist them. The forces set up by the 
Bandung movement were the decisive factor. While France decided 
to cut and run in 1958, Britain followed a year later, when Harold 
Macmillan felt free to follow de Gaulle's example. As Sir Michael 
Blundell, the shrewdest of the Kenya settlers' leaders, put it, '. . . a 
dramatic change was to take place in the policy of the British 
government after the general election in October 1959 ... the 
decision was taken to withdraw from Africa as quickly as decency 
would permit.' 9 But even this switch, though rationalized in Mac- 
millan's 'Winds of Change' speech in Cape Town on 3 February 
1960, was more a series of violent wobbles than a smooth U-turn. 
Macmillan's agent, the Colonial Secretary Iain Macleod, later admit- 
ted there was no 'resounding decision' but more 'a score of different 
deliberate decisions'. 10 

When Macleod used the term 'deliberate',- he meant that the 
formalities of negotiations were preserved, ending in a grandiose 
orgy of constitution-making, usually at Lancaster House in London. 
One thing decolonization did not lack was paper constitutions. It is 
ironic that Britain, which had never had one, produced (by my 
calculation) more than 500 for its colonial territories in the years 
1920—75, most of which lasted only a few years, some a few months, 
some never being applied at all; none surviving into the 1980s. The 
European empires began in paternalism and a denial of the spirit of 
politics. They ended at the opposite extreme, in over- 
democratization and political elephantiasis. The silver age of empire 
was completely dominated by endless conferences and 
constitution-making. Thus, the two Rhodesias and Nyasaland 
dithered for thirty years over whether or not to have a federation. 
There was the Hilton- Young Commission of 1927-9, the Bledisloe 
Commission of 1948-9, the Settlers' Constitution of 1936 (never 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 509 

implemented), two separate conferences in 1951 (boycotted by 
Africans), a third in 1953. This produced the 'final' constitution, 
which was too complex for most voters to understand and was out of 
date by the time it was put into practice. 

With voting rolls depending on a weird mixture of property, 
income, residence and literacy qualifications, and electoral districts 
and candidatures 'balanced' to the point of incomprehensibility, men 
and women did not always know whether they had a vote or where 
or how to cast it. There were often several tiers of government and a 
multiplicity of parties at each. Thus a country's destiny could be 
settled by a handful of people or by sheer muddle. In the 1962 
election which led to the long Rhodesia crisis, and scores of 
thousands of dead, only 12,000 Africans out of a possible 65,500 
actually voted; a mere 500 more African votes would have put in the 
moderates, and the whole of the country's history for the next twenty 
years would have been different. 11 Most of the Africans, and a good 
many whites, did not know what they were doing. 

Constitutional complexities proliferated even when there were no 
fundamental problems of race. Thus Tanzania's 1955 'reform' 
produced one of the most complicated constitutions ever devised for a 
colonial territory, mainly to exclude the more belligerent national- 
ists. Further changes in 1957—8 added yet more subtleties, including a 
tripartite voting provision that each voter on the roll had to cast his 
vote for one person of each race (African, European, Asian), on pain 
of invalidation. A new kind of bureaucracy, expert at 'balanced' 
multiracial constitutions, emerged, invaded the UN Secretariat, and 
so internationalized itself. From 1956, under UN pressure, the 
Belgians in Ruanda-Urundi constructed one of the most rococo 
constitutions ever devised by man, with multi-roll elections to the 
Councils of Sub-Chiefs, Councils of Chiefs, Territorial Councils, 
African Council and, on top, a General Council to advise the 
Vice-Governor-General: a five-tier system. Here was one of the 
world's most primitive countries with a political structure more 
elaborate than that of the United States. 12 

Colonies had once been under-governed. Now they were over- 
governed. One reason was that 'independence' meant full sov- 
ereignty, with all that such a status implied. The Gambia, with a 
population of 300,000, which was really one town, Bathurst, and its 
hinterland, surrounded on three sides by Senegal, became a fully- 
fledged state burdened with the entire apparatus of government, 
which finally flattened it into bankruptcy in 1981. The alternative 
was to hammer these small, separate chunks of colonialism into 
federations. But they seldom worked for long or at all. They 
involved, too, extra tiers of government, often with two legislative 



510 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

chambers each, and elaborate safeguards to calm the mutual hatreds 
and fears of territories at different stages of development and with 
different racial mixes. Thus the British West Indies were over- 
administered, for historical reasons, even while still crown colonies. 
Independence added another tier, federation a third, so that while it 
lasted - generally not long - these islands, most of them poor and 
backward, probably had more legislators per head than any other 
community in history. 

The former colonies thus became superlative prey for the great 
human scourge of the twentieth century: the professional politician. 
Indeed, if decolonization did possess an ethical principle, it was that 
political forms were the ultimate standard of value, the only true 
criteria of statehood. The principle had been adumbrated in India. 
The Montagu Report of 1918, which introduced it, condescendingly 
observed: 'If we speak of "Indian opinion", we should be understood 
as generally referring to the majority of those who have held or are 
capable of holding an opinion on the matter with which we are 
dealing.' 13 But every adult, even if he or she is an illiterate living in a 
remote village, is capable of holding an opinion about the future of 
the society to which they belong. What the Report was really saying, 
and this remained the conventional wisdom down to the tragic and 
savage end of the decolonization process, was that, in negotiating 
independence, the only valid mode of discourse was that of those 
who made their living by full-time politics: that unless an opinion 
could be expressed within the vocabulary and terms of reference and 
assumptions of that mode of discourse, it was not really an opinion 
at all, and could therefore be ignored or, if necessary, trampled on. 

Hence the assumptions on which decolonization rested, and still 
more the constitutional clutter which accompanied it, tended to 
widen the gap between the 'real' and the 'political' nation, and to 
define the latter in the narrowest, most sectarian sense. The benefi- 
ciaries of decolonization were therefore the vote-manipulators. 
Therein lay the seeds of a great deception. The professional politi- 
cians see the res publico, in terms of votes, ordinary people in terms of 
justice. For the 'real' nation, democracy matters less than the rule of 
law: the first is the form, the second the substance. When the 
ex-colonial peoples received independence, they thought they were 
being given justice: all they got was the right to elect politicians. 
Colonialism, of course, could not produce political equality; what it 
could, and at its best did, provide was equality before the law. But 
the process of transfer, by making the vote the yardstick of progress, 
left the law to take care of itself, so that in the long run the vast 
majority of Africans ended with nothing. 

This helps to explain why those territories where the process of 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 511 

transfer was longest and most elaborate fared no better, as a rule, 
than those where it was rushed. The outstanding and perhaps the 
most pathetic example was the Gold Coast. In the post- 1945 period 
it was the richest black state in Africa. It was generally regarded as 
the most promising. It had no race problem. It was the first to get 
independence. The road to freedom was a long one. It had had a 
legislative council since 1850, a black (nominated) member as long 
ago as 1888; there were six by 1916. Full elections in local 
government came in 1925. In 1946 the Legislative Council got an 
African majority. 1948: constitutional inquiry commission. 1949: 
African-majority committee to devise new constitution. 1951: elec- 
tions under new constitution. 1952: Kwame Nkrumah Prime Minis- 
ter. 1954: final independence constitution'. 1956: new elections. 
1957: full independence. This was the slow, sure, copy-book pro- 
gress to self-rule; and Nkrumah was regarded as the model African 
statesman, his new country, Ghana, the prototype for African 
self-rule. Young, handsome, ultra-articulate, he cut a notable figure 
at Bandung. 

Yet there were portents even before independence. Ghana's drive 
for independence had been the work of the barrister J.B.Danquah, 
who had hired Nkrumah as a full-time party organizer. Nkrumah 
was thus from the start a professional politician, nothing else. He 
hijacked the party organization, turned it into a mass-movement 
revolving round his own personality, and persuaded the British that 
he was the best, or simplest, man to back in the independence stakes. 
They made it easy for him. The Local Government Ordinances of 
1951 and 1953, by creating political councils, which immediately fell 
into the hands of Nkrumah's Convention People's Party, broke the 
power of the chiefs, the traditional authorities. Thus Ghana was an 
embryo one-party state even before the hand-over. Once in power, 
Nkrumah used British devices, such as 'judicial enquiries', and 
employed left-wing British legal and political advisers,, to destroy all 
other centres of influence, and the constitutional restraints on his 
personal rule, and to drive the opposition into illegality. Having 
concentrated power in his party and himself, he then destroyed the 
rule of law. The decisive point came in December 1963. On the 9th, 
three opposition leaders (former colleagues of Nkrumah) were 
acquitted of treason by three judges in a special court. A careful 
five-hour judgement, a model of English judicial reasoning, was read 
by the Chief Justice, Sir Arku Korsah. He had been a Middle Temple 
barrister for forty-four years, a judge since 1945, Chief Justice since 
1956. He was a symbol of the most vital governing principle of all: 
that in a civilized community, everyone and every institution, 
including, indeed above all, the state, is equal before and subject to the 



512 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

law. He was, in a real sense, the end-result of a millennium of British 
constitutional development. On 11 December Nkrumah sacked him. 
The three men were tried again and convicted. Two years later, old 
Danquah died in gaol, where he was being held without trial. 14 

This destruction of the rule of law was paralleled by the moral 
destruction of Nkrumah and by the economic destruction of the 
country. The three were closely connected. In the heady atmosphere 
of Bandung in 1955, Nkrumah absorbed two fatal fallacies. The first 
was that all economic problems can be solved by political means. 
Colonies and ex-colonies were poor and backward not for intrinsic 
physical and human reasons but because of the political fact of 
colonization. The theory was emerging, and Bandung gave it enor- 
mous impetus, that colonialism did not merely hold back economic 
advance but actually subjected the colony to a deliberate process of 
'underdevelopment'. 15 What politics had done, politics could undo. 
'Underdevelopment' could be reversed by large-scale, politically 
motivated investment programmes. Continental prosperity could be 
promoted by the political process. Nkrumah preached this doctrine 
at the Pan- African Congresses he inaugurated at Accra in 1958. He 
summed it up at Addis Ababa in May 1963: 'African unity is above 
all a political kingdom, which can only be gained by political means. 
The social and economic development of Africa will come only 
within the political kingdom, not the other way round.' He therefore 
called for a Union Government of African States, a Common 
Market, a Pan-African Currency, an African Monetary Zone, a 
Central Bank, a continental communications system and a common 
foreign policy: 'We shall thus begin the triumphant march of the 
Kingdom of African personality.' 16 Nkrumah not only preached 
these fantasies: he tried to practise them in Ghana. The territory had 
been one of colonialism's success-stories. By diligent housekeeping, 
its modest level of prosperity might have been consolidated and even 
raised. By politicizing the economy, Nkrumah rapidly eliminated 
Ghana's balance of payments surplus; by the mid-1960s it had 
accumulated a mountain of foreign debt and a low international 
credit-rating. 

The second fallacy or disease which Nkrumah (and others) 
contracted at Bandung, which operated as a mutual-admiration 
society, was the notion that the emergence of the new nations from 
the malign process of 'underdevelopment' required leadership by 
charismatic personalities. This idea was implicit in Leninism, which 
endowed vanguard elites (and their guiding spirit) with quasi-sacral 
insights into the historical process. It was also implicit in Gandhiism, 
which gave a determining political role to the self-elect 'holy man' 
and was a primary influence on the Bandung generation. Nehru, 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 513 

Sukarno, U Nu, and then Nasser and Nkrumah — and many others — 
were not just political leaders: they were spiritual leaders too, in the 
sense that the nation incarnated the spiritual yearnings of a people, and 
the 'liberators' incarnated the nation. 

It was not long after he returned from Bandung that Nkrumah began 
to allow his followers to refer to him as Osagyefo, 'the Redeemer'. The 
corruption set in rapidly; a form of bastardized Stalinism made its 
appearance. In 1960 an authorized biography recorded: 'He is our 
father, teacher, our brother, our friend, indeed our life, for without him 
we would no doubt have existed but we would not have lived .... 
What we owe him is greater even than the air we breathe, for he made 
us as surely as he made Ghana.' 17 The Redeemer began to believe this 
nonsense himself. 'All Africans know', he said in 1 96 1 , 'that I represent 
Africa and that I speak in her name. Therefore no African can have an 
opinion that differs from mine.' 18 It was against this background that 
Nkrumah crushed opposition and wrecked the rule of law. The 
charisma held for a time, especially at international conferences. But 
even there, as the 1960s progressed, newer, more up-to-date and 
fashionable figures arose and became the cynosure. Nkrumah lost his 
lustre. At home, the very fact of arrogating to himself quasi-divine 
powers made him vulnerable when the gradual, then rapid, fall in 
living-standards proved the magic did not work. But by the mid-1 960s 
there was no constitutional means of removing the Redeemer. He fell to 
a military coup in February 1966, and died in exile in 1972. 

The collapse of black Africa's first and model state into military rule 
was a distressing blow, more particularly since its huge near-neighbour, 
Nigeria, had itself lapsed from constitutionalism into militarism the 
month before. Nigeria's population made it by far the most important 
of the black African states and, during the 1 960s, the development of oil 
made it economically the most secure. It, too, had emerged from a long 
process of preparation for self-rule, beginning with the first elected 
Africans in 1922—3. It was the masterpiece of Lord Lugard's 'dual 
mandate' system, the most conscientious and high-minded exercise in 
colonial administration ever devised. Internal tension between the 
dominant tribes, the Hausa and Fulani of the north, the Ibo of the east 
and the Yoruba of the west, long antedated British sovereignty. 
Despite the most elaborate efforts to devise a fool-proof federal system, 
they survived it. Nigeria's history, indeed, illustrates the essentially 
superficial and ephemeral impact of colonialism. A far bigger impact, 
indeed, was made by the arrival of nationalism, in its Afro-Asian form, 
with its emphasis on the 'rights' of each ethnic community. If all these 
had been conceded, Nigeria would have had to be a federation of some 
200 states. 19 The assertion of 'rights' to the point of fracture made 
Nigeria unworkable by the normal processes of democratic debate and 



514 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

compromise. Breakdown nearly came in 1964, only four years after 
independence, and finally in 1966; and military rule in turn led to the 
secession of the east, which termed itself 'Biafra', on 30 May 1967, 
followed by two years' civil war and immense loss of life. 

This tragic conflict divided Africa. Only Tanzania, Zambia, Gabon 
and the Ivory Coast backed Biafra. The other African states supported 
the Nigerian military regime, most of them because they feared similar 
secessions which they calculated would work to the advantages of the 
'imperialists'. But if Balkanization was an imperial aim, why had the 
colonial powers striven so hard to create unitary states or, that failing, 
viable federations; and why did all the great powers (as it happened) 
support Nigeria against the secessionists, the chief reason why Biafra 
was crushed? There were no answers to these questions. The political 
philosophy of African nationalism was based upon a theory of 
colonialism which was not merely false but fundamentally and 
systematically misleading. It was bound to lead to disillusion, 
frustration and war. 

Unfortunately, in the watershed years 1959-60, when the colonial 
powers began to pull out of Africa at a rapidly accelerating rate, this 
false theory became the prevailing wisdom of the UN, under the impact 
of the Bandung generation and, above all, Dag Hammarskjold. The 
critical moment came when Belgium was persuaded against its better 
judgement to pull out of the Congo on 30 June 1960. Belgium had run 
this vast and valuable though primitive region with excessive political 
paternalism but, from 1920 onwards, with increasing economic 
success. The returns of heavy industrial investment began to come in 
during the 1950s. The index of industrial production rose, 1948—58, 
from 118 to 350, with productivity increasing two and a half times 
during these years. Directly contradicting all the Leninist-type theories 
of imperialism, industrial production was growing at an annual rate of 
14.3 per cent in the 1950s, tailing off only at the prospect of 
independence. 20 As a result, at the time of independence, the Congo 
had, for instance, a higher ratio of hospital beds, 560 per 100,000 
inhabitants, than any other African country (higher than Belgium's 
own in fact) and the highest literacy rate, 42 per cent (rates in British 
colonies ranged from 30 per cent in Uganda to 15 per cent in 
Tanganyika and Nigeria; French rates averaged 10 per cent). 21 But 
Belgium's educational effort was concentrated overwhelmingly in the 
primary sector: there was no Congolese doctor, engineer or senior 
administrator, and above all there was not a single African officer in 
the 25,000-strong Force Publique. 

What the system had rapidly produced, in its last frantic years of 
impending abdication, was a crop of professional politicians, all 
concealing deep tribal affiliations beneath a veneer of European-style 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 515 

ideology. The three most important, Joseph Kasavubu the President, 
Patrice Lumumba the Prime Minister, and Moise Tshombe, premier 
of Katanga, the richest of the provinces, were bitter tribal and 
populist rivals. 22 All three were volatile personalities but Lumumba 
was by far the most unstable. He was a former postal-clerk and 
brewery worker turned full-time political agitator, and now Minister 
of Defence as well as head of the government. The Belgian legacy was 
fragile enough but it might conceivably have lasted a few years. 
Lumumba, however, chose the independence ceremonies to make a 
rabble-rousing attack on white rule; five days later on 5 July the 
garrison in Leopoldville, the capital, mutinied and threw out its 
white officers, prior to surging forth to loot, rape and kill Europeans 
and Africans alike. The Belgians waited for five days, while the terror 
spread and increased, and while Hammarskjold, at UN headquarters 
in New York, did nothing, though his own UN staff in the Congo 
were thrown out of their hotel rooms at gunpoint by the exultant 
mutineers. Only on 10 July did the Belgians send in their own troops 
to restore order. Immediately Hammarskjold saw his chance, turned 
angrily and decisively on the Belgians, and on 13 July, in front of the 
Security Council, denounced their troops as a threat to peace and 
order. 23 The Secretary-General had been looking for an opportunity 
to expand the un's role, and to ride to world government on a 
swelling tide of Third World emotion. As the great Belgian states- 
man, Paul-Henri Spaak, said of him: 7/ a vecu V anticolonialisme 
exacerbe et triomphant. II y participait par devoir, mats aussi, j'en 
suis sure, par conviction' 1 * He believed that the UN was to be the 
catalyst of the new Africa. France's relations with Africa, he told 
Andre Malraux, were like a good martini: Trance might be the gin, 
but the un was definitely the angostura' (suggesting that he was as 
confused about martinis as he was about Africa). In the affairs of 
Afro-Asia, he said, 'Only the un, of which they are themselves 
members, breaks the colonial spell and puts the matter outside the 
orbit of the Cold War.' 25 If Hammarskjold had done nothing and 
allowed Belgium to restore order, the crisis might have been quickly 
resolved, with the minimum of bloodshed. Tshombe, to extract the 
Katanga mining industry from the chaos, had declared the province 
independent on 11 July. This problem, too, might have been resolved 
by negotiation. Instead the Secretary-General immediately set about 
creating and deploying a un army, taken not from the Security 
Council powers (as the un Charter clearly intended) but from the 
'non-aligned' states from whom Hammarskjold drew his following. 
Moreover, he sought to use this expeditionary force not merely to 
restore order, which the Belgians were far more capable of doing, but 
to reunite Katanga to the Congo by violence. He saw himself as 



516 Caliban's kingdoms 

king-maker, and Lumumba as the king. Nor is it difficult to see why he 
backed Lumumba, who seems to have had little following, and that 
purely tribal, among the Congolese themselves, but whose rhetoric 
appealed strongly to Pan-African intellectuals and to the Afro-Asian 
leaders to whom the Secretary-General looked for backing. 

In this forlorn endeavour, Hammarskjold paid scant regard to the 
lives, black or white, he was risking. Cold, detached, consumed by an 
overwhelming ambition masquerading as an ideal, he thought in terms 
of a political abstraction, not human beings. He formulated what 
became a characteristic UN double-standard: that whereas the killing of 
Africans by whites (as at Sharpeville in South Africa on 21 March 
1960) was of international concern and a threat to peace, the killing of 
Africans by Africans (or of whites by Africans, or of Asians by Africans 
or all three races by Africans) was a purely internal matter outside the 
purview of the UN. Thus the un became identified with a form of 
inverted racism, which was to cost an incalculable number of African 
lives over the next two decades. Even in Hammarskjold's time the toll 
was heavy. His UN army became a source of further instability rather 
than the reverse. His protege, Lumumba, tried to set up his own 
secessionist state, fell into the hands of the Congolese army, now 
controlled by a former nco, 'General' Mobutu, was tossed to the 
Katangese and murdered, 17—18 January 1961. The eclipse of this 
worthless scoundrel, responsible for the deaths of thousands, was 
described by Hammarskjold as 'a revolting crime against the principles 
for which this Organization stands'. 26 In fact it was no more than a 
meaningless incident in a long power-struggle. The Secretary-General 
lost his emotional detachment and became obsessed with the need to 
revenge the death of the king he had failed to make by using his un 
troops to expel the whites from Katanga and change its regime, the first 
instance of what might be termed imperialism by international 
bureaucracy. But in the process he made the error of leaving the abstract 
make-believe world of his u n offices and descending into the real world 
of the Congo basin. It cost him his life when his aircraft hit a tree near 
Ndola in September 1961. 

Hammarskjold, like many other outsiders, assumed one could 
discern, and respond to, Western-type political principles and situa- 
tions in what was, in fact, nothing more than a seething cauldron of 
tribal and personal politics. All the Congolese politicians shifted their 
positions as expediency and self-preservation dictated. It was absurd 
that un policy should be tied to any one of them. The Algerians, and 
other Afro— Asian busy-bodies, made the same mistake. Ben Bella (soon 
to vanish into an oubliette himself) dismissed Tshombe as 'a travelling 
museum of imperialism'. 28 In fact he proved a popular prime minister 
when Kasavubu, reversing all his previous views, appointed him. But 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 517 

not for long. The Congolese street-mob was as volatile as Shake- 
speare's Roman mob (or a Cairo mob rehearsed by Nasser). One 
moment the cry was, 'Long live Tshombe, Arabs go home!' The next 
it was: 'Down with Tshombe, Arabs send him home!' (He had since 
been condemned to death for treason.) 29 The watershed was in 
December 1965 when, as was probably inevitable, Mobutu ended 
the political era with a military coup. He then went on, at the next 
Independence Day celebrations, to salute the man for whose murder 
he was responsible: 'Glory and honour to an illustrious citizen of the 
Congo, to a great African, and to the first martyr of our indepen- 
dence — Patrice Emery Lumumba, who was the victim of the 
colonialist plot!' Thereafter, Mobutu, now president, ruled with the 
support of Western interests, to the enrichment of many hundreds of 
friends, supporters and relatives and not least of himself: by the early 
1980s he was reckoned to be a billionaire, perhaps the world's 
wealthiest man, richer than King Leopold of Belgium, who once 
owned the country. 30 

The watershed years 1959-60, culminating in the long Congolese 
crisis, to which the UN made so disastrous a contribution, probably 
destroyed any chance, however remote, that constitutionalism would 
become the norm in the new African states. Too many hopes had 
been invested in the new class of professional politicians. They could 
not deliver. They broke, or were broken, under the strain. The 
military men took over. The same thing had happened in the first 
'liberated' continent, Latin America, in the early decades of the 
nineteenth century: the generation of Bolivar, the Liber ador, was 
succeeded by the first generation of Caudillos. The phenomenon was 
repeated in the Arab world, where the military, led by Colonel 
Nasser and his colleagues, began to take over from 1952. In black 
Africa, the first successful military coup took place in Togo in 
January 1963, when Sylvanus Olympio was murdered. Six months 
later Fulbert Youlou was ousted in Brazzaville. Two months after 
that Hubert Maga was overthrown in Cotonou. There were mutinies 
in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania in January 1964, followed the next 
month by the ousting of Leon Mba in Gabon (reversed by de 
Gaulle's paratroopers). Mobutu's Zaire coup followed in November 
1965, accompanied by two in Dahomey in quick succession, coups in 
the Central African Republic and in Upper Volta the following 
January and in Ghana in February. The first Togo coup attracted 
immense and world-wide publicity; by the time it was repeated, 
exactly five years later, no one outside the country took any notice. 
By this date (January 1968) black Africa had undergone sixty-four 
military coups, attempted coups and mutinies. 31 By the end of the 
1960s, the decade of independence, Dahomey had already exper- 



518 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

ienced six coups, Nigeria and Sierra Leone three each, and with two 
each for Ghana, Congo-Brazzaville, Togo, Upper Volta and Zaire; 
many others had had one. During the 1970s, indeed, the military 
putsch became the chief means of changing political direction or the 
personnel of elites throughout black Africa; and already by 1975 
twenty of the forty-one states were ruled by military or military-civil 
juntas. 32 

Even when military power did not become the normal arbiter of 
politics, parliamentary democracy in the Western sense, including the 
essential right to remove a government by electoral process, disap- 
peared within a few years of independence, being replaced by Leninist 
one-party systems. In a very few cases, Kenya being the outstanding 
example, virtual one-party rule was accompanied by the survival of 
free market economics and the rule of law, at any rate up to a point. 
There, the ruling party became simply a non-idealistic organization 
for promoting the careers of elites from the dominant tribe. 33 Even in 
these quasi-constitutional states, corruption has been institutiona- 
lized, with the signes exterieures de la richesse interpreted as evidence 
of capacity to lead. President Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, one of the few 
terrorist leaders to make successfully the transition to responsible rule, 
actually upbraided one of his opponents, the Leftist Bildad Kaggia, at 
a public meeting, for failing to enrich himself: 

We were together with Paul Ngei in gaol. If you go to Ngei's home [you will 
find] he has planted a lot of coffee and other crops. What have you done for 
yourself? If you go to Kubai's home, he has a big house and has a nice 
shamba. Kaggia, what have you done for yourself? We were together with 
Kungu Karumba in gaol. Now he is running his own buses. What have you 
done for yourself? 34 

In fact a modest degree of corruption, provided it operated within 
well-understood African conventions, breach of which was answer- 
able in the courts, was the least of the post-independence evils. Where 
the market system was allowed to operate, and the role of the state was 
restricted accordingly, corruption could be conventionalized (as, for 
instance, in eighteenth-century England) and so contained. It became 
an organic cancer only where the state took upon itself Utopian roles, 
as became increasingly the mode in Africa during the 1960s and still 
more in the 1970s. For this the assumptions of Leninism were partly 
responsible; still more the Bandung interpretation of Leninism, 
exalting the omni-competence of the political process to produce 
beneficial results, as preached by its eager acolytes such as Nkrumah. 

But it was not collectivist philosophies alone which encouraged the 
fragile African state to expand and so corrupt itself. Some aspects of 
colonialism were also to blame. It is true that most colonies, in most 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 519 

respects, were conducted on harmless laissez-faire principles. That 
was certainly the theory throughout the British colonial empire, for 
instance. Government protected the colony from external aggression, 
policed it and ran its currency. The market did the rest. Unfortu- 
nately there were innumerable exceptions to these principles, which 
in some cases amounted to an alternative system. 

The great temptation of colonialism, the worm in its free-market 
apple, was the itch to indulge in social engineering. It was so fatally 
easy for the colonial administrator to persuade himself that he could 
improve on the laws of supply and demand by treating his territory 
as an ant-hill and its inhabitants as worker-ants who would benefit 
from benevolent organizing. The Belgian Congo, where white settlers 
were given no political powers at all for fear they would oppress the 
natives, was a monument to well-meaning bossiness. The law 
instructed firms to behave like *a good head of family'. As in Soviet 
Russia, there were restrictions on native movement, especially in the 
big cities, and in Elizabethville natives had to observe a curfew. The 
notion was that the African could be shoved around for his own 
good. Practice, of course, was much less benevolent than theory. 
Until 1945, the French used social engineering on a huge scale in the 
form of forced labour and native penal codes. It was infinitely less 
savage and extensive than the Gulag Archipelago but it rested on 
some of the same assumptions. 

The most dedicated of the social engineers were the Portuguese, 
who ran the first and the last of the empires. In Angola and 
Mozambique they adopted slavery from the Africans, institutiona- 
lized it and integrated it with their administrative system. The 
slave-trade, especially to Brazil, was the economic mainstay of these 
two territories for three hundred years. The treaties the Portuguese 
signed with the African chiefs were for labour, not products (though 
in Mozambique the Arabs acted as middlemen). The Portuguese 
were the only primary producers of slaves among the European 
powers. They defended the trade desperately and resisted its suppres- 
sion, abolishing it only when compelled by the British, and replacing 
it by a commercialized system of forced labour. This they maintained 
to the end in the 1970s, still with the co-operation of the African 
chiefs, who in the slave-days ran the labour-gangs or shabalos. 

Cecil Rhodes wanted to absorb Angola and Mozambique in the 
free British system, regarding Portuguese colonialism as an ana- 
chronism: in his innocence he did not realize it was a portent of 
twentieth-century totalitarianism. In the post- 1945 period the Portu- 
guese provided every year 300,000 contracted labourers from Mo- 
zambique and 100,000 from Angola, mainly for South Africa. Every 
African who had not been assimilated and granted citizenship (the 



520 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

Portuguese had no colour-bar as such) had to possess a caderneta or 
pass-book with his work record. Bad workers were sent to the local 
jefe de posto for corporal punishment on the hand with a palmatoria 
or perforated ping-pong bat. The ultimate deterrent was hard labour 
on 'the islands' (Sao Tome or Principe). Like the Belgians, the 
Portuguese had a curfew, and Africans could not normally leave the 
house after nine. 35 

The Portuguese authorities hotly defended their methods on moral 
grounds. They argued that in return for exporting labour, the two 
colonies were getting ports and railways and other investment 
unobtainable by any other means. They claimed they took their 
civilizing mission seriously: Africans were not children but adults 
who must be made to accept social responsibilities. This meant 
taking the men out of idleness into work, and the women out of the 
bondage of the fields into their proper role in the home. 36 But like 
most forms of moralizing interference it had unforeseen side-effects. 
In 1954 the Bishop of Beira complained that exporting labour was 
totally destructive of family life since 80 per cent of the men in his 
diocese were habitually away from home, either in Rhodesia and 
South Africa or on work-projects within the territory. 37 

Even the British-influenced territories used large-scale social en- 
gineering in the form of land-apportionment to underpin racial 
divisions. In Kenya the expulsion of the Kikuyu from the 'White 
Highlands' between the wars (which we have noted in Chapter Four) 
raised some of the same moral objections as Stalin's collectivization 
of the farms. It was the direct cause of the ferocious Mau Mau 
outbreak in the 1950s. Land apportionment legislation in Southern 
Rhodesia, a similar policy, was one of the underlying causes of the 
guerrilla war there which dominated Rhodesian history in the 1970s 
and was ended only with the change to black rule in 1979. But the 
outstanding example was South Africa, where social engineering was 
raised into the central principle (indeed philosophy) of government 
in the form of apartheid. 

In South Africa pass-laws (and books) as forms of social control 
went back to the eighteenth century, being supposedly abolished in 
1828 but creeping back in again, until in the 1970s arrests under 
movement-restriction laws averaged more than 600,000 a year. 38 
Their origins lay in Elizabethan regulations to control 'sturdy 
beggars', themselves provoked by rapid population increase. But it is 
ironic that South Africa's first positive measures of social engineering 
were the work of Jan Christian Smuts, who was one of the principal 
architects both of the League of Nations and of the UN, and who 
personally at San Francisco in 1945 drafted the UN Declaration on 
Human Rights. 39 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 521 

Smuts was one of the Boer moderates who, in the liberal peace 
settlement after the Boer War, were associated with the British in the 
re-creation of the country. These men laid the legislative foundations 
of a semi-totalitarian state based upon the principle of racial- 
ordering. In 1911 strikes by contract workers (i.e. blacks) were made 
illegal, while the Mines and Works Act reserved certain job- 
categories for whites. In 1913 the Natives Land Act introduced the 
principle of territorial segregation by skin-colour. This Act was the 
key to all that followed, not least because it determined the nature of 
the African response which was to create their own proliferating 
varieties of Zionist religious sects. 40 In 1920 the Native Affairs Act 
introduced segregated political institutions for Africans, setting up 
the Native Conference of African leaders, nominated by government, 
and guided by the all-white Native Affairs Commission of 'experts'. 
In 1922 an Act restricted skilled apprenticeships to those with 
minimum educational qualifications (i.e. non-Africans). In 1923 the 
Native (Urban Areas) Act created segregated African residential 
areas in and near towns. In 1925 the Industrial Conciliation Act 
denied collective bargaining rights to Africans. The 1925 Wages Act 
and the 1926 Colour Bar Act were specifically designed to draw a 
gulf between poor whites and the African masses. 41 

It was Smuts, again, who moved South Africa in a directly 
opposite direction to that followed by the government of India after 
Amritsar. In 1921 he massacred an African 'Israelite' sect which 
engaged in a mass-squat on forbidden land at Bulhoek, and the 
following year he put down a black labour rebellion in the Rand with 
700 casualties. This ruthless policy was reinforced with further 
legislation. The 1927 Native Administration Act made the Gov- 
ernor-General (i.e. the government) Supreme Chief over all Africans, 
with authoritarian powers to appoint headmen, define tribal boun- 
daries, move tribes and individuals, and control African courts and 
land-ownership. Its Section 29 punished 'any person who utters any 
words or does any other act or thing whatever with intent to 
promote any feeling of hostility between Natives and Europeans'. 
Government police powers were further increased by the Mines and 
Works Act and Riotous Assemblies Act of 1930. 42 This granitic 
massing of totalitarian power took place at exactly the same time 
Stalin was erecting his tyranny on the Leninist plinth, gave govern- 
ment comparable powers and was designed to produce the same 
results. 

During the Second World War, Smuts, who had earlier destroyed 
the hopes of the coloured and mixed races of securing political equality 
with white voters, extended social engineering to them. In 1943 he 
set up a Coloured Affairs Department to 'administer' the Cape 



522 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

coloureds, and the same year he introduced the Pegging Act to stop 
Indians moving into white areas. Far from making common cause 
between the whites, Asians and coloureds, against the overwhelm- 
ing majority of blacks, it was Smuts's United Party which drove 
both into the arms of the black nationalists (who hated them more 
than whites), and the Indian element was vital in swinging Asian 
and UN opinion against South Africa. 43 Hence all the structural 
essentials of white supremacy and physical segregation existed 
before the United Party lost power to the Boer Nationalists in May 
1948. 

What the Nationalists did was to transform segregation into a 
quasi-religious philosophical doctrine, apartheid. In many ways 
they were a similar development to African nationalism itself. Their 
earliest slogan, Afrika voor de Afrikaaners, was identical with the 
black 'Africa for the Africans' of the 1960s and 1970s. Their 
religious sectarianism flourished at the same time as African Zion- 
ism and for the same purpose: to bring together in collective 
defence the oppressed, the unwanted and the discriminated against. 
It was remarkably similar to Jewish Zionism too, in both its origins 
and consequences. The Boers created their own Zion, which then 
served as the focus of hatred and unifying force for the Africans, as 
Israel did for the Arabs. The first Boer nationalist institutions, 
1915—18, were created to provide help for poor whites through job 
agencies, credit banks and trade unions. They were fiercely anti- 
Semitic as well as anti-black and anti-British. The movement began 
with the defence of the underdog, then broadened to promote the 
political, economic and cultural interests of the Afrikaaners as a 
whole, then in 1948 suddenly made itself overdog, with a ven- 
geance. 44 

Apartheid first appeared as a political programme in 1948, 
treating the Reserves as the proper homeland for Africans where 
their rights and citizenship were rooted, but its origins went back to 
the foundation in 1935 of the Suid-Afrikaanse Bond vir Rasse- 
studie. It was therefore directly influenced by Hitler's racial ideas 
and his plans for segregated settlement in Eastern Europe, though it 
added a Biblical underpinning lacking in Hitler's atheist panorama. 
Beneath the surface, apartheid was a muddle, since it combined 
incompatible elements. As pseudo-scientific racism, it derived, like 
Hitlerism and Leninism, from social Darwinism; as a religious 
racism, it derived from fundamentalist beliefs which denied Dar- 
winism in any form. On the surface, however, it had a certain 
clarity and simplicity; and the political system Smuts had created, 
reinforced by the Separate Representation of Voters Act (1951), 
which knocked the coloureds off the Common Roll, gave the 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 523 

Nationalists a secure tenure of power which is now well into its 
fourth decade. They have thus had the means to embark on a course 
of social engineering which, for consistency and duration, is rivalled 
only by Soviet Russia's own. 

The object of apartheid was to reverse the tide of integration and 
create wholly separate communities. The Prohibition of Mixed 
Marriages Act (1949) extended the ban from white-African to all 
unions across the colour lines. The Immorality Act made extra- 
marital sex illegal in any circumstances but more severely punished if 
it involved miscegenation. The Population Registration Act (1950) 
allocated everyone to a racial group, like the Nuremberg Laws. The 
Group Areas Act, the same year, empowered the government to 
designate residential and business areas for particular racial groups. 
It began the process of shoving human beings around like loads of 
earth and concrete, and flattening their homes and shops with 
bulldozers. The first phase of apartheid was consolidated by the 
security provisions of the Suppression of Communism Act (1950), 
which defined Communism not only as Marxism-Leninism but 'any 
related form of that doctrine' and any activity whatever which 
sought to bring about 'any political, industrial, social or economic 
change within the Union by the promotion of disturbance or 
disorder'. This turned the authoritarian elements of the state, for the 
first time, against a significant portion of the white population. 

The second phase followed the appointment of the ideologist 
H.F.Verwoerd as Minister of Native Affairs in 1950. He was an 
intellectual, Professor of Social Psychology at Stellenbosch, who 
significantly was not an inward-looking old-style Boer but had been 
born in Holland and educated in Germany. He gave the system a new 
unity, especially after he became premier in 1958. 45 His Bantu 
Education Act of 1954 imposed government control over all African 
schools, brought the missions to heel, introduced differential sylla- 
buses and an educational system specifically designed to prepare 
Bantu-speakers for their place in society. At the same time, the 
systematic creation of separate living areas, the 'Bantustans', was 
begun. Segregation began to penetrate every aspect of life, including 
sport, culture and, not least, church services; and by 1959 the 
government had effectively segregated higher education. 

During the years 1959-60, which in effect created the black 
African continent, many observers believed apartheid was doomed 
to collapse in the near future. That was Harold Macmillan's view 
when he gave his 'Winds of Change' speech in Pretoria on 3 February 
1960, followed almost immediately by the Sharpeville shooting, in 
which sixty-nine Africans were killed. 46 It was thought that an 
Amritsar syndrome would now at last set in, that the tide of African 



524 CALIBAN'S KINGDOMS 

advance was irresistible, that the Boers would lose their will and their 
nerve. There was a flight of capital. South Africa left the Common- 
wealth. There was likewise a belief that apartheid, even on its own 
terms, was unworkable. It conflicted with many of the demands of the 
market economy, on which South Africa depended for survival. It 
conflicted, too, with the ineluctable logic of demography. The central 
blueprint for progressive apartheid was the so-called Tomlinson 
Report of 1956, probably the most elaborate description of and 
justification for large-scale social engineering ever put together. It 
stated that 'the dominant fact of the South African situation' was that 
there was 'not the slightest ground for believing that the European 
population, either now or in the future, would be willing to sacrifice its 
character as a national entity and a European racial group'. And it 
proceeded from there to knock the country into an appropriate shape. 47 
The Report was criticized at the time for its absurd over-optimism, both 
about the ease with which industry could be sited near Bantu areas and 
about the growth of the black population. The accumulating evidence 
of the 1960s appeared to confirm these caveats. In 1911, when race 
policy started, Europeans were nearly a third of the black population 
(1,276,242 whites against 4 million blacks, 500,000 coloureds and 
150,000 Asians). In 1951, when apartheid had got going, there were 
2,641,689 whites, 8,560,083 blacks, 1,103,016 coloureds and 
366,664 Asians. By 1970 the whites had risen only to 3,752,528, the 
blacks had jumped to 15,057,952, the coloureds to 2,018,453 and the 
Asians to 620,436. It was calculated that, by the year 2000, Africans 
and coloureds would outnumber whites by ten to one. 48 This made the 
relative areas assigned to whites and blacks seem unrealistic, particu- 
larly since the creation of industrial jobs near Bantu areas was 
proceeding at only 8,000 a year against the Tomlinson projection of 
50,000. The moral inequities of the system were gruesomely apparent. 
By 1973 only 1,513 white families had been forced to move out of the 
'wrong' race areas, while 44,885 coloured and 27,694 Indian families 
had been engineered out of their homes, some of them occupied since 
the days of the Dutch East India Company. 49 There was a constant 
process of African squatting in forbidden areas, accompanied by 
equally constant bulldozing, under heavily armed police and army 
guard, horribly reminiscent of Russia, 1929-32. Presiding over this 
exercise in perverted Utopianism were Boer intellectuals, trained in the 
social sciences. Granted its internal contradictions and implausibilities, 
and the fact that African, and increasingly, world opinion were 
mobilized against it, the experiment seemed destined to collapse. 

Yet the lesson of Soviet collectivization has been that such schemes, 
however morally and economically indefensible, can endure, if pursued 
with sufficient ruthlessness and brute physical power. Moreover, there 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 525 

were certain factors working in favour of the regime. Like Russia, 
South Africa is immensely rich in minerals: gold, coal, diamonds, 
manganese and copper (in order of importance), plus antimony, 
asbestos, chromium, fluor-spar, iron ore, manganese, mica, plati- 
num, phosphates, tin, titanium, uranium, vanadium, zinc and many 
others. 50 Far from declining, as had been predicted in 1960, the 
South African economy flourished mightily from 1962 onwards, 
throughout the boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. When the boom 
ended in 1973—4, world inflation produced a price-revolution in gold 
from which South Africa, the world's largest producer (gold forms 
more than half the total of her mineral wealth), was the principal 
beneficiary. While incomes over virtually all the rest of Africa, 
including those of her most dedicated and active enemies, fell, South 
Africa's rose. Between 1972 and 1980, for instance, a standard 
sixty-pound gold ingot rose in retail value from $250,000 to $2.5 
million, a tenfold increase. 51 The price-revolution benefited govern- 
ment revenues by over $1 billion a year and also provided funds for a 
huge rise in capital investments. 

This steady growth in South Africa's income in the two decades 
after the 'Winds of Change' struck the continent enabled the regime 
to construct shelters against it in the form of a self-contained arms 
industry, which made South Africa virtually independent of reluctant 
foreign suppliers, and a military nuclear-weapons programme. By 
the early 1980s South Africa was spending $2.5 billion annually on 
defence, but this was no more than 6 per cent of gnp, a tolerable 
burden (by this point many black and Arab African countries were 
spending 25-50 per cent of gnp on their armed forces). 52 South 
African forces were periodically involved in maintaining security in 
South- West Africa, a former German colony Smuts had failed to 
secure outright at Versailles in 1919, South Africa being given it in 
trusteeship, a formula which (by another irony) he had invented 
himself. But in general South Africa survived with remarkably little 
damage, either to the military power or to the morale of the white 
ruling class, the decolonization by force of Angola, Mozambique and 
Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) during the 1970s. 

The Boer nationalists, as opposed to Smuts, had always criticized 
his unrealized scheme to create a 'great white dominion' including 
Rhodesia and Mozambique, and running from the Cape up to 
Kenya. They argued in the 1920s that this would merely 'engulf the 
whites in a future black Africa. In the 1970s their caution was proved 
justified, when the ratio of white to black even within South Africa 
fell to 1:5. The South African regime refused to commit its own 
fortunes to the preservation of the crumbling bastions of colonialism 
to the north. When, in due course, they fell, the white laager 



526 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

contracted. This brought triumphant, militant and armed black 
nationalism to South Africa's own frontiers, backed by overwhelm- 
ing majorities in the UN, the Organization of African Unity and a 
growing measure of Soviet-bloc physical support, chiefly in the form 
of Cuban troops and advisers. 

Yet the 'confrontation' between South African apartheid and 
black nationalism was verbal and political rather than military, still 
less economic. The nearer the African states were to South Africa, the 
more they felt the pull of her immense and prosperous economy and 
the less inclination did they display in carrying their resolve to 
destroy apartheid further than words. Ordinary Africans voted with 
their feet, not indeed in favour of apartheid but for the jobs the South 
African economy provided. At the time of the boycott organized by 
the auo in 1972, the South African Chamber of Miners employed 
381,000 blacks, one-third of whom came from north of latitude 22 
degrees S, and one-third from Mozambique. The number of blacks 
coming to South Africa increased steadily in the 1970s, not least 
because real wages for blacks in the Rand rose rapidly at a time when 
they were falling in most of black Africa. The neighbouring regimes 
called themselves 'front line states' and kept up the anti-apartheid 
rhetoric, but in practice the governments of Zambia, Malawi, 
Zimbabwe and, above all, Mozambique made themselves systematic 
collaborators with the apartheid system by deliberately increasing 
their exports of labour to the Rand. Malawi, Botswana and Zambia 
pulled out of the auo boycott; other states simply broke it, as they 
had earlier broken the boycott of Southern Rhodesia. South Africa 
built Malawi's new capital at Lilongwe and the Cabora Bassa dam in 
Mozambique; and when one front-line president, Seretse Khama of 
Botswana, fell ill, he was immediately flown to a 'whites only' 
hospital in Johannesburg. 53 

It is significant that by the early 1980s the most active of South 
Africa's enemies was remote Nigeria, the only major black oil 
producer. Its royalties, which exceeded $23 billion in 1980, pres- 
erved it (as gold did South Africa) from the 1970s recession and gave 
it the luxury of preserving an independent foreign-economic policy. 
But states south of the Congo and the Great Lakes could not resist 
the pull of the Rand magnet and, in practice, adjusted their ideologi- 
cal policies accordingly. 

In any case, differences between Pretoria's policy and those of 
most black African states were more theoretical than real. All 
African states practised racist policies. In the 1950s and 1960s, 
Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia expelled more than a 
quarter of a million Jews and ghettoed the few thousand who 
remained. In the 1960s the United Republic of Tanzania expelled its 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 527 

Arabs or deprived them of equal rights. In the 1970s Asians were 
expelled from most states in the Horn and East-Central Africa and 
they were discriminated against everywhere; even in Kenya they were 
threatened with expulsion in 1982. In most cases race-discrimination 
was a deliberate act of government policy rather than a response to 
popular demand. When the Uganda government expelled the Asians 
in 1972 the motive was to provide its members and supporters with 
free houses and shops, not to please ordinary black Ugandans, whose 
relations with the Asians had been friendly. 54 Anti-Asian racism was 
usually propagated by official or semi-official newspapers controlled 
by governments. In the 1970s they regularly published racist mat- 
erial: that Asian women had feelings of superiority, hence their 
refusal to sleep with black men; that Asians smuggled currency out 
of the country in suitcases; that Asian businessmen were monopolists 
and exploiters; a typical headline read 'Asian Doctors Kill their 
Patients'. 55 

From independence onwards, most black African states practised 
anti-white discrimination as a matter of government policy. In the 
second half of the 1970s Kenya and the Ivory Coast were virtually 
the only exceptions. Houphouet-Boigny, President of the latter, drew 
attention to anti-white racism at the oau, telling the other heads of 
state: 

It is true, dear colleagues, that there are 40,000 Frenchmen in my country 
and that this is more than there were before Independence. But in ten years I 
hope the position will be different. I hope that then there will be 100,000 
Frenchmen here. And I would like at that time for us to meet again and 
compare the economic strength of your countries with mine. But I fear, dear 
colleagues, that few of you will be in a position to attend. 56 

But the commonest, indeed the universal, form of racism in black 
Africa was inter-tribal, and it was this form of racism, for which one 
euphemism is social control, which led a growing number of African 
states, in the 1960s and still more in the 1970s, to exercise forms of 
social engineering not unlike apartheid. One of the merits of colonial 
rule in Africa (except where white supremacy policies dictated 
otherwise) was that it geared itself to tribal nomadic movements, 
both cyclical and permanent. It permitted a high degree of freedom 
of movement. As populations rose, and pressures on food resources 
increased, this laissez-faire policy became more difficult to maintain. 
But it was a tragedy that, when independence came in the early 
1960s, the successor-states chose to imitate not colonial-style liberal- 
ism but white-supremacist control. The Bandung— Leninist doctrine 
of the big, omnicompetent state joined in unholy matrimony with 
segregationism. But of course the Soviet state had always controlled 



528 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

all internal movement and settlement, not least its own Asian tribes. 
Leninist and South African practice fitted in comfortably together. 
Throughout black Africa, the documentation of social control - 
work permits, internal and external passports, visa requirements, 
residence permits, expulsion orders — proliferated rapidly with 
independence. And, as South African experience testified, once 
documents appear, the bulldozer is never far behind. In the early 
1970s it emerged in many places in West Africa, to shift squatters 
from coastal towns back into the interior. 57 

The great drought which struck a dozen Central African countries 
near the desert-bush border in the 1970s increased nomadic 
movement and so the practice of violent social control. There had 
long been racial enmity along the desert line, since nomadic tribes 
(especially Touregs) had seized southerners for slavery. One of the 
first acts of independent Mali, which straddled the line, was to 
massacre its northern Touregs. When drought-relief funds became 
available, Mali (and other states) used them to finance control 
systems. As the Secretary of the International Drought Relief Com- 
mittee in Mali put it: 'We have to discipline these people and to 
control their grazing and their movements. Their liberty is too 
expensive for us. This disaster is our opportunity.' 58 Control of 
movement, in Mali and elsewhere, was accompanied by other forms 
of social engineering. In such states development plans were delib- 
erately drawn up in the late 1960s and 1970s to force everyone, 
nomads included, into the money economy by taxation. They did not 
differ in essentials from the old forced-labour system devised by the 
French, Spanish, Portuguese and Belgian colonizers. 59 

The most suggestive case of a new African state moving towards 
totalitarianism was provided by Tanzania. Its leader, Julius Nyerere, 
was a professional politician of the Nkrumah generation. In the 
1960s, when the politicians were bowled over by the soldiers, he 
contrived to survive by militarizing his rhetoric and his regime. In 
1960, in reaction to the Congo crisis, he said: There is not the 
slightest chance that the forces of law and order in Tanganyika will 
mutiny.' 60 In January 1964 they did so, and Nyerere barely survived 
with the help of white British troops who disarmed his black army. 
He then disbanded it and recreated it from scratch as a party army: 'I 
call on all members of the Tanu Youth League, wherever they are, to 
go to the local Tanu office and enrol themselves: from this group we 
shall try to build the nucleus of a new army.' 61 Four days later he 
announced the appointment of a Political Commissar for the Tanza- 
nia People's Defence Forces. 

This conscious imitation of Leninism was accompanied by the 
erection of a one-party state. In 1961 Nyerere had said he would 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 529 

welcome an opposition party to Tanu: 'I would be the first to defend 
its rights.' 62 But in January 1964, with the party youth being 
reorganized as an army, he appointed a commission to design what 
he termed 'a democratic one-party state', observing that its job was 
not 'to consider whether Tanzania should be a one-party state. That 
decision has already been taken. Their task is to say what kind of a 
one-party state we should have.' 63 At the subsequent election, there 
was a choice of candidates, but under the same party label (meaning 
they needed Nyerere's approval to stand) and they were not free to 
raise issues. 64 

The way in which Nyerere, the former pacifist, used militaristic 
terminology to further his authoritarian state was ingenious and 
helped to explain his remarkable appeal to the Western intelligentsia, 
which led one black sociologist to coin the term 'Tanzaphilia'. 65 
Defending his suppression of human rights, such as the freedom of 
speech, of the press and of assembly, Nyerere observed: 'Until our 
war against poverty, ignorance and disease has been won, we should 
not let our unity be destroyed by somebody else's book of rules.' But 
of course such a 'war', by definition, could never be 'won'. 
Moreover, such a 'war' was easily extended from internal to external 
opponents: Nyerere followed Sukarno's advice to find an enemy. 
From the post-mutiny period onwards he was in the forefront of the 
African leaders who demanded a concerted politico-military cam- 
paign against Rhodesia, the Portuguese territories and South Africa. 
The philosophy of his new authoritarian state was summed up in the 
'Arusha Declaration' of February 1967, which stated bluntly: 'We 
are at war' and was full of militaristic imagery and sloganizing. 66 

Of course Tanzania was not at war with anybody. But the fiction 
was used to justify wartime restrictions and suspension of rights. The 
Arusha Declaration was an updated and Africanized version of 
Bandung, and similarly redolent of the higher humbug. Anything 
'inconsistent with the existence of a classless society' was banned. 
'No one must be allowed to live off the work done by others': that 
permitted widespread arrests of 'capitalists', especially Asians. The 
government 'must be chosen and led by peasants and workers': that 
allowed Nyerere to exclude anyone he wished from political activity. 
'Laziness, drunkenness and idleness' were condemned: a pretext for 
forced labour. 'It is necessary for us to be on guard against internal 
stooges who could be used by external enemies who aim to destroy 
us': a pretext for a permanent political witch-hunt. 'Loitering' was 
specifically condemned: a pretext for the sweep-and-search opera- 
tions beloved of all black African governments, slavishly copied from 
the South African police-manuals. The machinery for control was 
contained in the party structure: 'the ten-house cell' being the basic 



530 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

unit, moving up through the ward, the district, the region to the 
nation. The philosophy behind Arusha was termed by Nyerere 
ujamaa, 'familyhood', based upon a mythic past: 'In our traditional 
African society, we were individuals within a community. We took 
care of the community and the community took care of us. We 
neither needed nor wished to exploit our fellow men.' 67 Ujamaa was 
designed to recapture that spirit. Yet in practice it was as anti-family 
as any other totalitarian doctrine. Offenders were brought before 
'ten-house cell' courts. 'Political education officers' handed out tracts 
which, for example, stated: 

The cell leader has to keep a close watch so as to detect any new faces in his 
ten houses. When he sees a stranger, he must make enquiries and find out 
who he is, where he came from, where he is going, how long he will remain 
in the area and so on. Usually the host reports to the cell leader about his 
guests and gives all the necessary information. If the leader doubts the 
stories of these strangers, he must report the matter to the branch officials 
or to the police. 68 

Cell-leaders were given the right to detain anyone classified as 
'runaway' (usually from forced labour) and to order 'round-ups' of 
'miscreants'. A favourite phrase was e serikali yeze kuyesula, 'the 
government know how to unearth'. Indeed, after the 1964 mutinies 
Nyerere seems not only to have flung off his British democratic 
trappings but to have descended into the colony's Prussian past. His 
party militia learned the goose-step. He introduced sumptuary 
legislation and sartorial uniformity. In 1968 he decided that the 
Masai could not be allowed into Arusha wearing 'limited skin 
clothing or a loose blanket' or indeed any kind of clothing termed 
'awkward' or 'soiled pigtailed hair'. 69 But having banned the tradi- 
tional African garb, he switched the attack eight months later to 
'remnants of foreign culture', authorizing the Tanu Youth League to 
manhandle and strip African girls wearing mini-skirts, wigs and tight 
trousers. 70 So girls were forbidden to wear trousers while men had to 
put them on: more or less the old white missionary standard. When 
the Masai complained, they were told God had forced Adam and Eve 
to dress before he drove them out of Eden. 71 But the missionaries had 
not set political spies in everyone's house. 

Nyerere's ujamaa was merely the most elaborate and sanctimoni- 
ous of the new authoritarian philosophies developed by the charis- 
matic petty tyrants of black Africa. At the village level it was merely a 
euphemism for forced collectivization. In Zambia, the same process 
was termed 'village regrouping'. Its one-party dictator, Kenneth 
Kaunda, termed the national philosophy 'humanism'. This was 
derived, he said, from the truth that all people are 'human under the 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 531 

skin'. But some turned out to be more human than others. 'Zambian 
humanism', he declared, 'aims at eradicating all evil tendencies in 
Man . . . the attainment of human perfection', by ridding society of 
'negative human inclinations such as selfishness, greed, hypocrisy, 
individualism, laziness, racism, tribalism, provincialism, national- 
ism, colonialism, neo-colonialism, fascism, poverty, diseases, igno- 
rance and exploitation of man by man'. 72 The list gave the state 
endless scope for authoritarian action. Elsewhere, other 'isms' ap- 
peared. Ghana produced 'Consciencism', Senegal 'Negritude'. In the 
Congo, President Mobutu was at a loss until he hit upon the ideal 
ideology: 'Mobutuism'. 

Once the tyrannies began to appear in the early 1960s, they swiftly 
graduated from the comparatively sophisticated (and bloodless) 
despotisms of Nyerere's Tanzania to resurrected horrors from 
Africa's darkest past. The gruesome comedy Evelyn Waugh had 
fabricated in Black Mischief became fact. On 'Kenyatta Day', 
October 1965, the President of Kenya, once termed by the British 
governor 'the leader of darkness and death', now called by relieved 
white settlers 'the old man', held a 'Last Supper', to commemorate 
the meal before his arrest as a Mau Mau terrorist. 73 In Malawi, Dr 
Hastings Banda, known as 'Conqueror' and 'Saviour', used witch- 
craft to sacralize his rule. In Zaire, Joseph Mobutu banned Christian 
names and re-named himself Monutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa 
Za Banga, freely translated as 'the cock that leaves no hens alone'. 74 
President Bongo of Gabon banned the word pygmy (he was under 
five feet tall) but kept a bodyguard of giant German ex-Foreign 
Legionaries, whose delight was to sing the Horst Wessel Lied at the 
main hotel. 75 As the 1960s progressed, violence struck the new 
African elites with increasing frequency. Two Prime Ministers of 
Burundi were murdered in quick succession. The 1966 Nigerian 
coup cost the lives of the Federal Prime Minister and two of the three 
regional premiers. Would-be Caudillos died too: in the Congo 
People's Republic an executed brass-hat was displayed dead on TV, 
his mouth crammed with dollars. Rulers showed an inclination to 
carry out retribution personally. The President of Benin (formerly 
Dahomey) murdered his Foreign Minister when he found him in bed 
with the Presidential wife. Another Foreign Minister, this time 
in Equatorial Guinea, was clubbed to death by his own head of 
state. 

This last incident was one of the innumerable crimes committed by 
President Francisco Macias Nguema. In the poorer African states, of 
which there are nearly thirty, rulers set up one-party states and in 
theory disposed of absolute authority. But in practice they tended to 
have little power to influence intractable events or even to arbitrate 



532 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

tribal quarrels. All they could do was to tyrannize, usually by 
personal violence. Macias was a case in point. He was born in the 
Spanish colony in 1924, served in the administration, became 
President on independence in 1968 and made himself President for 
life in 1972. During the next seven years he turned the country into a 
virtual prison-camp; many of its inhabitants simply fled for their 
lives. A Spanish-mounted coup overthrew him on 3 August 1979, 
and he was tried for 'genocide, treason, embezzlement and systema- 
tic violation of human rights'. His execution was carried out by a 
Moroccan firing-squad flown in when local troops complained his 
spirit was too strong for mere bullets and would return 'as a tiger'. 76 

The case of President (later Emperor) Bokassa of the Central 
African Republic was similar. When the French gave the colony 
independence they put in a hand-picked professional politician, 
David Dako, as president. Ineffectually he tried to balance the head 
of the police, Izamo, against Bokassa, who led the army, and Bokassa 
proved the most agile of the trio. 77 From 1965 Bokassa was life 
President and from 1977 Emperor, holding an elaborate coronation 
ceremony in December attended by 3,500 foreign guests and featur- 
ing an eagle-shaped throne, a crown with 2,000 diamonds and 
regalia modelled on Napoleon's coronation. It cost $30 million, a 
fifth of the country's meagre revenues. His friendship with the 
expansive President Giscard d'Estaing of France, to whom he gave 
diamonds, was not the least of the factors which buttressed his 
regime. He celebrated his first anniversary by sacking and exiling his 
eldest son, Prince Georges, for anti-paternal remarks. Two months 
later, in January 1979, he slaughtered forty schoolchildren who 
rioted when forced to buy uniforms made in Bokassa's factory. In 
April, between thirty and forty more children were murdered in the 
Ngaragba prison, apparently in Bokassa's presence and partly by 
him, a fact established by a commission of Francophone lawyers 
under Youssoupha Ndiaya of Senegal. When Giscard, alarmed by 
the publicity, sent out his adviser on African affairs, Rene Journiac, 
to ask the Emperor to abdicate, he was whacked on the head by the 
imperial sceptre. In retaliation Giscard landed troops at Bangui on 
21 September 1979, with Dako in their luggage as replacement- 
president. Bokassa was given asylum in the Ivory Coast at Giscard's 
request, and was later condemned to death in absentia for murder, 
cannibalism, 'intelligence with Libya' and fraud in gold and dia- 
monds. 

The Sekou Toure regime in the Republic of Guinea was little 
better; Colonel Gadafy's in Libya considerably worse; both commit- 
ted the additional crime of exporting their horrors to their neigh- 
bours. The most instructive case, however, was that of 'General' 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 533 

Amin in Uganda, because it illustrated so many weaknesses of the 
world system in the 1970s. It was also the most tragic, for it virtually 
destroyed Uganda, once the most delightful country in Africa. 
Churchill, who visited it as Colonial Under-Secretary in 1908, called 
it 'that paradise on earth', 'that tropical garden'. 'Uganda is a 
fairy-tale,' he wrote. 'You climb up a railway instead of a beanstalk 
and at the top there is a wonderful new world.' 78 Uganda's indepen- 
dence was rushed through in October 1963 in accordance with 
Macmillan's 'Winds of Change' policy. The Baganda ruling tribe 
were well-educated and always impressed Europeans by their charm. 
But the country was in many ways primitive, riven by complex tribal 
rivalries, racial enmity between Muslim north and Christian south 
and long-standing sectarianism within the Christian communities. 
Violent magic was ubiquitous. The Kakwa and Nubi of the Muslim 
north drank their victims' blood and ate their livers and believed in 
the Mahdist 'Yakan of Allah water', which when drunk makes 
soldiers invulnerable. But the sophisticated Baganda kings also 
mutilated bodies for purposes of politico-religious terror. 79 To make 
matters worse, Milton Obote, the professional politician installed as 
Prime Minister on independence, was a narrow-minded anti-Baganda 
sectarian of exceptional administrative incompetence. In 1966 he 
destroyed the constitution by using Amin to storm the Kabaka's 
palace and eject him by force. When Obote, in turn, was toppled by 
Amin in January 1971, many people greeted military rule with 
approval as the lesser of two evils. 

It is important to grasp that even at this stage Idi Amin was known 
to be an exceptionally cunning and wicked man. The giant son of a 
Lugbara witchwoman, he had become a Muslim at sixteen and drew 
his power from the northern Kakwas and Nubis. He enlisted in the 
King's African Rifles as a boy and his promotion to officer, though 
he was virtually uneducated, reflected the desperate need to avoid a 
Congo-type mutiny as independence neared. He quickly acquired an 
evil reputation in Kenya, fighting against cattle-rustlers. It was 
discovered he had murdered Pokot tribesmen and left them to be 
eaten by hyenas, got information from Karamajog tribesmen by 
threatening to cut off their penises with a panga, and had actually 
sliced off the genitals of eight of them to obtain confessions. He was 
also known to have murdered twelve Turkana villagers. The British 
authorities were themselves reluctant to prosecute one of the few 
black officers on the eve of independence, and referred the case to 
Obote, already Prime Minister-designate. Obote settled for a 'severe 
reprimand', a curious punishment for mass-murder. 80 Indeed, he 
promoted Amin colonel, used him to put down the Baganda and 
permitted him to build up a military tribal base in the north, to 



534 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

engage in large-scale smuggling of gold and ivory, to recruit Muslims 
without reference to the government, to murder the only other senior 
black officer, Brigadier Okoya (and his wife) in January 1970, and 
thereafter to treat the army as his own. When Obote was told by the 
auditor-general that £2.5 million was missing from army funds, the 
Prime Minister left for a conference in Singapore, telling Amin he 
wanted a 'full explanation' by his return. That was to invite a coup, 
which Amin had already been pressed to undertake by Colonel 
Gadafy and the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who wished to oust 
Obote's Israeli advisers. 

Amin's was a racist regime, operated in the Muslim-Arab interest 
from the start, since he began massacres of the Langi and Acholi 
tribes within weeks of taking over. In July 1971 he asked the Israelis 
to help him invade Tanzania by seizing the port of Tanga; they 
responded by pulling out. The British repented their support at the 
same time, and thereafter Amin was Gadafy's client. Muslims form 
only 5 per cent of the population and only Libyan support made the 
long tyranny possible, though Palestinian terrorists provided Amin 
with his personal bodyguard and the most adapt of his executioner- 
torturers. Gadafy persuaded Amin to throw out the Asians, and it 
was at that point, in August 1972, that the real looting of the country 
began. But it ought to be on record that Britain was shipping 
armoured cars to Amin as late as December 1972. 81 Indeed, freight- 
ing of scarce luxuries to Uganda from Stansted airport, an important 
traffic which enabled Amin to keep up the morale of his soldiers, 
continued with British government approval almost to the end of the 
terror. 

Surviving cabinet minutes give a unique glimpse of the emergence 
of a primitive tribal tyranny in the outward forms of British 
bureaucratic constitutionalism. Thus cabinet minute 131, dated 14 
March 1972, read: 'Should any minister feel that his life was in 
danger from unruly crowd or dissatisfied persons, he was at liberty 
to shoot to kill.' 82 In fact it was not dissatisfied persons but the 
President whom ministers feared. His Minister of Education, Edward 
Rugumayo, who escaped in 1973, sent a memorandum to all African 
heads of state which claimed Amin had 'no principles, moral 
standards or scruples' and would 'kill or cause to be killed anyone 
without hesitation'. 83 His Attorney-General, Godfrey Lule, wrote: 
'He kills rationally and coolly.' Henry Kyemba, Minister of Health, 
said that it was the murder of Michael Kagwar, President of the 
Industrial Court, in September 1971, which 'revealed to the country 
as a whole that the massacres were not to be limited to the army or 
the Acholi and Langi'. 84 The dead soon included any public figure 
who in any way criticized or obstructed Amin: the governor of the 



Caliban's kingdoms 535 

Bank of Uganda, the vice-chancellor of Makerere University, the 
Foreign Minister, the Chief Justice, dragged out of his court in broad 
daylight, Archbishop Janan Luwum — the last beaten to death, along 
with two cabinet ministers, by Amin himself. Amin often partici- 
pated in atrocities, sometimes of a private nature. Kyemba's wife 
Teresa, matron-in-charge of Mulago hospital, was present when the 
fragmented body of Amin's wife Kay was brought in: Amin appears 
not only to have murdered but dismembered her, for he kept 
collections of plates from anatomical manuals. He is also said to 
have killed his son and eaten his heart, as advised by a witchdoctor 
he flew in from Stanleyville. 85 There can be little doubt he was a 
ritual cannibal, keeping selected organs in his refrigerator. 

The image of refrigerated cannibalism encapsulated the regime, 
which was a grotesque caricature of a Soviet-type terror. The 
traditional police simply faded away, as their senior officers were 
murdered for investigating Amin's crimes. Like Stalin, Amin had 
competing security services. They included his personal creation, the 
Public Safety Unit, the military police and his equivalent of the kgb, 
an organization called the State Research Centre which had evolved 
out of the old Cabinet Research Section and still retained its bound 
volumes of the Economist. The src was run on the advice of 
Palestinians and Libyans who had themselves, in some cases, had 
Russian training. It usually killed with 'sledgehammers but it was by 
no means primitive in all respects. It was linked by tunnel to Amin's 
villa so that intended victims who came to see him (he liked to ask 
them to cocktails) could be taken away without being seen again. 
src beatings were regular affairs, carried out at specific times every 
day. In contrast to Amin's impulsive nature, there was an element of 
totalitarian routine and bureaucratic order about the terror. As in the 
Soviet bloc, at least two src agents were attached to Ugandan 
overseas missions. Like the kgb, the src financed itself by commer- 
cial activities (including drug rackets) and often killed for hard 
currency. 86 Amin was not just a case of a reversion to African 
primitivism. In some respects his regime was a characteristic reflec- 
tion of the 1970s. His terror was a Muslim-Arab phenomenon; his 
regime was in many ways a foreign one, run by Nubians, Palestinians 
and Libyans. 

It could be argued that the UN power-politics of the 1970s, the 
ugly consequences of the relativistic morality impressed on the 
organization by Hammarskjold and his school, were responsible for 
prolonging the Amin regime by six terrible years. According to one 
authority, the failure to take international action in 1972, when the 
nature of the regime was already glaringly apparent, cost the lives of 
200,000 Ugandans. Britain bore a heavy responsibility. The src 



536 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

records revealed how important the 'Stansted whisky run' was to the 
regime. British appeasement reached its nadir in June 1975 when 
Amin threatened to execute a British lecturer, Denis Hills, for calling 
him 'a village tyrant'. James Callaghan, a weak Prime Minister even 
by the standards of the 1970s, sent out General Sir Chandos Blair 
with a letter from the Queen begging for clemency, and later he flew 
to Kampala himself. But he allowed the Stansted run to continue 
until 4 March 1979, the very eve of Amin's overthrow. The only 
government to emerge with credit was Israel's, which acted vigo- 
rously to save lives when Amin and the Palestinians hijacked an 
airliner at Entebbe in June 1976. 

Most African states actually supported Amin, in accordance with 
the old Latin- American principle of 'Caudillos stick together'. Des- 
pite the revelations of his genocidal atrocities by his ex-ministers, the 
oau elected him its president and all except three of its members 
attended the oau summit he held in Kampala. Nyerere objected, not 
so much on moral grounds as because he was an Obote ally and 
rightly feared an Amin invasion. 'By meeting in Kampala,' he 
protested, 'the heads of state of the oau are giving respectability to 
one of the most murderous administrations in Africa.' Furious, the 
oau even considered a motion condemning Tanzania. The heads of 
state showered Amin with congratulations during the summit when, 
having consumed parts of his earlier wife, he married a new one, a 
go-go dancer from his Suicide Mechanized Unit. They applauded 
when Amin was carried on a litter by four white businessmen, a 
Swede holding a parasol over his head, and when the Ugandan Air 
Force made a demonstration bombing on Lake Victoria against a 
target labelled 'Cape Town' (the bombs all missed and the Air Force 
commander was murdered as soon as the delegates had left), oau 
heads of state again gave Amin a warm reception in 1977, and there 
was no criticism of Amin whatever by the oau until 1978; even then 
it was muted. 87 

Most members of the UN, where the Afro-Asian-Arab and Soviet 
blocs formed a majority, behaved equally cynically. As chairman of 
the oau, he addressed the General Assembly on 1 October 1975 in a 
rabid speech which denounced the 'Zionist-US conspiracy' and 
called not only for the expulsion of Israel but for its 'extinction' (i.e. 
genocide). The Assembly gave him a standing ovation when he 
arrived, applauded him throughout, and again rose to its feet when 
he left. The following day the UN Secretary-General and the President 
of the General Assembly gave a public dinner in Amin's honour. 88 
Attempts to raise Uganda's violation of human rights at the UN in 
1976 and 1977 were blocked by African votes, which rendered Amin 
the same service at the Commonwealth Conference in 1977. Even 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 537 

when he invaded Tanzania on 30 October 1978, an act which led to 
his downfall five months later, the oau refused to condemn him and 
told Nyerere to accept mediation. For once the Tanzanian socialist 
dictator dropped his verbal guard: 

Since Amin usurped power he has murdered more people than Smith in 
Rhodesia, more than Vorster in South Africa. But there is this tendency in 
Africa that it does not matter if an African kills other Africans .... Being 
black is now becoming a certificate to kill fellow Africans. 89 

That, indeed, was the consequence of the morally relativistic 
principle introduced by Hammarskjold that killing among Africans 
was not the UN's business; and Amin could be forgiven for thinking 
the UN had given him a licence for mass-murder, indeed genocide. 
The Amin regime was made possible by the philosophy of the 
Bandung generation as well as by the re-emergent barbarism of 
Africa. But within a year of his fall history was being rewritten. It 
was claimed the applause which greeted him at the UN was 'ironic'. 
The terror was being linked to 'imperialism'. 90 Nor did Uganda's 
sorrows end when Tanzania's 'army of liberation' arrived, with 
Obote in its baggage. The first thing the Tanzanians did when they 
got to Kampala was to loot it. Though Amin himself was given 
sanctuary in the Muslim world (Libya, then Saudi Arabia), his tribal 
forces continued to occupy and terrorize part of the country. With 
Nyerere's armed backing Obote 'won' the 1980s elections. Obote's 
upc party and the Nyerere-controlled 'military commission' gerry- 
mandered constituency boundaries; illegally declared 17 seats un- 
contested upc victories; killed one opposition (Democratic Party) 
candidate and beat up others; illegally removed fourteen returning 
officers who were not upc stooges; sacked the Chief Justice and 
other officials to intimidate the judiciary; and finally, after it became 
clear on election night that the dp was nevertheless winning, 
announced on the official radio that all results would be 'vetted' by 
the military — whereupon the secretary to the election commission 
fled for his life. The army subsequently destroyed evidence of dp 
victories and Obote was declared the winner. 91 The result was 
regional and tribal civil war; and mass-terrorism by three undisci- 
plined and mostly unpaid 'armies' prolonged indefinitely the agony 
of Churchill's 'fairy-tale land'. 92 

The case of Uganda illustrated the tendency of post-colonial 
Africa, from the mid-1960s onwards, to engage in internal and 
external wars, and for both the oau and the UN, far from arbitrating 
such disputes, to exacerbate the drift to violence. This was not 
fortuitous. The militarization of the oau began at Addis Ababa in 
1963, when passive resistance was renounced, force was adopted as 



538 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

the means to end the remaining colonial regimes and a 'liberation 
committee' was formed with Tanzania in the chair. The next year, at 
Cairo, it was the ex-pacifist Nyerere who called for the expulsion of 
Portugal by force, and in 1965 it was his second-in-command, 
Rashidi Kawawa, who told the UN Committee on Colonialism in Dar 
es Salaam that its function was identical with that of the oau 
committee, 'two liberation committees of historical importance in 
the struggle against colonialism'. M.Coulibaly of Mali, the UN 
chairman, at first protested: the UN could not be identified with a 
regional military body, he said. Then he capitulated, and his commit- 
tee ruled that it was legitimate for any state to use force to expel the 
Portuguese. This was the first time the UN had committed itself to the 
military as opposed to the peaceful solution of political problems. 
Four months later, in November 1965, Nyerere persuaded the oau 
to extend the principle to Rhodesia. 93 

With both the UN and the oau not merely endorsing but inciting, 
indeed commanding, violence, individual African states employed it 
increasingly to resolve their inter-tribal civil wars and frontier 
disputes, which colonialism had frozen. Africa appears to have the 
greatest linguistic and ethnic variety of any continent. Of the 
forty-one independent states, only Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Lesotho 
and Somalia were basically homogeneous, and even these had debat- 
able borders. 94 Most African civil wars, since they involve trans- 
frontier tribal conflicts, tend to become foreign wars also. One of the 
earliest of them, the 1958 Hutu race-revolt in Rwanda against their 
Tutsi overlords, involved Burindi, and this pattern was repeated three 
times over the next fifteen years. The revolt of the Polisarios against 
Morocco and Mauritania, the struggle between northern Muslims 
and southern Christians in Chad, the civil wars in Angola, the Sudan 
and Nigeria, five of the longer and more serious conflicts, all 
involved foreign intervention. The UN and the oau, not surprisingly, 
proved wholly unable to arbitrate these conflicts. A typical example 
was the partition in December 1975 of the old Spanish Sahara 
between Morocco and Mauritania, which recalled the partitions of 
Poland in the eighteenth century (or in 1939). Algeria was left out, 
and thereupon backed the Polisario insurgents. The UN passed two 
mutually exclusive resolutions, one supporting Morocco, the other 
Algeria. The oau has never seriously attempted to enforce its 
primary maxim that states should not interfere in each other's 
internal affairs, except (interestingly enough) in the case of Amin's 
Uganda. It failed to censure Gadafy of Libya for his attempts to 
overthrow Sadat in Egypt, Niheimi in the Sudan, Bourguiba in 
Tunisia, Francis Tombalbaye and Felix Malloum in Chad and his 
blatant intervention in half a dozen other states. Nor was the oau 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 539 

able to prevent incursions by non-African powers, since nobody 
wanted to repeat the Congo's disastrous involvement with the un, 
and it was the individual states themselves which invited the help of 
foreign troops, as did Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania with Britain and 
the Ivory Coast, Gabon and Senegal with France. 94 

The trans-border complexities increased markedly after 1973-4 
when Soviet Russia, with its satellite Cuba, first committed large 
numbers of troops to the African theatre. A case in point was 
Ethiopia, where the old Emperor Haile Selasse had run a semi-feudal, 
semi-liberal regime by a careful balance of foreign help. The Indians 
trained his army, the British and Norwegians the navy, the Swedes 
the air force, the French ran the railway, the Australians the hotels, the 
Yugoslavs the port, the Russians the oil refinery, the Bulgars his 
fishing fleet, the Italians the breweries, the Czechs the shoe factories 
and the Japanese the textile mills. 95 The Russians seized their chance 
to overthrow the old man in 1974 - he was smothered to death with 
a pillow — and gain a monopoly of influence, dropping their 
Somalian protege in the process. The worst that could be said about 
the Emperor's censorship was that he had cut the death of the King 
from Macbeth; after his fall Shakespeare was no longer performed at 
all. The regime became totalitarian, massacred its opponents by the 
tens of thousands, and engaged in large-scale frontier wars which 
continued into the 1980s. After Russia extended the Cold War to 
Africa, it became the classic theatre of Realpolitik, of abrupt 
formations and reversals of alliances, and of the principle 'my 
enemy's enemy is my friend'. A characteristic instance was the 
Katangan invasion of Zaire across the Angolan frontier in 1977—8, 
with the Communists, replacing the 'imperialist secessionists' of 
1960, helping the Katangans with Cuban and Russian troops, and 
Morocco and France backing Zaire. 

The thirty-odd civil and foreign wars the new African states fought 
in their first two decades produced a swelling total of refugees. By 
1970 there were a million of whose existence the un was statistically 
aware. The figure leapt to 4.5 million in 1978, plus 2 million 
described as 'unsettled' after returning to their home country. In 
1980 there were 2,740,300 UN-recorded refugees in seventeen Afri- 
can countries, plus 2 million 'displaced persons', the vast majority of 
them the result of the military activities of Soviet Russia, Cuba and 
Libya. 96 The possibility of a significant proportion of these people 
being resettled was remote. By the early 1980s, all the newly 
independent states, with the exception of the Ivory Coast, Kenya and 
the three oil-bearing territories, Algeria, Libya and Nigeria, were 
poorer than under the colonial system. Some had moved out of the 
market economy altogether. 



540 CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 

In these circumstances, the quite rapid material progress which 
had been a feature of the final phase of colonialism, 1945-60, was 
reversed. Though independence was fertile in regional pacts, such as 
the six-power Casablanca Group, the fifteen-power Monrovia 
Group and the Brazzaville Twelve, these were largely verbal 
agreements for political purposes, and they proved ephemeral. 
Meanwhile the specific and practical inter-state arrangements for 
currencies, transport and communications were disrupted or lapsed. 
Wars, 'emergencies' and the shutting of frontiers disrupted road and 
rail links. Rolling-stock was not renewed. Roads deteriorated. Travel 
patterns tended to revert to those of the 1890s, with links chiefly 
between the coastal cities (though by air rather than by sea) but with 
little long-distance movement inland. Mobility became patchy and 
unreliable. In the late 1970s, the greatest traffic jams so far contrived 
by man took place not in the advanced West but in Lagos: it was said 
that the head of state, General Mohammed, died because he could 
not solve the jam even for himself and his car got stuck at the same 
time, 8 am, each morning, making it easy to plan his murder. In 
1976, after the Nigerian government had ordered 18 million tons of 
cement, the approaches to Lagos harbour were jammed by nearly 
five hundred ships, and by the time most of them landed their cargo 
it was unusable. 97 

But in many inland areas, even in Nigeria, land traffic declined. As 
one account put it, 'More and more of the observable life of Africa 
takes place within twenty miles of its three dozen international 
airports.' 98 With the decline in air traffic control standards and the 
frequent closings of internal air-space, it often became easier and 
cheaper to travel between African capitals via Europe than direct. 
The same was true of phone-links: for instance, it was impossible to 
phone Abidjan from Monrovia, four hundred miles away, except 
through Europe or North America. The suggestion was made that 
this decline actually benefited authoritarian governments by immobi- 
lizing critics, for most African governments maintained for their 
exclusive use military transport and communications networks on 
the Iron Curtain model. But the state suffered too. In 1982 the Chad 
ambassador in Brussels complained he had not heard from his 
government for more than a year. 99 

Equally marked was the deterioration in medical standards. The 
progress made in eliminating malaria, which had been spectacular in 
the late 1940s and 1950s, was reversed, who's twenty-year pro- 
gramme launched in 1958 was a failure. By the end of the 1970s 
there were 200 million cases in the world and 1 billion people living 
in malaria-risk areas. The reversal was by no means confined to 
Africa; results in Central America and Asia were in some ways even 



Caliban's kingdoms 541 

more disappointing. 100 But the late 1970s saw a disquieting increase 
in malarial cases returning from African capitals where the disease 
had been stamped out in the 1950s. 101 The return of traditional 
scourges reflected the growth of malnutrition and famine, the 
breakdown of public health and hospital services and the shortage of 
qualified doctors. In 1976 who reversed its policy and announced 
that henceforth 'village healers' would be employed in rural health 
services, though a distinction was still made between African-type 
midwives, bonesetters and herbalists, on the one hand, and 'witch- 
doctors' using 'spells and superstitions' on the other. In 1977, 
however, this distinction was dropped and 'witch-doctors', patro- 
nized by 90 per cent of the rural population, were given the same 
status as scientifically trained practitioners. 102 In Lagos, within the 
penumbra of the world's largest traffic-jam, a joint teaching-hospital 
was opened for doctors practising medicine and 'healing'. 

The varied but on balance sombre pattern of the African continent 
a generation after independence was reflected in the following 
summary of events in the last year of the 1970s decade and the first 
of the 1980s. For 1979: Sudan: attempted coup. Morocco: War in 
Western Sahara against Polisario guerrillas cost £750,000 a day. 
Ethiopia: 20,000 Cubans plus Ethiopian troops were fighting wars 
on three fronts against Eritrea and Somalia, where refugees passed 
the 1 million mark. Djibouti: uprising in Adar region. Kenya: 
successful multi-party elections. Tanzania: 40,000 troops invaded 
Uganda, when Amin, supported by 2,500 troops from Libya, was 
ousted. Ghana: coup by Flight-Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. Three 
former heads of state and many other politicians executed by 
firing-squad; public floggings and canings of corrupt citizens; police 
strike; country declared officially bankrupt. Nigeria: return to 
civilian rule. Liberia: food riots; seventy killed. Senegal: z fourth 
legal party created. Mauritania: coup. Ould Salack, who had ousted 
Ould Daddah in 1978, ousted in turn by Ould Hardallah. Peace 
signed with Polisario guerrillas. Mali: single-party elections. Guinea: 
release of political prisoners, including Archbishop of Conakry. 
Benin: single-party elections. Togo: single-party elections; political 
show-trials of so-called 'Brazilian elitists'. Cameroon: attempted 
coup followed by small massacre. Chad: civil war. People's Republic 
of Congo: coup. Equatorial Guinea: overthrow of dictator Macias. 
Central African Republic: overthrow of Bokassa. Zaire: most major 
roads reported unusable; two-thirds of road vehicles unusable for 
lack of spare parts; Benguela railway closed; 38 per cent of foreign 
exchange earmarked for debt-servicing; 42 per cent of under-fives 
suffering from malnutrition. Burundi: fifty-two missionaries ex- 
pelled for 'subversion'. Guinea-Bissau: revenue covered only 65 per 



542 Caliban's kingdoms 

cent of expenditure. Cape Verde: over 90 per cent of food consumed 
imported. Mozambique: death-penalty extended to sabotage, terror- 
ism and mercenary activities; many political executions; President 
Machel attacked men with long hair and women with tight clothes. 
Catholic and Anglican churches closed. Angola: civil war. Zambia: 
many political arrests. Malawi: import controls. Zimbabwe: end of 
white rule after decade of civil war; 20,000 dead. Namibia: guerrilla 
warfare. Lesotho: guerrilla warfare. Swaziland: economy under 
pressure from refugees. Botswana: ditto. South Africa: guerrilla 
warfare. 

In 1980: Sudan: one-party elections. Tunisia: attempted coup. 
Morocco: war against Polisario. Algeria: Soviet-style concentration 
on heavy industry abandoned as failure. Ethiopia: Soviet helicopter 
gunships used against Somalis, Oromo, Gallas and other non- 
Amharic races. Somalia: refugees pass 1.5 million mark. Tanzania: 
Nyerere, sole candidate, elected president; famine. Zanzibar: at- 
tempted coup. Uganda: cost of maintaining 20,000 Tanzania army 
of occupation, plus 6,000 Uganda army, rose to 37 per cent of 
revenue; fifty political murders a week in Kampala; famine. Ghana: 
114 per cent inflation; universities closed. Nigeria: attempted coup; 
1,000 killed. Gambia: opposition parties banned; many arrests. 
Liberia: coup; many executions by firing-squad. Senegal: voluntary 
retirement of Senghor after twenty-year rule. Mauritania: coup: 
Ould Hardallah ousted by Ould Louly. Mali: schools on strike; 
economy described as 'catastrophic'. Guinea-financed coup in 
Bissau, following dispute over oil-rights. Ivory Coast: one-party 
elections. Upper Volta: coup. Niger: invasion by Libyan-financed 
nomads. Benin: President Kerekou 'converted' to Islam during visit 
to Gadafi. Cameroon: economy under pressure by refugees from 
Chad. Chad: civil war and invasion by Libya. Zaire: Mobutu 
declared 4 February: 'As long as I live I will never tolerate the 
creation of another party.' Guinea-Bissau: coup. Sao Tome: 
threatened invasion by exiles; 1,000 Angolans and 100 Cubans 
moved in. Angola: civil war. Zambia: attempted coup. Zimbabwe: 
British-supervised free elections. Namibia: guerrilla war. Lesotho: 
invasion by 'Lesotho Liberation Army'. South Africa: guerrilla 
warfare. 103 

The summary conceals many nuances. But it confirms a down- 
trend in the recurrent cycle of interest in Africa. The first cycle, what 
might be called the Rhodes period, ran from the 1880s up to the First 
World War, when many believed Africa's resources would be the 
mainstay of future European prosperity. This was briefly sustained in 
the early 1920s, then evaporated. A further cycle of interest began in 
the late 1940s and reached its peak in the early 1960s, during the 



CALIBAN S KINGDOMS 543 

transfer from colonial rule to independence. It began to collapse with 
militarization in the late 1960s. By the early 1980s it was dead: that 
is, the interest of the outside world in Africa was confined largely to 
certain major primary producers, especially Nigeria and South 
Africa. By then it was apparent that the great bulk of the continent 
had become and would remain politically unstable and incapable of 
self-sustained economic growth, or even of a place within the 
international economy. Africa had become simply a place for 
proxy wars, like Spain in the 1930s. In Africa, the professional 
political caste and the omnicompetent state had proved costly and 
sanguinary failures. We must now examine to what extent the same 
pattern had been repeated in Asia, especially in the two stricken 
giants which housed nearly half the world's population, China and 
India. 



SIXTEEN 

Experimenting with Half Mankind 



In the summer of 1966, the official Peking press reported that on 16 
July Mao Tse-tung, the Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, 
then in his seventieth year, had organized and led a mass swim in the 
Yangtze. Somewhat fuzzy photographs were published of what 
appeared to be his large round head bobbing in the water. Reports 
said he had swum nearly ten miles in just over sixty minutes and he 
was described as 'radiant with vigour and in buoyant spirits'. 1 This 
was merely one of the prodigies which appeared to have taken place 
in China in the quarter-century between Mao's accession to power 
and his death in 1976. It was widely believed China was steadily 
overcoming the economic problems facing large, backward and 
heavily populated countries, and was doing so within the framework 
of an enthusiastic national consensus. 

Visitors returned fervent admirers of Mao's brand of Commun- 
ism. China, one of them wrote, was 'a kind of benign monarchy 
ruled by an emperor-priest who had won the complete devotion of 
his subjects'. Its people, another predicted, would be 'the incarnation 
of the new civilization of the world'. Simone de Beauvoir testified: 
'life in China today is exceptionally pleasant'. The country had 
become, said another witness, 'almost as painstakingly careful about 
human lives as New Zealand'. David Rockefeller praised 'the sense 
of national harmony' and argued that Mao's revolution had suc- 
ceeded 'not only in producing more efficient and dedicated adminis- 
tration, but also in fostering high morale and community of pur- 
pose'. Another American visitor found the changes 'miraculous .... 
The Maoist revolution is on the whole the best thing that happened 
to the Chinese people in centuries.' What attracted most admiration 
was the improvement in moral tone. 'Of the many communes I 
visited,' Felix Greene reported, 'all except one denied any knowledge 
of any children born out of wedlock.' 'Law and order', another 
American visitor found, '. . . are maintained more by the prevailing 

544 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 545 

high moral code than by any threat of police action.' Yet another 
insisted that government tax collectors had become 'incorruptible' 
and that intellectuals were anxious to prove their lack of 'contempt 
for peasants' by 'lugging buckets of manure in their free time'. 2 

These testimonies recalled the uncritical praise lavished by visitors 
on Stalin and his regime during the horrors of collectivization and 
the great purges. When taxed on this point, admiring visitors replied 
that the lessons of Soviet mistakes had been learnt, largely through 
the extraordinary genius of Mao. He was, Jan Myrdal wrote, 'third 
in line with Marx and Lenin' and had solved the problem of how 'the 
revolution can be prevented from degenerating'. He 'combined', 
wrote an American political scientist, 'qualities which rarely coexist 
in one being in such intensity'. Han Suyin argued that, unlike Stalin, 
Mao 'is extremely patient, and believes in debate and re-education', 
and had 'an ever-present concern with the practical application of 
democracy'. When a problem arose, an American sinologist re- 
ported, Mao 'invariably' responded 'in a uniquely creative and 
profoundly ethical way'. Felix Greene believed that the hunger for 
power had been eliminated and that there was 'no evidence of that 
jockeying for power or of the personal rivalry that we have so often 
seen in the Kremlin'. Mao was not merely a soldier, a leader, a poet, 
philosopher, teacher, thinker and charismatic: he was also a kind of 
saint. What struck Hewlett Johnson most about him was 'something 
no picture has ever caught, an inexpressible look of kindness and 
sympathy, an obvious preoccupation with the needs of others . . . 
these formed the deep content of his thoughts.' 3 

Needless to say, these travellers' tales, as in Stalin's Russia, bore 
little or no relation to the truth, which was more interesting and 
infinitely more depressing. And Mao's public image, too, was as 
remote from the reality as Stalin's. Mao was not a saint. There was 
nothing of the scholar or the mandarin about him. He was a big, 
coarse, brutal, earthy and ruthless peasant, a kulak indeed; an 
educated version of his father. Khrushchev, not unjustly, compared 
him to 'a bear, swaying from side to side as he moved, calmly and 
slowly'. 4 Talking to the Politburo in 1956, Mao warned: 'We must not 
blindly follow the Soviet Union .... Every fart has some kind of 
smell, and we cannot say that all Soviet farts smell sweet.' 5 Three 
years later, admitting the failure of the 'Great Leap', he told the same 
group: 'Comrades, you must all analyse your own responsibility. If 
you have to shit, shit! If you have to fart, fart! You will feel much 
better for it.' 6 Again, in 1974, reviewing the shortcomings of the 
Cultural Revolution he philosophized: 'The need to shit after eating 
does not mean that eating is a waste of time.' 7 A Belgian Communist 
described him, during the great Red Guards rally in Heavenly Peace 



546 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

Square on 18 August 1966, retiring from time to time to take off his 
vest and wipe his chest and armpits, remarking, 'It's unhealthy to let 
sweat dry on your body.' 8 

Beneath this coarse exterior, however, there beat a strong- indeed 
a wild — romantic heart. It is probably true, as Stalin insisted in 1949, 
that Mao was not really a Marxist at all: 'He doesn't understand the 
most elementary Marxist truths.' 9 While he used the Marxist formu- 
lations, and indeed considered himself a great Marxist thinker, much 
superior to Stalin's contemptible successors, he never in practice 
attempted to apply objective Marxist analysis. He did not believe in 
'objective situations' at all. It was all in the mind: he might be 
described as a geopolitical Emile Coue who believed in 'mind over 
matter'. On the basis of 'the tremendous energy of the masses', he 
argued, 'it is possible to accomplish any task whatever'. 10 'There is 
only unproductive thought,' he said, 'no unproductive regions. There 
are only poor methods of cultivating the land, no such thing as poor 
land.' 11 This contempt for objective reality explains his willingness 
to accept the prospect of nuclear war, and his conviction that China 
would win it. 'The East wind prevails over the West wind,' he said in 
1957. 'If imperialism insists on fighting a war, we will have no 
alternative but to make up our minds and fight to the finish before 
going ahead with our construction.' 12 The same year, in Moscow, 
he shocked his Communist colleagues by the same argument: 'We 
may lose more than 300 million people. So what? War is war. The 
years will pass and we'll get to work producing more babies than 
ever before' (according to Khrushchev, he 'used an indecent 
expression'). 13 He later took a similar view of war with Russia: 
'Even if it goes on for ever, the sky won't fall, trees will grow, women 
will give birth and fishes will swim.' 14 He seems to have believed all 
his life that the true dynamic of history was not so much the 
maturation of classes (that might be the outward expression) as 
heroic determination. He saw himself as the Nietzschean superman 
made flesh. 

In his artistic longings, in his romanticism and in his belief that will 
is the key not only to power but to accomplishment, Mao was an 
oriental Hitler. Though the cult of Mao bore a superficial resem- 
blance to Stalinism, it actually had a far more creative and central 
role in the Maoist state. Like Hitler, Mao loved politics as theatre. 
The decor of his regime was far more striking and original than 
Stalin's lacklustre imitations of Nazi pomp. He drew on and 
transformed the majesty of the imperial era. The crowds were trained 
to greet him with the ritual chant 'Boundless life to Chairman Mao'. 
Like the emperors, he ploughed a symbolic annual furrow, used the 
Imperial City for his residence and gave calligraphic instructions for 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 547 

monuments. 15 But to this he added a sun-culture of his own, 
reflected in his hymn The East is Red', which he imposed on China as 
a second national anthem: 

From the Red East rises the sun: 

There appears in China a Mao Tse-tung. 

His round, sun-like face appeared on huge posters; and, like the sun, 
he appeared at dawn to inspect a million Red Guards in the summer 
of 1966. 

These occasions, of which there were eight within a few weeks, 
allowing the sun to shine on over 11 million people, strongly 
resembled the Nuremberg rallies. The Red Guards rhythmically 
chanted Maoist slogans, while Lin Piao (rather like Goebbels) called 
out the litanies: 'Beat down the capitalist roaders in power! Beat 
down the reactionary bourgeois authorities! Sweep away all wicked 
devils and evil spirits! Do away with the Four Old Things: old 
thought, old culture, old customs, old habits. The Thought of Mao 
Tse-tung must rule and transform the spirit, until the power of the 
spirit transforms matter!' (18 August 1966). 16 Mao's thought was 
'the sun of our heart, the root of our life, the source of our strength', 
'his thought is a compass and spiritual food', it was 'like a massive 
cudgel swung by a golden monkey', a 'brilliant beam of light' 
exposing 'monsters and goblins', a series of 'magic mirrors to detect 
demons', and he himself was 'the source of all wisdom'. The 
Revolution and its achievements were (in a manner of speaking) a 
gigantic thought-form of Mao's, since 'all our victories are victories 
of the Thought of Mao Tse-tung'. 17 

The Little Red Book played a similar role to Mein Kampf and, like 
Hitler, Mao used military drill, massed bands and son et lumiere to 
produce illusion and hysteria. For his 1966 rallies, 1,000-piece bands 
played 'The East is Red', and a film of the ninth National Congress 
of the ccp in 1969 showed delegates, holding the Little Red Book 
aloft, jigging up and down in frenzy, tears rolling down their cheeks, 
yelping and baying like animals, in the Great Hall of the People. 18 
The virulently abusive language Mao and his henchmen used to 
evoke violent and intolerant activism was very reminiscent of Hitler's 
anti-Semitism. 

The most important respect in which Mao recalled Hitler was in 
his imminent eschatology. Mao was, above all, a violently impatient 
man. He lacked the unhurried stoicism with which Stalin remorse- 
lessly pursued his objectives and his hatreds. Mao, like Hitler, 
wanted to speed up history. He thought his successors would prove 
poltroons and faint-hearts and that unless things were done in his 
own lifetime, they would not be done at all. He always heard time's 



548 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

winged chariot at his back, and his impetuosity found expression in 
his complementary and insatiable love of drama. In a sense, Mao 
never made the transition from revolution to administration. He 
lacked Stalin's bureaucratic appetite. For him, history was a cosmic 
play, a succession of spectacular episodes, in which he was actor, 
impresario and spectator. No sooner had the curtain come crashing 
down on one scene - 'the Long March', say, or 'the Fall of the kmt' - 
than he clamoured for it to rise again and the action to recommence, 
faster and more furious than before. 

Hence Mao's reign was a lurid melodrama, sometimes degenerat- 
ing into farce but always, in the deepest sense, a tragedy: for what he 
caused to be enacted was not theatre but a gigantic series of 
experiments on hundreds of millions of real, living, suffering people. 
The first drama after the defeat of the kmt seems to have occurred 
towards the end of 1950. Initially, the land reform introduced in the 
south under the law of 1949 was not radical. A speech of Lin Piao's 
as late as 14 June 1950 applied the brakes. The benevolent term 
'prosperous middle peasant' replaced 'rich peasant' and new catego- 
ries of 'enlightened gentry' and 'small landlords' were coined to keep 
efficient farmers in business. 19 Then the coming of the Korean War 
gave Mao the pretext for his first post-war cataclysm. In 1951 and 
still more in 1952-3, the land reform was continually accelerated 
and conducted with great savagery. There was 'the Three-Antis 
campaign', quickly followed by 'the Five-Antis campaign'. On 21 
February 1951 new 'Regulations regarding the punishment of coun- 
ter-revolutionaries' provided death and life-sentences for a wide 
range of 'crimes'. All major towns held mass rallies at which social 
'enemies' were publicly denounced and sentenced. Over a few 
months, nearly 30,000 such meetings were held in Peking alone, 
attended by 3 million people. The papers published long lists of 
names every day of executed 'counter-revolutionaries'. In October 
1951 it was stated that 800,000 cases had been dealt with in the first 
six months of the year (Chou En-lai later said that 16.8 per cent had 
received death-sentences, which would mean 135,000 executions, or 
22,500 a month, a high rate even by Stalin's worst standards). The 
total number of killed during this first post-war drama of Mao's may 
have been as high as 15 million, though a figure of 1 to 3 million is 
more likely. 20 

This gigantic piece of social engineering was also accompanied by 
Mao's first shot at mental engineering, or brainwashing, which he 
termed 'thought reform'. It was designed to replace traditional 
family piety with filial piety to the state as the central moral value of 
the nation and to elevate Mao into a substitute father-figure. 21 Mao 
defined 'thought reform' (23 October 1951) as a vital precondition 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 549 

for 'the thoroughgoing democratic transformation and the progress- 
ive industrialization of our country'. He set up a nationwide 
'Movement for the study of Mao Tse-tung's Thoughts'; those who 
rejected them were branded as 'Westerners' and 'reformed' in prison, 
often shackled for varying periods with heavy, painful irons. 22 The 
drama, however, embraced not only the victims of the 'land reform' 
and those who criticized the way it was done. Many of the total of 
eight 'Antis' were directed at merchants, industrial managers and 
bureaucrats: the campaign in fact embraced virtually the whole 
nation. 

Like all Mao's successive dramas, it fizzled out as he lost interest or 
confidence in its results, or as the disastrous consequences became 
apparent in lower agricultural productivity and famine. But by 1955 
Mao's impatience was rising again. In a speech of 31 July 1955 he 
suddenly announced a speed-up in the rate of collectivization of 
farms and the abrupt nationalization of all commerce and industry 
still in private hands. He called 1955 'the year of decision in the 
struggle between socialism and capitalism'. 23 This campaign, too, 
was to change mentalities: the 'poor peasants' would acquire 'con- 
trol' and then 'strengthen unity' with the 'middle peasants', even the 
'upper-middle peasants', against the 'infiltration' of 'counter- 
revolutionaries', 'rascals' and 'devils'. Disappointed by the response, 
Mao produced with equal suddenness his 'Let a hundred flowers 
bloom' policy in 1956, to persuade a variety of voices to speak out. 
As he put it, 'Correct ideas, if pampered in hot-houses without 
exposure to the elements or immunization against disease, will not 
win against wrong ones.' Khrushchev took the view that the whole 
'hundred flowers' episode was a mere 'provocation'. Mao merely 
'pretended to be opening wide the floodgates of democracy' to 'goad 
people into expressing their innermost thoughts', so he could 'des- 
troy those whose thinking he considered harmful'. 24 At all events the 
campaign was brutally reversed without warning. 'Rightist elements' 
were sent to work-camps; professors who had briefly 'bloomed' 
found themselves cleaning lavatories; and in 1957 the tentative 
protections of 'socialist legality' were withdrawn. 25 

These confused events, or abortive mini-dramas, should be seen 
against the background of Mao's increasing dissatisfaction with the 
policies of Stalin's successors in Moscow. He had disliked and 
disagreed with Stalin: his reaction to Stalin's death was to instigate 
the suicide or murder of Kao Kang, the Stalinist agent and head of 
the State Planning Committee, in February 1954. But he objected 
strongly to 'deStalinization' as an attempt to blame collective 
mistakes on the character of a single man. He thought Khrushchev's 
'secret session speech' repudiating Stalinism of 1956 a hypocrisy. 



550 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

The others, Khrushchev included, had been up to their necks in 
Stalin's crimes. How did Khrushchev, he demanded, see his role 
'when he beats his breast, pounds the table and shouts abuse at the 
top of his voice'? Was he a 'murderer' and a 'bandit' himself? Or 
merely a 'fool' and an 'idiot'? 26 Mao was clearly afraid that the 
Moscow campaign against 'the cult of personality' might be used 
against himself. More fundamentally, however, he felt that the sheer 
intellectual poverty of the new Moscow leadership strengthened his 
claim, now Stalin was dead, to the pontifical primacy of the bloc. He 
determined to astound the comrades, east and west, by the sheer 
audacity of his next move, and in September— October 1957 an- 
nounced the new drama of the Great Leap Forward, which was 
launched with tremendous publicity the following spring. 

The Great Leap was perhaps the purest expression of Mao's 
chronic impatience, his belief in mind over matter, his confidence 
that, granted the will, the age of miracles was not over. He wanted to 
move to Communism in one bound, even to the stage when the state 
would 'wither away'. He projected his itch to telescope history onto 
the peasants: they were 'poor and blank', and this was 'a good thing 
- poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A 
clean sheet of paper has no blotches and so the newest and most 
beautiful words can be written on it.' 27 As a piece of social 
engineering, the Leap was reckless and impulsive even by Mao's 
standards. He justified it by arguing that Stalin had walked 'only on 
one leg' - that is, he created industrial and agricultural areas, each 
separate and monoped. China would begin 'walking on two legs', 
moving directly to self-reliant communes (modelled historically on 
the Paris Commune of 1870), each with its own industrial, agricultu- 
ral and service sectors and its own defence militia: 'unity of work and 
arms'. 28 

The scale and speed of this experimental theatre was almost 
beyond belief. In January— February 1958, then after a brief pause to 
sort out the confusion, between August and December, about 700 
million people (90 per cent of the population) had their economic, 
political and administrative life completely transformed. In Henan 
Province, for instance, 5,376 agricultural collectives were knocked 
into 208 large 'people's communes' with an average of 8,000 
households in each. These units were expected to be virtually 
self-supporting and, in particular, to produce their own steel. It was a 
case, as Khrushchev put it, of Mao 'acting like a lunatic on a throne 
and turning his country upside down'. He said that Chou En-lai 
came to Moscow and admitted that the Chinese steel industry was in 
a mess as a result. A.F.Zasyadki, deputy-chairman of the State 
Planning Commission, was sent out to investigate. He reported to 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 551 

Khrushchev that the Soviet-trained steel engineers were now being 
forced to work in agriculture and the steel industry was 'a shambles'. 
The steel mill he visited was 'in the charge of an old man'. All 
Russia's equipment, money and effort was being wasted. 29 Khrush- 
chev seems to have concluded that Mao was another Stalin and 
worse; a madman who would wreck his country and blow up the 
world if he had the means. The Great Leap therefore led directly to 
the end of Russia's technical assistance programme (including nu- 
clear weapons) in 1959 and to the open admission of the Sino-Soviet 
breach the following year at the Romanian Party Congress, when 
Khrushchev denounced the Chinese leadership as 'madmen', 'pure 
nationalists' who wanted to unleash a nuclear war. 

In China itself the Great Leap movement came to a juddering halt 
on 23 July 1959, Mao ringing down the curtain with an abrupt 'The 
chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility'. 30 But 
the consequences of the drama had their own irresistible momentum. 
Nineteen-fifty-nine was a year of natural disasters, and combining 
with the unnatural disaster of the Great Leap produced a man-made 
famine on the scale of Stalin's catastrophe in the early 1930s, which 
lasted till 1962. 31 To this day outsiders do not know exactly what 
happened to Chinese agriculture during these terrible years. The steel 
industry was wrecked and had to be rebuilt virtually from its 
foundations. Agriculture was yet again reorganized by a return to 
co-operatives and a fall in the size of commune units to 2,000 
households. But the crops and livestock lost were lost for good. 
People just starved. How many millions died from the Leap is a 
matter of conjecture: figures are not available. 

The Great Leap disaster seems to have exhausted a large portion 
of the political capital Mao had banked with his colleagues during 
the successful revolutionary war. He never held the supreme and 
solitary power of a Hitler and a Stalin, both because of the 
intractable nature of China's problems, her lack of centralization and 
modern communications, and because he never possessed a terror 
apparatus on the same scale as the kgb or the Gestapo-ss. The party 
was more regionalized than in Russia; in particular, there was a 
profound polarity between the conservatism of Peking and the 
radicalism of Shanghai. After the curtain came down on the drama of 
1959, Mao eschewed histrionics for a while; he seems to have been 
'resting'. From this point dated the beginning of 'the two-line 
struggle', with 'revisionists' temporarily on top. They never again 
allowed Mao to touch the productive process directly, either in 
agriculture or in heavy industry. Instead he brooded on culture and 
education. He had always disliked mandarinism and the cultural 
establishment. In a sense, he hated 'civilization' as much as Hitler 



552 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

did. In China it represented not the international Jewish conspiracy 
but the dead hand, the insufferable, insupportable weight of a 
4,000-year past. In this respect his revolution appeared to have 
changed nothing - and it was because of this cultural failure, he 
reasoned, that the Great Leap had proved impractical. 

By 13 February 1964 Mao was making ominous noises: The 
present method of education ruins talent and ruins youth. I do not 
approve of reading so many books. The method of examination is a 
method of dealing with the enemy. It is most harmful and should be 
stopped.' 32 Nine months later he betrayed unmistakable signs of 
impatience and a hankering for a new drama: 'We cannot follow the 
old paths of technical development of every country in the world, 
and crawl step by step behind the others. We must smash 
conventions . . . when we talk of a Great Leap Forward, we mean 
just this.' 33 Thus the Leap was transmuted from a physical to a 
mental one: by the beginning of 1965 Mao's interest in brainwashing 
had revived and was to be the dominant feature of his next and 
greatest drama. 

By this point China was effectively run by a triumvirate: Mao 
himself, the head of state Liu Shao-chi, in charge of the Party and in 
particular of the Peking apparatus, and the army head, Lin Piao. 
Mao chose to open the new play indirectly, by pushing onto 
centre-stage his film-actress wife, Chiang Ching. She was well cast 
for the star role in what was soon termed the 'Cultural Revolution'. 
It was characteristic of Mao's romanticism that he always had a soft 
spot for actresses. He had had an affair, for instance, with the 
famous Lily Wu. His then wife, Ho Tzu-chen, found out, brought an 
action and got a divorce at a special Central Committee court, which 
then banished both women. 34 In 1939 Mao married Chiang Ching, 
who had acted in Shanghai in the 1930s under the stage name of Lan 
Ping. According to her account, she went into the profession at the 
age of thirteen, became a party member at nineteen, and was 
twenty-three when Mao sought her out in Yenan, by offering her a 
free ticket to a lecture he was giving at the Marxist— Leninist 
institute. 35 But other versions make her older and say she was 
married three if not four times in 1930s Shanghai, had numerous 
affairs in the film world and acquired many hatreds and enmities. 

Chiang Ching kept, or was kept, very much in the background for 
the first twenty years of her marriage. There is a deep-rooted 
suspicion of the scheming political wife in China, what might be 
called the 'Dowager Empress syndrome'. In the early 1960s it was 
considered remarkable that Wang Kwang-mei, the wife of the head 
of state, Liu, should dress fashionably, wear pearls and even dance 
(she had been born in the USA) while accompanying her husband 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 553 

abroad, and this may have excited Chiang's jealousy. She herself 
became the centre of a group of disgruntled pseudo-intellectuals, 
failed writers and minor actors and film-directors, mainly from 
Shanghai, who wanted to take over the arts and radicalize them. 
There was a certain party mandate for their 'line'. In 1950, following 
the Zhdanov cultural purges in Soviet Russia, an 'opera reform 
bureau' was set up in China, drawing its inspiration from a theatre 
group founded at the Red Army Academy in 1931 and the so-called 
'Chinese Blue Blouse Regiment' which used impromptu theatre to 
project ideology from mobile stages. In 1952 the Peking People's Art 
Theatre was set up to produce 'modern' didactic drama. 36 But little 
came of this. Well into the 1960s, Chinese classics remained domi- 
nant and many independent theatres flourished, performing Ibsen, 
O'Neill, Shaw, Chekhov and using the Stanislavsky method. 37 
Chiang's own group, the League of Left- Wing Dramatists, found it 
difficult to get their works performed and was even suspected of 
Trotskyism. 38 She seems to have brought to the Chinese scene, 
already envenomed by the bitter sectarian factionalism inherent in 
Marxist-Leninist politics, the spirit of the theatrical vendetta. 

She got her breakthrough in June— July 1964 when the frustrated 
Mao allowed her to put on the Festival of Peking Opera on 
Contemporary Themes in the Great Hall of the People. This con- 
sisted of thirty-seven new operas (thirty-three on the Revolution, 
four on earlier revolts), performed by twenty-eight proletarian 
companies from nineteen provinces. Even more surprisingly, Mao 
allowed her to deliver a speech, the first by a woman since he took 
power. She said there were 3,000 professional theatrical companies 
in China, including ninety supposed to be dealing with 'modern' 
drama. Nevertheless, the Chinese stage was dominated by old 
themes, heroes and heroines, 'by emperors, princes, generals, minis- 
ters, scholars and beauties, and on top of these, ghosts and mon- 
sters'. There were 'well over 600 million workers, peasants and 
soldiers in our country' as opposed to 'only a handful of landlords, 
rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, Rightists and 
bourgeois'. Why should the theatre serve these few and not the 600 
million? She recommended for universal performance certain 'model 
operas', such as Raid on the White Tiger Regiment and Taking Tiger 
Mountain by Strategy. 39 None of this went down well in Peking, the 
repository and guardian of Chinese culture. Its mayor and party 
boss, the ultra-mandarin Peng Chen, called her operas 'still at the 
stage of wearing trousers with a slit-seat and thumb-sucking'. Every- 
one disliked her burgeoning habit of phoning her opponents and 
critics in order to 'struggle with them'. When she asked Peng to give 
her an opera troupe 'to reform on my own' and showed him a new 



554 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

revolutionary opera with which she proposed to reform it, he flatly 
refused, snatched the score from her hands and challenged her 'to take 
up a strong position if she pleased'. 40 

Her strong position was to persuade Mao to leave Peking and spend 
most of 1 965 in Shanghai/There a number of themes came together in 
his head: hatred of Soviet Russia and its leadership, and of the new class 
of bourgeois bureaucrats who had frustrated his Great Leap, the long- 
ing of an elderly hero to appeal to the young again, his contempt for 
formal education, his loathing for the people who flourished by virtue 
of mandarinism, his jealousy of Liu. Liu's book, How to be a Good 
Communist, sold fifteen million copies 1962-6, as many as Mao's 
books at that time. Official editorials urged the comrades to study Liu 
on a par with Mao. The two men had quarrelled violently over the 
reasons for the failure of the Leap. 41 Thus to the suppressed ambitions 
of a failed actress were added the grievances of an injured author. Mao 
gave up reading the Peking People's Daily, turning instead to the 
forces paper, Liberation Army Daily. He was gearing up for another 
dramatic explosion. He observed grimly to Andre Malraux: 'I am 
alone with the masses — waiting.' To the sycophantic French 
ambassador, who told him youth was with him, Mao retorted: 'The 
things you saw represented only one side of the situation - you didn't 
see the other side.' He told a group of Albanians that the new 
privileged elite in Russia had sprung first from literary and artistic 
circles and the same was happening in China: 'Why are there so many 
literary and artistic associations in Peking? They have nothing to do 
. . . army performances are the best, local troupes rank second and 
those from Peking are the worst.' Official culture groups, he said to a 
group of planners, were 'just transplants from the Soviet Union ... all 
ruled by foreigners and dead men'. Peking's Academy of Sciences was 
'fairyland', stuffed with 'antiquarians' who 'read unreadable jour- 
nals'. 42 He would rely on the earthy, peasant army. He broke its chief 
of staff, Luo Rui-qing, for alleged pro-Soviet activities. He built up its 
head, Lin Piao, against Liu and his Peking 'clique'. The shape of things 
to come was his permission to Chiang Ching to convene in Shanghai a 
'Forum on Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces'. Before it 
took place, a nervous Lin held a briefing of senior officers: 

She is very sharp politically on questions of literature and art ... . She has 
many opinions which are valuable. You should pay good attention to them 
and see that they are applied ideologically and organizationally. From now 
on, all the army's documents concerning literature and art should be sent to 
her.43 

Having lined up the army behind himself, Mao went over to the 
attack. The actual detonator to what soon became known as the 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 555 

'Cultural Revolution' was personal pique - Mao's reaction to a play, 
Haijui Dismissed from Office, actually written in 1961 by Wu Han, 
Deputy-Mayor of Peking, and another official mandarin. 44 It was 
about an upright Ming-dynasty official who disagreed with the 
Emperor's land policy and was unjustly punished for being frank. 
When Mao finally saw it he could not but regard it as a clear attack 
on himself, plainly inspired by Liu and all the more galling in that the 
agricultural disasters for which he was thus publicly blamed had 
undeniably occurred. His attack was launched with a review of the 
play in the Shanghai daily, Literary Currents, 10 November 1965. 
Back in Peking near the end of the year, he saw the Soviet premier, 
Alexei Kosygin, and sneeringly asked him if Soviet Russia would 
come to China's help if America attacked her over the Vietnam War: 
Kosygin had no answer. But Mao admitted to him frankly that he 
was at loggerheads with his colleagues. Indeed he made little attempt 
to conceal the coming explosion. Back in Shanghai early in the new 
year, he snarled at Teng Hsiao-ping and other senior colleagues (who 
had travelled down from Peking) in front of an amazed delegation of 
Japanese Communists, addressing them as 'You weak-kneed people 
in Peking' for being 'soft on Russia'. The Japanese 'cringed in 
amazement'. 45 

From that point on, the Cultural Revolution gathered momentum. 
Mao (as he later put it) 'gave the nod'. In February 1966 Lin, now 
Chiang Ching's firm if apprehensive ally, appointed her 'Cultural 
Adviser' to the entire army forces. The obnoxious mandarin Mayor 
of Peking was dismissed and moved, along with Liu, into the 
shadows, though the two men, Teng and others were not arrested 
until the next year. On 20 March Mao, the old wizard, decided to 
conjure the brutal force of unlettered youth out of the earth. 'We 
need determined people who are young, have little education, a firm 
attitude and the political experience to take over the work', he: said. 
'When we started to make revolution, we were mere twenty-three- 
year-old boys, while the rulers of that time . . . were old and 
experienced. They had more learning - but we had more truth.' 46 On 
16 May, Chiang Ching, now the leading spirit in a group of activists, 
mainly from Shanghai, whom Mao had officially designated as in 
charge of the Cultural Revolution, issued her first circular. It 
attacked 'scholar-tyrants' who had 'abstruse' language to silence the 
class struggle and keep politics out of academia, using the fallacy 
'everyone is equal before the truth'. Its sixth point was an open 
invitation to vandalism: 'Chairman Mao often says that there is no 
construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and 
repudiation - it means revolution.' The People's Daily and other 
Peking papers refused to print it. Two days later Lin Piao made a 



556 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

remarkable speech about power to the Politburo, analysing the 
history of coups d'etat. Echoing Goebbels, he argued that force and 
propaganda were irresistible in conjunction: 'Seizure of political 
power depends upon gun-barrels and inkwells.' And what was 
power for? 'Political power is an instrument by which one class 
oppresses another. It is exactly the same with revolution and with 
counter-revolution. As I see it, political power is the power to 
oppress others/ 47 That was frank enough; and, coming from the 
man who was supposed to be in charge of the nation's stability, it 
might well make the men round the table tremble. Even worse news 
was that the man in charge of the secret police, Kang Sheng, had 
thrown in his lot with the cultural revolutionaries. That meant there 
would be no restraint on the new 'gun-barrels and inkwells', which in 
the second half of May rapidly made their appearance, in the shape 
of Red Guards and wall-posters. 

Scholastic violence and political change had long been linked in 
China. The student revolt in Peking had detonated the 4th May 
Movement in 1919 and the 9th December Movement in 1935. There 
had been a similar upsurge during the 'hundred flowers', eventually 
put down (by Teng and Liu, among others, eagerly reacting to Mao's 
'nod') with the sacking of 100,000 teachers in 1957-8. 48 But this 
was something on an altogether different scale. With a population of 
800 million, China now had 90 million children in primary schools, 
10 million in middle schools and 600,000 in university. 49 The first 
Red Guards appeared on 29 May. They were from the middle 
school, aged about twelve to fourteen, wearing red cotton armbands 
with the characters 'Hung Wei Ping' (Red Guards) on them in 
yellow. Their first act was to attack Tsinghua University. 50 Soon they 
were joined by children from younger and older age-groups, by 
students and, most important, by members of the ccp Youth 
Leagues who, with Mao's encouragement, revolted against their 
official leadership and took to the streets in gangs. During the early 
summer, the entire educational system in China came to a standstill, 
as dons and teachers fled in terror (when they were lucky enough to 
escape capture and 're-education') and juvenile lynch-law took over. 

There was later some misunderstanding of the Cultural Revolution 
in the West. It was represented as a revolt of intellectuals. In fact it 
was quite the reverse. It was a revolution of illiterates and semi- 
literates against intellectuals, the 'spectacle-wearers' as they were 
called. It was xenophobic, aimed at those who 'think the moon is 
rounder abroad'. The Red Guards had a great deal in common with 
Roehm's Brownshirts, and the entire movement with Hitler's cam- 
paign against 'cosmopolitan civilization'. It was the greatest 
witch-hunt in history, which made the Zhdanov purges in post-war 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 557 

Russia seem almost trivial. Nevertheless, it is significant that this 
great upsurge of vandalism attracted a certain type of radical 
academic, who was to become depressingly familiar in Europe and 
North America over the next few years. At Peking, the first 'big- 
character poster', addressed to and attacking the university authori- 
ties, was put up by a woman philosophy don, Nieh Yuan-tzu, who 
was to become the Madame Defarge of the campus horrors. It read: 
'Why are you so afraid of big-character posters? This is a life and 
death struggle to counter the Black Gang!' Within a week, 10,000 
students had put up 100,000 posters, 'as big as doors', often with 
characters four feet high. 51 The phrases were reiterated: 'You 
absolutely won't get away with this . . . our patience is exhausted.' 
The first violence began at the same time. The rampaging street- 
gangs seized girls with long braided hair and cut it short; boys with 
foreign-style stove-pipe pants had them ripped off. Hairdressers were 
told not to give 'duck-tail' cuts, restaurants to simplify menus, shops 
to stop selling cosmetics, dresses with slit skirts, sunglasses, fur-coats 
and other finery. Neon signs were smashed. There were huge street 
bonfires of forbidden goods, which included (as an exhibition of 
'confiscations' showed) bolts of silk and brocade, gold and silver 
bars, chess-sets, ancient trunks and chests, playing-cards, mah-jong 
sets, gowns, frock-coats, top-hats, jazz records and a vast range of 
works of art. The Red Guards shut down teashops, coffee-houses, 
independent private theatres and all private restaurants, they put 
itinerant musicians, acrobats and strolling actors out of business, and 
they forbade weddings and funerals, holding hands and kite-flying. 
In Peking the ancient walls were pulled down, Bei Hai Park and the 
National Gallery of Fine Arts closed. Libraries were ransacked and 
shut, books burnt. Even when libraries remained open, few dared to 
visit them. Ten years later, Teng said that of the eight hundred 
technicians of the Research Institute for Non-ferrous Metals, for 
example, only four had the courage to use the library during the 
Cultural Revolution; he said that any of the 150,000 technical cadres 
of the Academy of Sciences who visited their laboratories during this 
dark time were denounced as 'white specialists'. 52 

There was no authority to prevent these activities. When shop- 
keepers and other injured parties sought police protection, they were 
reminded of 'The Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese 
Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revo- 
lution' (1 August 1966), which read: 'The only method is for the 
masses to liberate themselves . . . trust the masses, rely on them and 
respect their initiative .... Don't be afraid of disturbances .... Let 
the masses educate themselves ... no measures should be taken 
against students at universities, colleges, middle and primary 



558 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

schools . . . .' 53 In fact party leaders who sought to curb the Red 
Guards were paraded through the streets wearing dunces' caps and 
placards. Every single school superintendent seems to have been 
dismissed. 

As the movement got under way, violence became common, then 
universal. Red Guard leaders seem to have come from the lowest 
social strata. 54 Some of them were mere street-thieves and hooligans, 
sporting thick leather belts with brass buckles. Their posters urged 
'Boil him in oil', 'Smash his dog's head' and so on. Men and women 
classified as 'ghosts and monsters', 'bad elements' and 'counter- 
revolutionaries' had their heads shaved. Snippets of 'political de- 
bates' were later reported: 'Of course he is a capitalist. He has a sofa 
and two matching armchairs.' 55 Hundreds of thousands of private 
homes were broken into and ransacked for such reasons. But Red 
Guards raided government offices too, and forced officials to give 
them their archives on pain of being denounced as 'tools of the 
revisionists'. The Foreign Ministry was taken over by a gang led by 
Yao Teng-shan, a former petty official. He recalled every ambassa- 
dor except one, stripped them of rank and assigned them to minor 
tasks. His notes to foreign powers, written in the style of Red Guard 
posters, were politely returned with the request that future communi- 
cations be signed by Premier Chou. But Chou himself, normally the 
still centre of Chinese life through all Mao's dramas, seems to have 
been in danger at one stage. While it is true that, at the very top level, 
the Red Guards were not allowed to kill anyone, many died in gaol. 
Liu himself was left to die (1973) in his own excrement, naked on the 
freezing floor of his concrete cell. 56 But at a lower level the loss of life 
was catastrophic. The Agence France Presse, in the most widely 
respected figure, estimated (3 February 1979) that the Red Guards 
had murdered about 400,000 people. 

Meanwhile Chiang Ching had been ruling the world of culture and 
addressing mass meetings at which she denounced capitalism (which 
she said destroyed art), jazz, rock and roll, striptease, Impressionism, 
Symbolism, abstract art, Fauvism, Modernism - 'in a word, de- 
cadence and obscenity, to poison and corrupt the minds of the 
people'. Her platform oratory was modelled on that of the secret 
police boss, Kang Sheng, with whom she often appeared. 'Do you 
want to study the Communique and the Sixteen-Point Directive?' 
'Yes.' 'Do you want to study them again and again?' 'Yes.' 'Do you 
want to learn them thoroughly?' 'Yes.' 'Do you want to understand 
them?' 'Yes.' 'Do you want to apply them?' 'Yes.' 'Do you want to 
use them to carry out the Cultural Revolution in your school?' 'Yes, 
Yes, Yes!' 57 During the second half of 1966, virtually every main 
cultural organization in China was brought under her army organi- 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 559 

zation. All her old scores against the theatre and film world, some 
dating from the 1930s, were worked off. Leading directors, play- 
wrights, poets, actors and composers were accused of 'fawning on 
foreigners', praising 'secondary foreign devils', 'ridiculing the Boxers' 
(now seen as cultural heroes), and portraying ordinary Chinese as 
'prostitutes, opium smokers, jugglers and women with bound feet', 
thus breeding a 'national inferiority complex'. The Red Guards were 
ordered by her to 'dig up the roots of the Black Line', 'rip off the masks', 
destroy films, songs and plays of the 'national defence line' and 'drag 
out' members of the 'Black Gang'. 

On 12 December 1966 many 'public enemies', the ex-mayor of 
Peking and leading cultural mandarins — including, it seems, every film 
and theatre director who had ever crossed Chiang Ching - were 
marched to the Workers' Stadium in front of 10,000 people, with heavy 
wooden placards round their necks. 58 One of the worst aspects of the 
Cultural Revolution was the treatment of wives, who were often more 
brutally humiliated than their husbands. On 10 April 1967, for 
instance, Liu's wife was dragged in front of 300,000 people on the 
campus of Tsinghua University, dressed in a tight evening gown, with 
stiletto-heel shoes, an English straw hat and a necklace of ping-pong 
balls decorated with skulls, while the mob bayed, 'Down with ox-devils 
and snake-gods!' 59 

Chiang Ching's squads took over radio and TV stations, newspapers 
and magazines; they seized cameras and films, ransacked studios for 
evidence, confiscated all existing films and issued them re-edited, and 
impounded scripts, prompt-copies and musical scores. Painters no 
longer dared to sign work with their own name but instead used the 
slogan 'Ten Thousand Years to Chairman Mao'. 60 'With hammer in 
hand', said Chiang Ching, 'I set out to attack all the old conventions.' 
She attended rehearsals of the Central Philharmonic Orchestra and 
interrupted them, goading the conductor Li Te-lun into a furious shriek 
'You're attacking me with a big hammer!' She made composers write 
works which were then tried out on 'the masses' and altered to take 
account of their reaction. She claimed she had to 'hit them with a 
hammer' to make them obey and eliminate 'foreign influences'. 61 Some 
of her followers took her imagery literally, and one Western-trained 
concert pianist had his hands smashed. Hammers, fists, thumping and 
smashing were the emblems of revolutionary art. Taking over the 
ballet, Chiang Ching banned 'orchid fingers' and upturned palms, 
favouring instead clenched fists and violent movements to show 'hatred 
of landlord class' and 'determination to seek revenge'. 62 

Having banned virtually all forms of artistic expression in 1966, 
Chiang Ching strove desperately to fill the void. But not much was 
produced: two orchestral works, the Yellow River piano concerto and 



560 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

the Shachiaping symphony, four operas and two ballets, all eight 
classified as yang-pan hsi or 'model repertory', on the analogy of 
model farms. There was a sculpture series called The Rent-Collectors' 
Courtyard and a few paintings, of which the best known was a 
portrait of Mao wearing a blue gown, investigating mining condi- 
tions in the early 1920s, which was 'composed' by a collective of 
Peking students and actually painted by the son of a 'poor peasant'. 
Few films were made because (she later claimed), there was 'sab- 
otage'; her actors, actresses and directors were given 'bad dormitories', 
no hot meals and power was cut off from her stages and film-sets. 63 

After the heady days of 1966, when Mao did his swim and the cult 
of his personality reached its apogee, China began to lurch into civil 
war. On 5 February 1967, Mao's proteges in Shanghai set up a 
'commune', an indication he was still hankering after the Great Leap 
policy. It was based upon the dockers, especially the militant 2,500 
of the Fifth Loading and Unloading District, who in a single day (in 
June 1966) had written and put up 10,000 big-character posters. Of 
this district, 532 workers resisted. They had posters written against 
them and were made to wear tall dunces' hats and carry opprobrious 
posters with mysterious slogans such as 'Four-Family Village' and 
'Anti-Party Clique'; they also had their houses ransacked and were 
sentenced to 'symbolic' death sentences, which might easily become 
real ones. 64 The Shanghai commune was supposed to detonate 
others across the country. But the workers did not rise. Indeed they 
often resisted Red Guard invasions of their factories. Even in 
Shanghai the city authorities fought back with their own Scarlet 
Guards. Each side had enormous banks of loud-speakers, whose 
slogans battled it out deafeningly from dawn to dusk: 'The February 
seizure of power is illegal', 'The February seizure of power is 
admirable'. There were kidnappings, torture and gang-warfare, 
using bicycle chains and knuckle-dusters, 'troops' being rushed from 
one part of the city to another. 

At the universities, private armies were formed. The 'Chingkan- 
shang regiment' of Tsinghua University, an 'elite group' of the Far 
Left, fought pitched battles against 'ghosts and monsters' using 
bamboo spears and home-made armoured cars and cannon. Other 
units included the Five-One-Six, the New Peita commune, the 
Geological Institute's 'East is Red' commune, and the 'Sky' faction of 
the Aeronautical Institute. These were imitated in the factories and 
the non-university towns, and a kind of feudal anarchy began to 
develop, as China lurched back into organized gang-warfare and 
war-lordism. In July 1967 there was a 'mutiny', as it was called, in 
Wuhan, actually a large-scale battle between a Red Guard workers' 
force and a conservative group known as the Million Heroes. The 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 561 

local army commander backed the Heroes. Chou En-lai was sent 
down to restore peace. He was lucky to escape with his life and two 
of his companions were arrested and tortured. As a result, Chiang 
Ching produced the slogan 'Offend by reason and defend by force', 
and quantities of arms were issued to Red Guard groups. 65 

The violence seems to have reached a climax in the late summer of 
1967. As that point Mao, as usual, became both alarmed at what he 
had done and bored with the incessant wrangling. He seems to have 
told Chiang Ching to call it all off. In September she announced that 
violence must be verbal only; machine-guns were to be used only when 
'absolutely necessary'. Those who disobeyed were accused of 'moun- 
tain-strongholdism'. Attacks on the British Embassy and its staff 
were the work of 'ultra-Leftists instigated by the May Sixteenth 
clique'. 66 Mao also took a hand. 'The situation developed so rapidly 
as to surprise me,' he told the Central Committee. 'I cannot blame you 
if you have complaints against me.' He was annoyed that the Foreign 
Minister, Chen Yi, had lost twenty-seven pounds during a Red Guard 
grilling, adding, 'I cannot show him to foreign visitors in this 
condition.' He told the 'young firebrands' and 'little devils' to go back 
to school. He broke the Shanghai commune. 'China is now like a 
country divided into eight hundred princely states,' he complained. 67 

In the autumn of 1967 Mao withdrew official support for the 
Cultural Revolution, at any rate in its active Red Guard form, and 
used the People's Liberation Army (pla) to restore order and take 
over from groups he now denounced as 'incompetent' and 'politi- 
cally immature'. He justified this use of force by remarking, 'Soldiers 
are just workers and peasants wearing uniforms.' Fighting continued 
in some places in 1968, but in diminishing volume. In the summer, at 
his home in South-and-Central Lakes, he had a curious 'dawn 
dialogue' with Red Guard leaders: 'I have never made any tape 
recordings before, but I am doing it today. Otherwise you will 
interpret what I say today in the way you wish after you go 
home .... Too many people were arrested, because I nodded my 
head.' Police Minister: 'I am the one to blame for excessive arrests.' 
Mao: 'Don't try to free me from my mistakes or cover up for me.' 
Chen Boda (left-wing theorist): 'Follow the Chairman's teaching 
closely.' Mao (snappish): 'Don't talk to me about teachings.' Later 
he threatened that if Red Guards fought the army, killed people, 
'destroyed means of transportation' or 'lit fires', they would be 
'annihilated'. But he was unwilling to drop his anarchism entirely: 
'Let the students fight for another ten years. The earth will revolve as 
usual. Heaven is not going to fall.' All the same, the five chief Red 
Guard leaders were soon at work on pig-farms deep in the country- 
side. 68 The drama was over. 



562 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

The years which followed the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, 
when the bill for it was being paid by the economy and ordinary 
Chinese, were grim. Someone had to take the blame. On 12 
September 1971, a Trident aircraft crashed 250 miles beyond the 
Chinese border in the Mongolian People's Republic. It contained the 
bodies of the pla commander, Lin Piao, and his second wife, Yeh 
Chun. Everyone on board was dead and some of the corpses were 
riddled with bullets. According to Peking, Lin had been fleeing after 
the discovery of a plot of his to murder Mao. 'Captured documents', 
in which Mao was referred to by the code-name 'B-52', were 
produced, proving that Lin had sought to kill Mao in a traffic- 
accident, poison his food, use the air force to bomb his house, and 
blow up his train. He had written: 'B-52 is a paranoid and a sadist 
. . . the greatest dictator and tyrant in China's history .... Those 
who are his greatest friends today will be his prisoners 
tomorrow .... Even his own son has been driven mad by him.' The 
plot was allegedly betrayed to Chou En-lai by Lin's daughter by an 
earlier marriage, 'Little Bean', who hated her stepmother. 69 A more 
plausible version had it that Lin had been killed some time before by 
his colleagues, at a meeting in the Great Hall of the People - a 
real-life revolutionary drama this time. The next year a major plot 
was 'exposed' within the army, and a score of senior officers tried to 
escape to Hong Kong. A great many books and documents in which 
Lin had had a hand were recalled, together with his 'epitaphs' and 
portraits. Eleven famous photos of Mao, with Lin on them, were 
withdrawn. The episode, about which the truth remains obscure, 
closed with a note in the Chinese press, 20 February 1974, revealing 
that 'Little Bean' had been shot to death near Canton, a strip of red 
cloth pinned to the body reading 'Treason and heinous crime'. 70 

By this time the Mao era was drawing to its close. Chou was 
already suffering from cancer, Mao himself from Parkinson's Dis- 
ease. His last phase was marked by acrimony, consciousness of 
failure and confusion. He quarrelled with Chiang Ching and by 1973 
they had ceased to live together. She had to submit in writing 
requests to see him, stating her reasons. A note from him to her dated 
21 March 1974 read: 'It is better not to see each other. You have not 
carried out what I have been telling you for many years. What is the 
good of seeing each other any more? You have books by Marx and 
Lenin and you have my books. You stubbornly refuse to study them.' 
He told her her 'demands' had injured his health. 'I am already eighty 
years old. Even so you bother me by saying various things. Why 
don't you have sympathy? I envy Chou En-lai and his wife.' What 
must have frightened her as much was the reappearance of her enemy 
Teng, back from the dead and thereafter known as 'Lazarus'; he told 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 563 

journalists he had been at 'reform school' in Jiangsi Province. In 
1975 Mao produced his final slogan, Three Mores and One Less': 
'Chou should rest more, Teng should work more, Wang should 
study more and Chiang Ching should talk less.' He appended a 
maxim: The ears are made so as to remain open but the mouth may 
shut.' 71 

Sometimes, in his last period, Mao was perky: 'People say that 
China loves peace. That's boasting. In fact the Chinese love struggle. 
I do for one.' He kept his hatred of formal education: The more 
books one reads, the stupider one becomes.' On the other hand, just 
before his death he received a report on the education system from 
the head of Qinghua University, who had been purged by Chiang 
Ching, then rehabilitated. Mao told him to speak only for three 
minutes. He was told, grimly: Thirty seconds will be enough. 
College students study the textbooks of secondary schools, and 
their academic level is that of primary schools.' Mao (sadly): 'If this 
situation goes on, not only will the Party fail, but the nation itself will 
perish.' 72 His mind wandered between religious and secular belief. 
'My body is riddled with diseases. I have an appointment with God.' 
On another occasion he asked colleagues: 'Are there not some of you 
who thought I would go to see Marx sooner?' 'None.' 'I don't believe 
it.' 73 His last saying was enigmatic: The people do not support the 
reversals of verdicts.' 

The watershed year of 1976 opened an era of opaque confusion. 
Chou died early in April. This discreet mandarin, much respected 
abroad, who kept himself curiously detached from the failures and 
murderous squalor of the regime, seems to have been the only 
member of it to have aroused genuine popular feelings in China. 
When, on 5 April, the authorities removed wreaths placed in his 
memory in Peking's main square, 100,000 people rioted. Teng was 
immediately blamed for this disturbance and disgraced for the 
second time. Mao died on 9 September. During the last months of his 
life there was intense faction-fighting around his bedside. As soon as 
he was dead, Chiang Ching claimed a reconciliation had taken place. 
She produced a bit of paper which she claimed was a poem Mao had 
written to her in extremis: 'You have been wronged,' it said. 'I have 
tried to reach the peak of revolution but I was not successful. But you 
could reach the top.' 74 

However, another bit of paper was waved by Hua Kuo-Feng, who 
had succeeded Chou as premier. Hua was then fifty-five, a relative 
newcomer, having been on the Central Committee only since 1969 
and Minister of Public Security since the previous year. He was 
almost a 'helicopter', a term more usually applied to Chiang Ching's 
fast-rising protege Wang Hung-wen, now the party boss of Shanghai. 



564 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

Mao liked Hua partly because he was a peasant from his favourite 
province, Hunan, chiefly because he was cunningly sycophantic. On 
30 April the old tyrant had scratched out for Hua six characters: 
'With you in charge I have no worries.' Hua's bit of paper was 
undoubtedly authentic. In any case he had more impressive creden- 
tials: control of the top security unit in Peking, Number 8341, which 
protected Mao himself and which Hua had inherited from the old 
security boss Kang Sheng, who had died in December 1975. 

The showdown came on 6 October, a month after Mao's death, at 
a Politburo meeting held in the home of his old comrade Yeh 
Chien-ying, the Defence Minister and effective second man of the 
regime. Chiang Ching was present with Wang and two other leading 
Shanghai cronies. She brandished her paper and demanded the 
chairmanship for herself, with her 'brains', the Shanghai journalist 
Chang Chun-chiao, as premier, and Wang as head of the National 
People's Congress. But the 'Gang of Four', as henceforth they were 
known, lost the 'argument', and were taken straight from the 
meeting to prison. In Shanghai, their stronghold, their followers 
planned to arm 30,000 leftist militia-members, but the local party 
leadership and the garrison commander were removed before any- 
thing decisive could be done. Hua had the security services and 
Chiang Ching had made herself much hated in the army. 75 She may 
have had a following in Shanghai but in Peking the mob loathed her 
and called her 'the Empress', a term of abuse since Boxer days; the 
5 April riot had been directed against her and her friends. It was 
unfortunate for her, too, that 1976 was a year of appalling natural 
disasters, which the Chinese associate with a change in the dynasty. 
In April the largest meteor ever recorded fell on Kirin Province. In 
July and August three earthquakes hit north China, destroying parts 
of Peking and the whole of the nearby industrial centre of Tangshan, 
killing about 665,000 people (775,000 more were injured) - the 
second-worst earthquake disaster in China's history. 

It was a simple matter to blame such things, and genuine man- 
made catastrophes - economic failure, the collapse of the education 
system, the destruction of art treasures and China's cultural life — 
upon the malign influence of 'the Empress' and her gang. Soon 
posters were up: 'Cut Chiang Ching into Ten Thousand Pieces', 
'Deep-fry the Gang of Four in Oil'. For her trial in 1980-1, the 
eventual indictment ran to forty-eight pages. All four were accused of 
an astonishing variety of crimes, and each separately of specific acts 
of wickedness, vanity and extravagance - the last to emphasize that 
their puritanical reign of terror had been hypocritical. Chang had 
even been 'a spy in the pay of Chiang Kai-shek'. Wang was accused 
of philandering, importing expensive stereophonic equipment and, 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 565 

only four days before his arrest, having no less than 114 photographs 
taken of himself. Yao Wen-yuan, the fourth member of the gang, had 
spent $500 on a sumptuous banquet to celebrate Chou's death. 
Chiang Ching herself had drunk saffron water, dined off golden 
carp, kept an entire truckload of pornographic films, including the 
notorious Sound of Music, which she watched every night, ridden a 
horse then changed into a limousine, taken out library books on 
empresses, said that 'Even under Communism there can still be an 
Empress', closed a Canton shipyard because the noise disturbed her, 
prohibited planes landing so she could get to sleep, called the 
Empress-Dowager 'a legalist', had diverted traffic, ordered the leaves 
in Canton to be dusted before she arrived, said 'it is better to have 
socialist trains which run late than revisionist trains which run on 
time', hastened Mao's death by shifting him from one bed to 
another, played poker while he lay dying and said, 'The man must 
abdicate and let the woman take over.' She and the others were 'bad 
eggs' who 'worshipped things foreign, fawned on foreigners and 
maintained illicit foreign relations' and had 'engaged in flagrant 
capitulationism and national betrayal'. They were 'the evil lords of 
literature and the theatre'. 76 Chiang Ching remained defiant 
throughout her seven-week trial, which ended early in 1981, even 
extracting further drama from the proceedings at one point by 
suddenly stripping naked. 77 She was found guilty on all charges and 
condemned to death, sentence being provisionally suspended for two 
years. 

By this time Hua himself was in the shadows, elbowed aside by 
Teng, old Lazarus himself, who had re-emerged into public life in 
1977 and from the end of 1978 was clearly in charge. He was a 
rough, hard man from Szechuan, with something of Mao's own 
coarse brutality but without a suspicion of romanticism or any 
interest in politics as an art-form. Teng had been the most consistent 
opponent of Mao's political dramas, though he had sometimes been 
obliged to play bit-parts in them. He had spoken out grittily and 
often against the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Now that it 
was disavowed and punished, his emergence at the top was logical 
and perhaps inevitable. He despised people for whom politics was 
the only thing in life that mattered, especially the hard Left: 'They sit 
on the lavatory and can't even manage to shit.' 'One should not talk 
of class struggle every day. In real life, not everything is class 
struggle.' He had nothing but contempt for proletarian art. 'You just 
see a bunch of people running to and fro on the stage. Not a trace of 
art ... . Foreigners clap them only out of courtesy.' Having heard the 
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, he said, 'This is what I call food for 
the spirit.' Chinese operas 'nowadays', he added, were nothing more 



566 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

than 'gong-and-drum shows'. 'You go to a theatre and you find 
yourself on a battlefield.' Teng had no particular animosities: 'Let 
bygones by bygones. Those dismissed from office should be rein- 
stated.' He said he wanted an end to the 'shouting and yelling'. The 
country must get back to work again. 'Most college students now 
carry nothing but one brush for all posters. They can't do anything 
else.' 'Scientists today are not given time for research. How can they 
create or invent things?' Not least, the army was demoralized, as in 
Chiang Kai-shek's day, and liable to revert to war-lordism. It had 
become 'thick-skinned, disunited, arrogant, lazy and soft'. 78 

Teng, in short, was an old-fashioned, reactionary disciplinarian, 
now in his late seventies, who believed in law and order and hard 
work. He promptly sent the army into Vietnam, partly to punish the 
Vietnamese pro-Soviet leadership for persecuting its Chinese minor- 
ity, but mainly to teach the pla that life was a serious business: 
undisciplined units were put in the van and suffered appalling 
casualties. That done, he set about clearing up some of the mess 
Mao's long reign had left behind in the economy. It was now 
admitted publicly that the Mao era had been characterized, not by 
the puritanical austerity of which it had boasted, but by appalling 
corruption in high places. 79 The Peking People's Daily apologized to 
readers for 'all the lies and distortions' it had carried and, more 
remarkably, warned them against 'the false, boastful and untrue 
reports' which it 'still often prints'. 80 

In 1978—9 decisions were taken to move away from a Stalinist- 
Maoist stress on heavy industry and towards an economic structure 
more suited to a semi-developed country. The percentage of gnp 
invested was to fall from the unsustainable 38 per cent of 1978 to 
about 25 per cent by the mid-1980s. Profit-motives and bonuses were 
to be introduced; the law was to be reformed with emphasis on civil 
rights; democratic means were to be devised to check bureaucratic 
abuse; above all, market forces were to be allowed to exert their 
beneficent force. 81 The party was to cease to be the all-powerful force 
in national life. Its membership, 39 million in 1982, had apparently 
doubled in size during the Cultural Revolution, and Teng warned 
that many of these people had not been properly 'educated' and were 
'below standard'. In a report issued in spring 1981, he claimed that 
many party members 'loved flattery', were 'complacent and fuzzy- 
minded', had stopped 'caring about the hardships of the masses', 
were 'covered in the dust of bureaucracy' and were 'arrogant, 
conservative, lazy, interested only in pleasure and imbued with an 
ideology of privilege'. 82 The 'new realism' coincided with more 
natural disasters, including a drought which dominated agriculture 
in 1980 and 1981 and forced a proud regime to beg the West for 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 567 

help. As the 1980s opened, therefore, China ceased to be the 
miraculous new superpower and finally rang down the curtain on the 
make-believe world of Maoist romanticism, which had ended in 
horrific melodrama. Instead it entered the real world of slow, painful 
and pragmatic progress. 

Mao's regime in China was a tragedy. But it did not always seem 
so at the time, at least to the outside world. During the 1950s and 
1960s it was fashionable to contrast his authoritarian centralism, 
which had given China unity, stability and (it was asserted) steadily 
rising living-standards, with the ineffectiveness of Indian parliament- 
ary democracy. As we have seen, the Nehru era in world affairs, 
when he appeared the leading international statesman, the one most 
attuned to the needs of the times, was based on a series of illusions, 
the most important of which was his belief that India and China, the 
two most populous nations, could act together, what he termed 
Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai (India and China brothers). The policy was 
undermined by the first India-China conflict in 1959 and collapsed 
in ruins during the far more serious Chinese invasion of 1962. For 
Nehru, now seventy-three, it was an unrelieved personal disaster and 
he never recovered from it. When he died in his sleep in May 1964, 
he was a sad and bewildered man. 

With large, overpopulated, poor and industrially backward coun- 
tries like India and China, the chief problem of state is an elementary 
one: how to preserve the integrity of the state? How to maintain any 
system of government the bulk of the population will respect and 
acknowledge? Equally, the chief temptation of government is to 
bolster its popularity by taking advantage of its neighbour's misfor- 
tunes. Mao succumbed to this urge in 1959 and 1962, taking 
advantage of India's weakness and division. It intensified India's 
difficulties* though in the long run it did nothing to lessen his own. 

From the moment of partition in 1947-8, both India and Pakistan 
were cast as mutual enemies. For a quarter of a century, economists 
have continued to debate whether British rule hastened or impeded 
India's economic progress. 83 Nehru had believed unquestioningly 
that 'Most of our problems today are due to . . . arrested growth and 
the prevention by British authority of normal adjustments.' 84 But 
this was to ignore the main British contribution of imposing unity on 
the sub-continent and preventing the 'normal adjustments' of disinte- 
gration. British rule had been a progressive process of economic 
integration. Partition marked the first stage in its reversal. The 
internal conflicts within Pakistan, especially between its east and 
west wings, and comparable strains between Indian central govern- 
ment and the provinces, suggested that a fate like China's in the 
1920s was only just round the corner. Pakistan showed an inherent 



568 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

tendency towards war-lordism in the shape of ephemeral military 
dictatorships. India evinced a contrary preference for weak par- 
liamentary rule. 

When Nehru died, a group of Congress Party and provincial 
bosses, known as 'the Syndicate', ganged up to prevent the succes- 
sion of his most formidable follower, Morarji Desai. The man they 
picked instead, Lai Badahur Shastri, seemed to symbolize impotence. 
He was known as 'the Little Sparrow' and was so small that he only 
came up to the bottom of General de Gaulle's paunch. In the autumn 
of 1965 India and Pakistan drifted into war over Kashmir. Militarily 
it was inconclusive; economically, immensely destructive to both 
sides. It was settled by a meeting between the Pakistan dictator, 
Marshal Ayub Khan, and Shastri at Tashkent in January 1966, and 
the effort so exhausted the Little Sparrow that he died the following 
night. 

Bewildered, the Congress bosses turned to Nehru's daughter, Mrs 
Gandhi, who had served as Shastri's Minister of Information. Many 
Hindus believed she was her father reincarnated, and shouted 
Jawaharlal ki jai ('Long live Nehru!'). 85 She kept five Irish wolf- 
hounds, each bigger than her predecessor, and there was nothing 
small or weak about her. With China hostile, she saw India's future 
as linked to a Soviet alliance, and took the country towards the Left. 
In 1969 she quarrelled with Desai, her Finance Minister, sacked him, 
nationalized the banks, smashed up the old Congress Party and 
created a new one around her personal faction. She broke the 
financial power of the princely class, and when the Supreme Court 
ruled her actions unconstitutional, she dissolved parliament in 
March 1971 and won an overwhelming victory, taking 350 out of 
525 seats. 

Yet Mrs Gandhi, calculating and unscrupulous behind her hooded 
kestrel eyes, had no more grasp of economic realities than her father, 
and like him turned to foreign affairs for relief. She found the answer 
in the growing distress of Pakistan. The two wings had never had 
anything in common except the Muslim religion, and fear of Hindu 
India. The country was ruled from the west, and this was reflected in 
an increasing disparity of per capita income: in the west it rose 
1959-67 from 366 to 463 rupees, in the east only from 278 to 313. 
Although the bulk of the population lived in the east (70 out of 125 
million in the late 1960s), and produced most of the country's 
exports, the west got the imports. It had five to six times the power 
production of the east, and 26,000 hospital beds to 6,900 in the 
east. 86 It was one of the many grievances of the east wing that the 
Pakistani government had taken no effective flood-control measures 
in the Bay of Bengal. On the night of 12 November 1970 a cyclone 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 569 

struck the area, producing one of the greatest natural disasters of the 
century. A fifty-mile-wide wave swept inland, drowning hundreds of 
villages, turned itself into an ocean of mud, then swept out again, 
carrying with it hundreds more: over 300,000 people lost their lives. 

The effect was to inspire the East Pakistan leader, Sheikh Mujib 
Rahman, to demand a federal system, and he won elections on this 
programme. The Pakistan government sent out General Tikka Khan, 
known as 'the butcher of Baluchistan' from his activities in the west 
wing, as martial law administrator, with instructions from the 
current dictator, Yahya Khan, 'to sort those fellows out'. On 25 
March 1971 he unleashed his troops on Dacca University, and the 
next day Mujib proclaimed an independent Bangladesh Republic. 
India could probably not have kept out of the civil war in any case, 
for by mid-1971 there were 10 million refugees in her territory. But 
Pakistan resolved Mrs Gandhi's dilemma by launching a pre-emptive 
strike on Indian air bases. On 4 December she declared war, India 
recognized Bangladesh, and invaded the east wing. For the Indian 
Army it was an easy campaign, ending in Pakistani surrender. The 
Indian Commander-in-Chief and the Pakistani commander in the 
east wing had been at the Sandhurst military academy together. The 
former sent the latter his adc with a message: 'My dear Abdullah, I 
am here. The game is up. I suggest you give yourself up to me and I'll 
look after you.' 

The victory over Pakistan was the high tide of Mrs Gandhi's 
career. Thereafter events moved against her. The friendship with 
Bangladesh did not last long. As an independent power it soon 
became a natural ally of Pakistan. Her own regional problems 
multiplied, exacerbated by the natural disasters which broke up 
Pakistan. In 1972 the monsoon failed, bringing drought and then 
famine. In 1973 the security forces in Uttar Pradesh mutinied. She 
had to turn to the army and take over the state. The following year 
she had to put down a revolt in Gujarat, and take that over too. The 
same year, in Bihar, she used the Border Security Force and the 
Central Reserve Police against dissenters led by her father's old 
colleague Jayaprakash Narayan, who employed the Gandhi-like 
tactics of a gherao, or peaceful blockade, of the state parliament, and 
a bundh^ or enforced closure, of shops and offices. All the disruptive 
and regional opposition forces in the nation began to congregate 
together in a new Janata Front, and in 1975 Narayan led demonstra- 
tions throughout India, threatening to set up Janata Sarkars (people's 
governments) all over the north. At the same time Mrs Gandhi ran 
into trouble over electoral offences with the high court, - which 
declared her 1971 election void. This was precisely the combination 
which destroyed British India: concerted agitation to make normal 



570 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

administration impossible, and the difficulty of controlling it within 
the framework of the rule of law. 

As an exponent of ruthlessness, Mrs Gandhi was more than a 
match for any viceroy. In Bihar alone she sent in 60,000 police and 
paramilitaries to break up Narayan's gherao. She met a rail strike 
with mass arrests without warrants. Since the Pakistan war she had 
benefited from a State of External Emergency, but this did not enable 
her to ignore or reverse court verdicts. On 25 June 1975 she stopped 
the newspapers and arrested Narayan, Desai and most of her other 
opponents. The next day she declared a State of Internal Emergency, 
in effect a putsch by the government against the opposition. She 
invited her frightened party leaders to her house to put some courage 
into them. She said: 'Do you know the famous proverb, "When the 
great eagle flies under the stars, the small birds hide"?' Then, turning 
to one MP, she asked fiercely: 'What was that proverb? Repeat it!' 
Petrified, he replied: 'Madam, when the great evil fries under the 
stars, the small birds hide.' 87 

Since independence India had clung tenaciously to democracy and 
had drawn condescending comparisons with militaristic Pakistan. 
One reason why Mrs Gandhi dabbled in authoritarianism was that 
she felt she had to compete with the populist demagoguery of 
Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. Bhutto was a professional politician, thrust into 
power as an alternative to military incompetence after the Ban- 
gladesh debacle. He ruled Pakistan with considerable eclat, mainly 
by bending all the regulations in his favour, firing judges, suppressing 
newspapers and fiddling with top army appointments. 88 But, pre- 
cisely because Bhutto was a civilian, Mrs Gandhi felt she could not 
desert parliamentarianism completely. The result was that the em- 
ergency period was a succession of ad hoc arrangements, without 
any real chain of command or clear legal responsibilities, answerable 
to the courts: the perfect formula for cruelty and corruption. Many 
thousands of political activists were held in prison, often in horrible 
conditions. They included prominent people, such as the dowager 
queens of Gwalior and Jaipur, and Snehalata Reddy, the socialist 
daughter of a famous film-producer, who died from her experiences. 
George Fernandez, who had organized the rail strike, went under- 
ground, but his brother was arrested and tortured. 

Even before the emergency Mrs Gandhi had been faced with many 
charges of corruption, especially against her son Sanjay, and in the 
lawless confusion the decay of Indian public life spread rapidly. She 
now made Sanjay head of the Youth Congress and put him in charge 
of the more radical aspects of her birth-control schemes, which since 
1970 she had considered the most important of all India's domestic 
programmes. Sanjay and his friends took the opportunity to engage 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 571 

in social engineering on the Maoist model. He brutally moved 
slum-dwellers from Delhi's open spaces to the outer suburbs and, 
more important, set up huge sterilization camps in which hundreds 
of thousands of Indian males were, by a combination of bribes and 
bullying, subjected to vasectomy operations carried out under the 
most primitive conditions. With the press and radio curbed, Indians 
had to turn to the bbc to discover what was happening in their 
own country. Since, by her own admission, Mrs Gandhi did not 
listen to the bbc ('the bbc had always been hostile to me'), she was 
often ill-briefed herself. 89 When Bhutto announced elections for 
March 1977, she felt she had to compete and hold one herself, 
believing (from the reports of sycophantic regional officials) that 
she could win and so legitimize her emergency. The results, in fact, 
were disastrous for both of them. Bhutto won handsomely, but the 
uproar over the way in which this was achieved led in turn to 
martial law and another military coup. He was charged with 
conspiracy to murder and, after two long and controversial trials, 
was hanged in April 1979. 90 Mrs Gandhi lost the elections and her 
seat, dragged down by Sanjay's social engineering and a multitude 
of other liabilities. 

The victorious Janata Party, however, was not so much an 
alternative to Gandhiism as a coalition of the discontented. Its most 
considerable figure, Desai, had many of Gandhi's vices and none of 
his virtues. He did not drink or smoke and loudly asserted that the 
British had introduced liquor and tobacco to corrupt the natives. 
He made great play with his spinning-wheel. He declined the use of 
modern medicine. To keep himself fit he drank a glass of his own 
urine every morning. The Health Minister, Raj Narain, also be- 
lieved in the urine treatment and commended it officially. Asked 
about birth-control, he said that women should eat herbs to prevent 
pregnancy. Such eccentricities were unaccompanied by solid admin- 
istrative gifts or probity. Indeed Janata rule was even more corrupt 
than Mrs Gandhi's Congress Party. Attempts to conduct a Commis- 
sion of Inquiry into her misdeeds or to bring her to trial (she spent a 
week in gaol) merely stirred up an immense sea of mud which flung 
itself in all directions. Returned to parliament at a by-election, then 
expelled, she was able to reverse the roles and present herself as the 
victim of persecution, making inspired use of the 1939 hit by the 
Lancashire singer Gracie Fields, 'Wish me luck as you wave me 
goodbye' - a weird instance of the survival of colonial Values'. 91 At 
the election of 3 January 1980 the Indians were faced by a choice 
between familiar evils, and their instinct led them to vote for the 
nearest thing they knew to a royal dynasty. Mrs Gandhi won by a 
landslide, her party taking 351 seats out of 524. The 1977 result 



572 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

was a verdict against tyranny even at the risk of chaos; that of 1980 a 
vote against chaos even at the risk of tyranny again. 

The history of post-independence India tended to stress the 
intractable nature of the problem Britain had faced: how to keep the 
peace among a vast and enormously diverse collection of peoples 
while preserving constitutional and legal safeguards? Nehru's as- 
sumption that the problem would ease after independence proved 
wholly unfounded. In fact it grew steadily more difficult, not least 
because population doubled during the next generation. According 
to government calculations, it was 683,810,051 in January 1981. 92 
Under the pressure of these heaving masses, the structure of civil 
liberties created under British rule began to subside, though it never 
collapsed completely. Mrs Gandhi's emergency was, however, an 
important stage in this decline. Effective civil control over the police 
and the security forces was not re-established. Order of a sort was 
maintained, but more by terror than by justice. In November 1980, 
the press revealed that in the state of Bihar the police systematically 
used acid and bicycle spokes to blind suspects. Some thirty authenti- 
cated cases were brought to light. The following January, cases were 
reported from the holy city of Benares of police breaking the legs of 
men in custody. 93 The police were also accused of murder in their 
efforts to put down dacoitry, and their use of torture became a 
matter of frequent censure by the judiciary. As a judge of the 
Allahabad High Court put it: 'There is no better organized force for 
crime in India than the Indian police.' 94 

What made such savagery particularly detestable was that it 
appeared to reflect the bias of caste. The boast of British rule was 
that, while unable to eliminate caste, its worst consequences were 
mitigated by the British principle of equality before the law. It had 
been Churchill's great fear, his principal reason for resisting rapid 
independence, that the lower castes would be its principal victims, 
just as the higher castes (especially Brahmins like the Nehrus) were 
its undoubted beneficiaries. The most reprehensible aspect of police 
atrocities was that the police themselves, and still more the politi- 
cians who protected them, came from higher castes while, in almost 
every case, their victims were low-caste. Independence did nothing 
for the 'untouchables', who numbered over 100 million by the 
beginning of the 1980s. Their token representation in parliament and 
government was itself an aspect of their exploitation. Their way of 
life, their capacity to survive at all, remained a mystery, the least 
explored corner of Indian society. 95 There were many indications 
that police terror, to which authority seemed increasingly indifferent, 
was a form of social control rooted in the infinite gradations of 
privilege. 



EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 573 

More than half the human race lives in the great mainland nations 
of Asia. By the 1980s the Chinese population alone had passed the 
1,000 million mark. All, since securing independence or escaping 
foreign tutelage, engaged in 'social' experiments. China opted for 
Communism, including collectivized agriculture and the total nation- 
alization of industry. Burma chose one-party socialism, consolidated 
from 1962 by a further layer of military control under General (later 
President) Ne Win. Pakistan under Bhutto carried through a sweep- 
ing programme of nationalization. Both Pakistan and India kept out 
market forces by high tariff barriers. India's predominantly socialist 
economy was planned with a conventional, Stalinist stress on heavy 
industry, and even its substantial and vigorous private sector was 
subjected to intense regulation, made bearable only by ubiquitous 
corruption. After a generation, the results in each case were depress- 
ingly similar and meagre. These powers viewed each other with 
varying degrees of hostility, though China and Pakistan were in an 
uneasy alliance dictated by their common hatred for India. China 
made her first nuclear weapons in 1964, India in 1974, Pakistan in 
1978. All these nations (including Bangladesh, the poorest) spent a 
much higher proportion of their gnp on defence than during the 
colonial period. In Burma, for instance, chiefly on account of 
Chinese backing for Communist rebel groups, military spending by 
1980 absorbed one-third of the budget and almost all foreign 
exchange earnings. 96 In every case, the high hopes raised by the 
Bandung generation, of a sudden and spectacular attainment of 
Western-style living standards, against a background of peace and 
non-alignment, had been abandoned by the end of the 1970s. 

In the late 1940s, the Asian half of the human race had been told 
that there was a direct, immediate and essentially political solution to 
their plight. Experience exposed this belief as a fallacy. There were 
strong grounds for concluding, indeed, that politics, and especially 
ideological politics, was a primary contributor to human misery. No 
better illustration could be provided than the grim entity covered by 
the words the Calcutta Metropolitan District, in and around which 
were grouped 150 million of the poorest people on earth. Even in 
colonial times it inspired administrative horror. Kipling, with his 
customary prescience, called it the 'City of Dreadful Night'. 'It had', 
he wrote, a peculiar attribute, 'the bcs or Big Calcutta Stink'. 97 In 
the early 1940s it was becoming difficult for the municipal authori- 
ties, leaving politics aside, to keep even most of the city properly 
sewered. Partition dealt the city a blow from which it never 
recovered. It wrecked the economy of large parts of Bengal, pushing 
4 million virtually unemployable refugees into the western half, one 
million into Calcutta itself. Between the 1921 and 1961 censuses, the 



574 EXPERIMENTING WITH HALF MANKIND 

population had trebled and the effort to run standard modern 
services had been abandoned. 

By the end of the 1960s, an observer wrote that most of the 
District 'is without municipally organized sewerage systems, without 
piped water, drains or sewers, and even without privately owned 
means of sewage disposal, like septic tanks'. There were about 
200,000 primitive communal lavatories, 'low, cramped open brick 
sheds with platforms above earthenware bowls or dirt floors'. 98 As 
we have noted, the Bangladesh crisis tipped another 10 million 
homeless people into Indian Bengal, a great proportion of whom 
ended up on the streets of Calcutta, so that by the late 1970s a 
million souls were sleeping in the open in the city centre alone. The 
fiercely partisan and doctrinaire politics of West Bengal, run by 
Marxists in the 1960s and 1970s, when not under constitutional 
suspension and direct 'presidential rule', generated limitless impro- 
vidence and corruption. 

Calcutta's plight attracted many voluntary workers, who joined 
the efforts of Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity, who 
had set up their stations in Calcutta in 1948. But often the Marxist 
government seemed more anxious to drive out volunteer medical 
bodies, who drew attention to its failures, than to tackle the problem 
at its root." Calcutta became the realized anti-Utopia of modern 
times, the city of shattered illusions, the dark not the light of Asia. It 
constituted an impressive warning that attempts to experiment on 
half the human race were more likely to produce Frankenstein 
monsters than social miracles. 



SEVENTEEN 

The European Lazarus 



If post-war history took the new nations of Africa and Asia down a 
series of blind alleys, often terminating in horror and savagery, 
Europe's experience offered more comfort. This was unexpected. 
The prevailing mood in 1945 was despair and impotence. The 
European era in history was over. In a sense Hitler had been the last 
truly European leader, able to initiate world events from a Euro- 
centric vision. He lost that power at the end of 1941. The vacuum 
opened by his colossal fall could not be filled by European rivals. At 
the end of the war, the two non-European superpowers stood, as it 
were, on the rim of a spent volcano, peering contemptuously into its 
still smouldering depths, uninvolved in its collapse but glad it no 
longer had the daemonic energy to terrify humanity. 

On 26 October 1945, at the opening of the new ballet at the 
Theatre des Champs-Elysees, the drop-curtain by Picasso was hissed 
by the packed high-society audience. 1 That was the old Paris. Three 
days later, at the Club Maintenant, Jean-Paul Sartre delivered a 
lecture, 'Existentialism is a Humanism 5 . Here was the new Paris. This 
occasion, too, was packed. Men and women fainted, fought for 
chairs, smashing thirty of them, shouted and barracked. It coincided 
with the launching of Sartre's new review, Les Temps modernes, in 
which he argued that literary culture, plus the haute couture of the 
fashion shops, were the only things France now had left — a symbol 
of Europe, really — and he produced Existentialism to give people a 
bit of dignity and to preserve their individuality in the midst of 
degradation and absurdity. The response was overwhelming. As his 
consort, Simone de Beauvoir, put it, 'We were astounded by the 
furore we caused.' 2 Existentialism was remarkably un-Gallic; hence, 
perhaps, its attractiveness. Sartre was half-Alsacian (Albert Schweit- 
zer was his cousin) and he was brought up in the house of his 
grandfather, Karl Schweitzer. His culture was as much German as 
French. He was essentially a product of the Berlin philosophy school 

575 



576 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

and especially of Heidegger, from whom most of his ideas derived. 
Sartre had had a good war. Despite the surface enmities, there was a 
certain coming together of the French and German spirit. Paris was 
not an uncongenial place for an intellectual to be, provided he could 
ignore such unpleasantnesses as the round-up of Jews, as most 
contrived to do without difficulty. 3 As the Jewish intellectual Ber- 
nard-Henri Levy was later to point out, radical, proto-fascist forms 
of racialism were rarely repugnant to the French, not least to French 
intellectuals: he even called it 'the French ideology'. 4 

The Paris theatre flourished under the Nazis. Andre Malraux later 
snarled: 'I was facing the Gestapo while Sartre, in Paris, let his plays 
be produced with the authorization of the German censors.' 5 Albert 
Biissche, theatre critic of the Nazi forces' newspaper, Pariser Zei- 
tung, called Sartre's play Huis Clos 'a theatrical event of the first 
order'. He was not the only beneficiary of German approval. When a 
new play by the pied-noir writer Albert Camus, Le Malentendu, was 
presented at the Theatre des Mathurins on 24 June 1944, it was 
hooted by the French intellectual elite (then largely fascist) because 
Camus was known to be in the Resistance. Biissche found it 'filled 
with profound thoughts ... a pioneering work'. 6 Camus did not 
share Sartre's aloofness to the war; he was in fact one of only 4,345 
Frenchmen and women who received the special Rosette of the 
Resistance medal. But his thinking reflected the growing contiguity 
of French and German philosophy which the Occupation promoted 
and which was an important. strand in the post-war pattern. The 
most important influence in his life was Nietzsche, whom in effect, 
through his novels UEtr anger and La Peste, he gallicized for an 
entire generation of French youth. 

Sartre and Camus came together in 1943—4, protagonists - and 
eventually antagonists - in a cult centred on St Germain-des-Pres 
which sought to relate philosophy and literature to public action. 
Their caravanserai was the Cafe Flore, itself a symbol of the 
ambiguities of French intellectual life. St Germain had been a haunt 
of Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau, who had congregated in the old 
Cafe Procope. The Flore dated from the Second Empire, when it had 
been patronized by Gautier, Musset, Sand, Balzac, Zola and Huys- 
mans; later by Apollinaire and later still by the circle of Action 
Franqaise, led by Maurras himself: Sartre occupied his still-warm 
seat. 7 Existentialism in its post-war presentation was derived from 
Kant's 'Act as if the maxim of your action were to become through 
your will a general natural law'. Our positive acts, Sartre taught, 
created 'not only the man that we would like to be ourselves' but also 
'an image of man such as we think he ought to be'. Man could shape 
his own essence by positive political acts. He thus offered a rationa- 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 577 

lized human gesture of defiance to despair - what Karl Popper called 
'a new theology without God'. It contained an element of German 
pessimism, characteristic of both Heidegger and Nietzsche, in that it 
placed exaggerated emphasis upon the fundamental loneliness of 
man in a godless world, and upon the resulting tension between the 
self and the world. 8 But for young people it was magic. It was a form 
of Utopian romanticism with much the same attractions as the 
Romantic movement 150 years before. Indeed it was more attractive 
because it offered political activism too. As Popper complained, it 
was a respectable form of fascism which, needless to add, could 
easily be allied to forms of Marxism. Camus insisted he was never an 
Existentialist, and in 1951 he and Sartre quarrelled mortally over the 
latter's defence of various forms of totalitarian violence. But it was 
Camus's re-creation, in modern terms, of the solitary Byronic hero, 
who resists fate and an alien world by defiant acts, which brought the 
cult so vividly to life and gave it actual meaning to youth on both 
sides of the Rhine. 

Thus Existentialism was a French cultural import, which Paris then 
re-exported to Germany, its country of origin, in a sophisticated and 
vastly more attractive guise. The point is worth stressing, for it was 
the first time since the age of Goethe, Byron and De Stael that young 
people in France and Germany felt a spontaneous cultural affinity, a 
shared Weltanschauung. It served, then, as a preparation for a more 
solid economic and political harmonization, for which circumstances 
were also propitious. Yet this might not have come about but for two 
further circumstances. The first was the final (and possibly terminal) 
maturing of Christian activism in politics, which for a vital genera- 
tion became the dominant mode in Europe. The second was the 
emergence of a group of European titans — not Byronic, not young, 
not romantic, not indeed heroic in any obvious still less Existentialist 
sense — who were to revivify the corpse of a Europe which had slain 
itself. Both the agency, Christianity, and the agents, Adenauer, 
de Gasperi, de Gaulle, were by nature abhorrent to the founders of 
Existentialist activism. But then history habitually proceeds by such 
ironies. 

Adenauer, de Gasperi, de Gaulle were great survivors; men whose 
turn failed to come, might never have come, then did come by gift of 
catastrophe and in rich plenitude. At the end of the war in 1945, 
Alcide de Gasperi was sixty-five, Adenauer sixty-nine. Both were 
men from the borders, devout Catholics, anti-nationalists, men who 
revered the family as the social unit, hated the state (except as a 
minimal, regrettable necessity), and believed the most important 
characteristic of organized society to be the rule of law, which must 
reflect Natural Law, that is the ascendancy of absolute values. In 



578 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

short they set their faces against many of the salient features of the 
twentieth century. And theirs were obstinate faces; strange faces. A 
terrible accident in 1917 had given Adenauer's the mahogany 
impassiveness of a cigar-store Indian. 9 De Gasperi, like Adenauer, 
tall and excessively thin in youth, faced life with the scowl of a 
guard-dog. Both were confederalists. Adenauer represented the poly- 
centrist Germany of the Holy Roman Empire, de Gasperi the 
northern Italy of the Habsburgs. 

De Gasperi, indeed, was born under Austrian rule. As his father 
commanded the local gendarmes, he felt a secular loyalty to a royal 
house rather than to a nation state. But his primary allegiance was 
spiritual. Throughout his life he went to Mass every day if possible. 
In the remarkable letter proposing marriage to his future wife, 
Francesca Romani, in 1921, he wrote: 'The personality of the living 
Christ pulls me, enslaves me and comforts me as though I were a 
child. Come, I want you with me, to be drawn to that same 
attraction, as though to an abyss of light.' 10 He went to Vienna 
University and admired the city's famous mayor, Karl Lueger, 
though for quite different reasons to Hitler. He believed Lueger had 
indicated ways in which the 'social encyclicals' of the more progres- 
sive popes could be realized. His formation was thus German 
Catholic populism and his earliest writing was in the Austrian 
Catholic paper, the Reichspost. De Gasperi, indeed, was almost 
immune to the two great diseases of modern times: ethnic national- 
ism and the belief that states based upon it can be transformed into 
Utopias. In his first speech, made in Trento in 1902, he urged his 
listeners: 'Be Catholic first, then Italian!' He said he 'deplored' the 
'idolization' of the nation and the religione delta patria. His motto 
was 'Catholic, Italian, then democratic!' - in that order. 11 

Hence de Gasperi was the natural antipode to Mussolini. The two 
men debated 'Socialism in History' in a Merano beer-hall in 1909, 
Mussolini urging the need for violence, de Gasperi the necessity for 
basing political action on absolute principle. He had to leave early to 
catch a train, followed to the door by Mussolini's fluent jeers. 'He 
called de Gasperi: 'A man of slovenly, ungrammatical prose, a 
superficial man who invokes an Austrian timetable to avoid an 
embarrassing debate.' 12 De Gasperi, for his part, never recognized in 
Mussolini anything except a destructive radical: 'Bolshevism in 
black', as he put it. His own Partito Popolare Trentino was 
welcomed by Don Luigi Sturzo into the Catholic Popular Party, 
which might have ruled inter-war Italy but for Mussolini's putsch. 
De Gasperi disliked Italian parliamentary politics ('an equestrian 
circus'), with their theatricals and oratorial tricks, which he always 
spurned. But he hated the big totalitarian state still more. As he said 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 579 

at the last Partito Popolare National Congress, 28 June 1925: 'The 
theoretical and practical principles of fascism are the antithesis of the 
Christian concept of the State, which lays down that the natural 
rights of personality, family and society exist before the State.' 
Fascism was just 'the old Police State reappearing in disguise, holding 
over Christian institutions the sword of Damocles'. Hauled before a 
fascist tribunal in November 1926, he insisted: 'It is the very concept 
of the fascist state I cannot accept. For there are natural rights which 
the state cannot trample upon.' 13 De Gasperi was lucky. Mussolini 
threw him into the Regina Coeli prison in 1927. He might not have 
survived the regime any more than Gramsci. But the signature of the 
Lateran Treaty in 1929 enabled Pius xi to get de Gasperi out of 
custody and into the Vatican library, where he was sheltered for the 
next fourteen years. 

Hence when fascism collapsed, de Gasperi was the only unsullied 
major figure to offer the Italian people an alternative to it which was 
not another form of statism. He formed the first post-war coalition 
government in December 1945, and in the elections to the Consti- 
tuent Assembly took his new Christian Democratic Party to the front 
with 35.2 per cent (against 20.7 for the Socialists and 18.9 for the 
Communists). His real breakthrough came in January 1947, when 
the Social Democrats, under Giuseppe Saragat, split from the Marx- 
ist socialists under Pietro Nenni. This enabled de Gasperi to form a 
homogeneous Christian Democratic government, which won the first, 
crucial elections under the new constitution, in April 1948, with 48.5 
per cent of the votes and an absolute majority of the seats (304 out of 
574). This was one of the most important of the post-war European 
elections, for it set a pattern of relative stability in Italy for a 
generation. During the 'de Gasperi era', 1945-53, Italy achieved 
political respectability as a centrist member of European society, 
accepted the Marshall Plan, entered nato, joined the Council of 
Europe and the European Coal and Steel Community and launched 
its own economic miracolo, symbolized by the Vespa, Emilio Pucci 
colours, Pininfarina car-bodies, Necchi sewing-machines and 
Olivetti typewriters, and by the morning greeting in the power-house 
of industrial recovery, Milan — 'Buon lavoroV 

De Gasperi's success undoubtedly helped to pave the way for 
Konrad Adenauer in Germany. Both men constituted possible alter- 
natives to the inter-war totalitarian regimes of their countries. As we 
have seen, Adenauer might have become Chancellor in 1926. But he 
did not think he could have made a success of it. Weimar and the 
chancellorship were held in low esteem and in his view its problems 
were insoluble. He was out of sympathy with the prevailing wisdom 
in Germany. He was not a Rhineland separatist — he was a federalist 



580 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

rather - but he had absolutely no confidence in any 'German genius'. 
'Germans are Belgians with megalomania,' he insisted. The Prussians 
were the worst: 'A Prussian is a Slav who has forgotten who his 
grandfather was.' He used to say: 'Once the night- train from 
Cologne to Berlin crossed the Elbe, I got no more sleep.' 14 Under 
Weimar, the Mayor of Cologne was the unofficial head of the 
German Catholic community and that was enough for Adenauer. He 
had no trace of German racial feeling, no particle of respect for the 
Bismarckian state. What had it given German Catholics? The 
miseries of the Kulturkampf. Hitler dismissed him on 13 March 
1933, and he was lucky not to be killed along with Schleicher under 
cover of the Roehm purge. He thought Hitler was insane to go to war 
and bound to lose it. According to his youngest daughter, Libeth 
Werhahn, the family prayed for defeat. 15 He did not believe in a 
German resistance and had no complaints about the Allied uncondi- 
tional surrender policy, which he thought necessary. 

Adenauer's post-war career illustrates the importance of luck in 
politics. When the Americans took Cologne it had practically ceased 
to exist. Population had fallen from 750,000 to 32,000; Andre Gide, 
visiting the ruins, was so horrified he immediately asked to be driven 
away. It was Allied policy to restore those (if available) who had held 
office until the Nazis sacked them. So the Americans put Adenauer 
back in charge of the city. A few months after it became part of the 
British zone, he was sacked and expelled (October 1945), for reasons 
which were never satisfactorily explained. 16 No doubt Britain, now 
under a Labour government, favoured Social Democrats where 
possible. British administrators saw Germany as united and dis- 
armed, mildly socialist, with industry taken out of the hands of such 
men as Krupps and nationalized. The education and political bran- 
ches of the British military government were staffed with socialist- 
leaning officers, who ensured that Social Democrats ran the radio, 
the news-agency and quasi-official papers like Die Welt. 

Backing the Social Democrats was the first of many serious errors 
in British foreign policy towards Europe. It meant putting their 
money on the spd leader, Kurt Schumacher. A tragic victim of the 
past, he had only one arm and was soon to have a leg amputated; his 
incessant pain made him bitter, excitable, impatient and often 
unreasonable. He was in many ways the opposite to Adenauer: a 
Prussian, a Protestant, a believer in a big state, a 'big' Germany. 17 He 
refused to grasp that his vision for Germany depended essentially on 
Soviet agreement to reunification: it would not work for the trun- 
cated Western zones. Equally important, he refused to see (and the 
British with him) that the real alternative to Hitlerian Germany, 
something which would get the poison out of the system, was not a 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 581 

reconstruction of Bismarckian Germany on Social Democratic lines, 
with an all-powerful paternalist state, a Leninist centralized direction 
of nationalized industry, a huge, Prussian-style bureaucracy and a 
stress on equality, uniformity and collectivity. That was the formula the 
Russians chose for East Germany, and all it produced was a radicalized 
version of the Nazi state, the sort of version Goebbels (and Hitler in his 
final stage) would have favoured. The real antithesis to National 
Socialism was individualism, a society where private arrangements 
took priority over public, where the family was the favoured social unit 
and where the voluntary principle was paramount. 

These were precisely the ideals in which Adenauer believed with 
life-long conviction. As a member, then the patriarch, of a vast, close 
and ramifying family, he had come to regard it (as many millions behind 
the Iron Curtain were also discovering) as the one reliable refuge from 
totalitarian invasion. Of course it could be destroyed utterly - Hitler 
had indeed wiped out entire Jewish families - but it could not be 
corrupted and perverted. Even if it lost many of its members, it closed 
ranks and re-formed itself with remarkable fortitude, as the Jewish ex- 
perience proved. A society in which the family, as opposed to the po- 
litical party and the ideological programme, was the starting-point for 
reconstruction, was the answer to the totalitarian evil. Schumacher's 
assertion that Adenauer's ideas would lead to a 'restoration' of all 
that was worst in Germany was one of the great misjudgements of 
history. It would be difficult to conceive of a man more out of sympathy 
with the German conventional wisdom from the 1860s onward. 

If the British had allowed Adenauer to remain in charge of Cologne, 
he might never have entered the new national politics. They drove him 
there. The Soviet authorities helped by excluding his most dangerous 
rival, Andreas Hermes. During the summer and autumn of 1945 
Christian Democrat groupings emerged in various parts of Germany. 
Adenauer's sacking in Cologne might have been deliberately timed to 
enable him to get control of the New Christian Democratic Union by 
constructing it as a West German federal party with its power-base in 
the Cologne area. He thus created a party organism precisely suited to 
the salient features of the new German state which was emerging. 18 In 
March 1946, in his first public speech, he outlined his aims. The new 
state must no longer dominate the individual. Everyone must be 
allowed to take the initiative in every facet of existence. The Christian 
ethic must be the basis of the German community. The state must be 
federal, and conceived with the view to an eventual creation of a United 
States of Europe. 19 

This speech, one of the most important in the post-war world, which 
marked the real beginning of post-war German and indeed West 
European politics, was made at Cologne University. Adenauer had 



582 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

delivered another remarkable speech there, twenty-seven years be- 
fore, in June 1918: 'Whatever the ultimate shape of the peace 
treaty,' he had then warned, 'here on the Rhine, at the ancient 
international crossroads, German civilization and the civilization of 
the Western democracies will meet during the decades to come. 
Unless a genuine reconciliation is possible between them . . . 
European leadership will be lost for ever.' 20 That opportunity had 
been missed; European leadership had gone, probably for ever. But 
European stability and prosperity were still realizable aims. In 1919 
Adenauer had conceived the idea of a Rhine-Ruhr state within a 
German federation. In July 1946, the British created the Land of 
North Rhine- Westphalia, uniting industrial Rhineland and agricul- 
tural Westphalia, along almost identical boundaries with his 1919 
conception and so handing him the perfect instrument for his 
design: his luck again. 

For the next three years Adenauer played the cards Britain had 
unwittingly handed him with consummate finesse. He was a tough 
old bird; he had learnt patience. He kept his dignity and his temper. 
He was flexible, quiet, never banged the table or fawned, but 
charmed and sometimes discreetly flattered. He had taken to heart 
Churchill's saying, 'The Germans are always either at one's throat 
or one's feet'; he was neither. As one British minister put it, he had 
'a power to stand outside the Germans'; he knew 'the weaknesses 
that had betrayed them'. 21 Events played into his hands. The tighter 
the Russians screwed down the Iron Curtain, the more committed 
the Allies became to the creation of the West German state he 
wanted. He ruled out Berlin as a capital: 'Whoever makes Berlin the 
new capital will be creating a new spiritual Prussia.' The capital 
must be 'where Germany's windows are wide open to the west'. 22 
The first Berlin crisis reinforced this view. Adenauer blocked Social 
Democrat plans for the general nationalization of German indus- 
try, which initially had British support. By rejecting Marshall Aid 
for East Germany, the Russians did Adenauer a double favour: they 
undermined Jakob Kaiser, the Christian Democrat union leader and 
his chief party rival, and they made possible the separate economic 
development of West Germany which Adenauer required for his 
long-term aims. For he recognized, even at this early stage, that 
France would never consent to a United States of Europe which 
included a paramount Germany with its undivided industrial base 
and all its 80 million people. The Russians were the real creators of 
Adenauer's Germany by their policy of keeping Germany divided; 
and their successive moves to intensify the Cold War in 1947-8 
accelerated the formation of the West German state. Adenauer paid 
lip-service to reunification, then and later, as every German was 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 583 

conventionally supposed to do. But in reality he wanted to keep it 
divided, and the Russians did his work for him. 

Adenauer's crowning mercy was that, as President of the Par- 
liamentary Council, he was able to write his own constitution. He 
took a lot of time and trouble over it and eventually produced one of 
the best constitutions ever drawn up for a modern state, which 
skilfully balances sufficient authority for the Chancellor against the 
entrenched powers of its federal constituents. By comparison with 
the Weimar constitution it was a masterpiece. For the first elections, 
set for 14 August 1949, he formed an alliance with Professor Ludwig 
Erhard, head of the Bizonal Economic Council, whose free market 
economic philosophy, based on low tariffs, free trade, cheap imports 
and high exports, was exactly suited to his own political philosophy 
and was, indeed, already producing results by the summer of 1949. 
The British, wrong to the end, assumed the Social Democrats would 
win easily. In fact the cdu vote was 7,360,000, against fewer than 
7 million for the Socialists, and Adenauer, in rejecting the idea of a 
non-party coalition government, was able to argue that a total of 
13 million Germans had voted for free enterprise — that is, for 
Erhard's ideas — and only 8 million for nationalization. What 
emerged, after the election, was that Adenauer was in total control of 
his party (and of Erhard). In getting himself made Chancellor and 
forming his government he behaved in an authoritative, not to say 
high-handed, manner. He said that, on doctor's advice, he could only 
remain in office for two years. 23 He remained for fourteen. The 
August election was thus one of the critical events of the post-war 
world. An spd government, with the economic philosophy and 
programme it then possessed, could never conceivably have achieved 
the German Wirtschaftswunder. The Adenauer-Erhard combination 
was essential to it. By the time the spd finally achieved power, in 
1969, they had already renounced Marxist collective ownership and 
had, in effect, embraced the Erhardian market philosophy. 

Adenauer enjoyed a further critical advantage, again thanks to the 
British. Hitler had destroyed the German trade union movement 
completely. The British believed it essential to the refounding of 
German democracy, and encouraged unions to come into existence 
in 1945 long before they would permit parties. The man they backed 
to do it was a Rhineland metal-workers' leader, Hans Boeckler. He 
thought in terms of one big union, a weird syndicalist notion going 
back to pre-1914 days. The British sent over Will Lawther, president 
of the mineworkers, and Jack Tanner of the engineering workers, to 
persuade Boeckler to go for industrial unions. What in effect 
Germany was given, by a diktat which any normal process of 
historical development would have made impossible, was a perfected 



584 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

version of the British trade union model, shorn of all its weaknesses, 
anomalies, contradictions and inefficiencies. By an act of suicidal 
generosity unique in history, a union structure exactly designed for 
the needs of modern industry, which Britain had tried and failed to 
achieve over half a century by democratic consultation, was handed 
by her gratis to her chief commercial competitor. 

Some sixteen industrial unions were created, within a single 
federation, the DGB (Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund). At British urg- 
ing, the dgb was given not only constitutional powers of expulsion 
but the financial leverage of a fixed percentage of all union subscrip- 
tions, enabling it to hold vast financial reserves, on which unions 
could, and in case of strikes were obliged to, draw. To strike at all, a 
75 per cent secret ballot was necessary, and the dgb in effect had a 
further veto. 24 Strikes for political purposes were ruled out as was 
any organic connection between unions and political movements. 
Thus West Germany acquired the most effective union structure of 
any leading industrial nation, with no rival federations (as in the 
USA), no religious-Marxist divisions (as in Italy and France), no 
political unions (as in Britain) and, above all, no craft unions, that 
disastrous relic of an earlier industrial phase which constituted the 
chief institutional barrier to raising productivity. 

Adenauer capitalized skilfully on this gift from Britain. Boeckler, 
elected first Chairman of the dgb in October 1949, and thereafter its 
virtual dictator, had served with Adenauer on the Cologne city 
council. The new Chancellor made him, along with Erhard, the 
co-architect of his social and economic policy. He persuaded Boeck- 
ler to renounce public ownership in favour of Mitbestimmung 
(co-partnership of labour and capital) and a high-wage policy based 
on productivity agreements. 25 Adenauer got the co-partnership law 
through the Bundestag in 1951 with the help of spd votes and at the 
risk to his coalition, but it paid handsome economic and political 
dividends. By the next year Germany was already rich enough for 
Adenauer to reorganize German social security in a way which 
secured most of the objects of spd policy. 26 By the mid-1950s, 
German labour had settled for what was essentially a non-political 
policy based on high profits, high wages and bonuses, high produc- 
tivity, excellent social security and seats on policy-forming boards. In 
the process the class-war in West Germany died, and one conse- 
quence of its demise was the rejection by the Social Democrats in 
1959 of their original Marxist philosophy. 

Adenauer was one of the most gifted statesmen of modern times; 
certainly the most wholly successful in recent German history. 
During his chancellorship, real incomes in Germany tripled. In 1953 
he won a majority of seats in the Bundestag and in 1957, by which 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 585 

time Germany's currency was the strongest in Europe, an absolute 
majority of votes cast. He placed German democracy on an almost 
unassailable base and not only brought it back into the concert of 
civilized powers but made it a pillar of the legitimate establishment. 
He could not have achieved these things without both a strong streak 
of genuine idealism and ample reserves of cynical cunning. Erhard 
thought he had Menschenverachtung, a contempt for mankind. It 
was, rather, a vivid awareness of human weakness, and especially of 
German vices. In the new Bundestag, whose decor he supervised and 
made spectacular ('like a Max Reinhardt set for a production of 
Julius Caesar'), the ink-wells and desk-tops were screwed down to 
prevent hooliganism. Even so the scenes were awful, enhancing by 
contrast Adenauer's own imperturbability, dignity and maturity; 
though he shared with Calvin Coolidge a curious taste for practical 
jokes, which included hiding the block of wood on which the stocky 
Dr Eugen Gerstenmaier, President of the Bundestag, addressed the 
assembly. Adenauer did not think the Germans were a people to be 
trusted, either collectively or as individuals. He shadowed his 
ministers, tracking one down to a Paris brothel and accordingly 
ruling him out for the Foreign Ministry. 27 He had little affection 
beyond his own family circle and his closest associate was Hans 
Globke, co-author of the Nuremberg Laws, who ran the Chancellery 
and Adenauer's private intelligence service. 'And who knows', 
Adenauer would smirk, 'what Herr Globke may have in his safe?' 28 
He thought democratic statesmen ought to be smarter and better 
informed than their totalitarian rivals. Collectively, he felt the 
Germans could only be trusted within the iron framework of the 
absolute rule of law, overawing even the state; his establishment of 
this framework will in the long run prove, perhaps, his chief contribu- 
tion to German political culture. 

It was because the Soviet leaders, like Hitler, hated and ridiculed 
law that Adenauer set his face implacably against any deal with them 
which could not be guaranteed and supervised down to the smallest 
print. He used to say that the Soviet regime had appropriated during 
and since the war 500,000 square miles of territory, all of it in 
Europe; it was the only expansionist power left. Over forty years it 
had broken or revoked forty-five out of the fifty-eight treaties it had 
signed. 29 By insisting on testing Soviet intentions, he exposed their 
'reunification' proposals of 1952, 1955 and 1959 as fraudulent. He 
could not forget that 1,150,000 German prisoners of war had 
vanished into Soviet Russia, of whom only 9,628, classified as 'war 
criminals', had ever been accounted for. 30 Hence he used every 
means to persuade Germans to seek refuge in the West, where he 
could give them law and freedom and work. After the East German 



586 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

workers' rising of June 1953, put down with great ferocity by the 
Red Army, the Soviet leaders turned Walter Ulbricht's Communist 
regime into a complete satellite. It did not prosper, and Adenauer's 
policy of encouraging refugees was bleeding it to death at the rate of 
1,000 a day by July 1961. On 13 August Ulbricht, with Soviet 
permission, began building the Berlin Wall. It was illegal, and 
Truman and Eisenhower would certainly have knocked it down. But 
under a weak president, Jack Kennedy, the fait accompli was 
accepted. There was nothing Adenauer could do about it, for he had 
no jurisdiction in Berlin, which remained a four-power responsi- 
bility. He watched in sadness, in the last years of his life, while the 
flow of refugees was cut off, and the wall saved the East German 
economy, turning it from a crushing liability into a growing Soviet 
asset, the one reliable industrial workshop of the bloc. 

By then, however, Adenauer's work was complete, for he had tied 
the West Germans, economically, militarily and politically, to Wes- 
tern culture and legitimacy as tightly and as permanently as human 
ingenuity could devise. Therein lay the real idealism which balanced 
his Realpolitik. He was the first German statesman to put European 
before German interests. It may be true, as one of his critics put it, 
that he was 'a good European but a bad German'. 31 In that sense he 
wanted to be a 'bad' German; he hated Professor Kallmann's portrait 
of him because it made him, he said, 'look just like a Hun'. He 
thought that German reunification was not available at a price 
Germany or the West could afford to pay. That he was right was 
amply demonstrated by the failure of his successors, over twenty 
years, to obtain any other result. By contrast, integration with the 
West was a realizable object, and he realized it. But here again he was 
fortunate. Adenauer grasped, intellectually rather than emotionally, 
that Germany's future lay with France. He had no feelings for 
France; no French tastes; knew very little about the country, and up 
to the age of seventy had only once visited it, for a two-day 
conference. Yet, as always, he saw political facts realistically: There 
is no European policy without France or against France, just as there 
can be no European policy without or against Germany.' 32 

The partner Adenauer hoped to work with in France, Robert 
Schuman, had much in common with de Gasperi and himself. He 
came from Lorraine; German was his native tongue. Until 1919, 
when he was already middle-aged, he was not even a French citizen. 
Adenauer saw him as a citizen of the Kingdom of Lothar, Charle- 
magne's grandson, the so-called 'Middle Kingdom', to which both 
Lorraine and Cologne had belonged. On 9 May 1950 he sold 
Schuman the idea of a European coal-steel pool, which became the 
germ of the European Economic Community, and it was largely 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 587 

thanks to Schuman that the marginal but emotionally vital problem of 
the Saar was finally resolved in October 1955. But Schuman was too 
unrepresentative a Frenchman to 'deliver' France for the more 
grandiose project Adenauer had in mind. Schuman had been a sergeant 
in the German army in 1 9 1 4-1 8 . The French argued that for a Lorrainer 
to be a German private or even an officer was excusable as an accident of 
birth; but to rise to be a senior nco implied enthusiasm. In any case the 
Fourth Republic itself could not deliver France; it was too weak to 
deliver anything permanently. For France to embrace Germany it 
required the self-confidence born of renewed strength; and a man and a 
regime which embodied that confidence. It was Adenauer's great 
fortune that he survived long enough to capitalize on de Gaulle's 
triumphant return to power and the birth of the Fifth Republic. 

The recovery of France in the 1960s and 1970s is one of the most 
striking phenomena of modern times. In the 1930s, as we have seen, it 
would have appeared inconceivable. And the road which led to it is 
complex and paradoxical. The Third Republic in its last phase had been 
the embodiment of the notion 'small is beautiful': declining population, 
low production, productivity, investment, wages and consumption; 
the cult-the exaltation almost-of the 'little man', the small factory, the 
small farm, the small town. It was dead even before the Germans 
defeated it, and collapsed into a heap of dust in the summer of 1 940. It is 
important to grasp that Vichy was the beginning of the recovery, 
because it was created not only by French fascists and collaborators but 
by all those who deplored the rottenness and inadequacy of its 
predecessor. Petain himself may have leaned to archaism, as he 
indicated when he said: 'France will never be great again until the 
wolves are howling round the doors of her villages.' 33 But many of those 
who held key posts in the regime were radical modernizers. Under the 
guidance of Jean Coutrot, founder in 1930 of the Poly technique's 
Centre for Economic Studies, a new generation of technocrats came to 
the fore under Vichy. They included the Minister of Industrial 
Production, Bichelonne, Henri Culman, Vichy's chief economic 
theorist, Jacques Rueff, Laval's adviser in 1934 and later de Gaulle's, 
Roland Boris, who also was to be influential with de Gaulle (and Pierre 
Mendes-France) and Pierre Masse, later Commissioner for Planning in 
the Fifth Republic. 34 

Indeed, amidst its extraordinary confusions, contradictions and 
treachery, Vichy, by the mere fact of overthrowing the existing order, 
was a time of experiment and risk. One of its beneficiaries was the 
go-ahead younger French peasant, prototype of the new farmers who 
were later to do so well out of the ee c. For the first time peasants became 
interested in modernization, machinery and productivity. 35 A system 
of quasi-voluntary planning ('indicative planning'), the embryo of the 



588 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

Commissariat general du Plan, came into existence. It was Vichy 
which first put into effect the idea of tax-funded Family Allowances, 
conceived in 1932 by the demographer Adolphe Landry to raise the 
birth-rate; and under Vichy, for the first time in more than a century, 
the French birth-rate actually began to increase again. The psycho- 
logical effect was profound. Vichy was devoted to youth, a craze it 
caught from the Germans. It spent far more on education than the 
Third Republic. It was Vichy which effectively created popular sport 
in France, especially football: there were only thirty professional 
footballers in France in 1939, ten times as many by 1943. 36 One of 
the most striking features of Vichy were the 'Youth Workshops' or 
Chantiers de la Jeunesse (literally 'shipyards'), with a stress on 
technical education which had hitherto been lacking. The aim was a 
rejuvenation of France. As Petain's Minister of Information, Paul 
Marion, put it, 'Thanks to us, the France of camping, of sports, of 
dances, of travel and group hikes will sweep away the France of 
aperitifs, of tobacco dens, of party congresses and long digestions.' 37 
To a great extent this prophecy was fulfilled. 

Much of the achievement of Vichy was thrown away in its own 
debacle and in the division of the nation which followed. About 
170,000 French worked in the Resistance; more - 190,000 - were 
accused of collaboration, and about 100,000 sent to gaol. Nobody to 
this day knows how many were murdered in 1944: about 4,500 
cases were authenticated. 38 The Communists, who had actually 
opposed the war in 1939-40, were the great beneficiaries of 1944, 
when they were able to murder most of their enemies. They claimed 
the title of the parti des fusilles^ claiming 75,000 'Communist 
patriots' had been shot by the Nazis and Vichy. But at the Nurem- 
berg trials the official French figure of the total killed under the 
Occupation was only 29,660, and the Communists never produced 
the actual names of more than 176 cp 'heroes'. 39 In fact leading 
Communists offered to give evidence against Socialist leaders at the 
Riom trial, and the party newspaper VHumanite protested when 
Vichy released anti-Nazis from jail. 40 Unlike other parties, it never 
purged collaborators, who would have included its leader, Maurice 
Thorez; the only people it got rid of in 1944-5 were those who 
disobeyed the Stalin line in 1939-40 and fought the Nazis. Yet the 
cp emerged from the war, because of its belated Resistance enthusi- 
asm, by far the richest and best-organized, and in many respects the 
biggest, of the French parties. It pushed its vote from 1.5 million in 
1936 to over 5 million in 1945 and 5.5 million in 1946; the total 
went on rising until 1949, and in the late-1940s the cp had around 
900,000 paid-up members. The French cp was wholly Stalinist, and 
remained so after Stalin's death; it was systematically corrupted, 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 589 

intellectually and morally, by Thorez, an archetype of the 
twentieth-century professional politician, who became a full-time 
party functionary at the age of twenty-three and never did anything 
else - was, in effect, a Moscow civil servant all his life. 41 He 
ghettoized the party vote, erecting little iron curtains round its 
enclaves, so that the cp became a society within France, with its own 
newspapers, plays, novels, poems, women's magazines, children's 
comics, cookery books and farmers' almanacs. 42 

The existence of this huge, intransigent party, which owed its 
primary allegiance to a foreign power, posed almost insuperable 
problems of governing France. De Gaulle, who had (as he put it) 
'picked the Republic out of the gutter', found that he could not in 
practice entrust the 'big three' ministries to Communist members of 
his coalition. He could not, he said on the radio, 'concede to them 
any of the three posts which determine foreign policy: diplomacy, 
which expresses it; the army, which supports it; and the police, 
which covers it'. 43 The inability to secure a national, as opposed to a 
party-ideological, approach to defence led to his resignation in 
January 1946. As a result he played no direct part in shaping the new 
constitution, which was primarily the work of Communists and 
Socialists. The consequences were tragic. Ever since the end of its 
divine-right monarchy, France had found it impossible to devise a 
constitution which reconciled the demands of central authority and 
the rights of representation; it veered between dictatorship and 
chaos, according as the constitution pushed the balance one way or 
the other. The first twelve constitutions were failures. That of the 
Third Republic, in 1875, was passed by one vote in an Assembly 
which in fact had a majority of monarchists but could not agree on a 
particular king. It lasted, shakily, for sixty-five years, but it ended in 
complete failure and half the nation had never accepted it in spirit — 
one reason why Vichy was greeted with such rapture. Petain had 
been entrusted with devising a new constitution but (like Hitler) had 
never done so. De Gaulle had his own ideas, based upon a strong 
presidency, which he outlined in a speech at Bayeux ('the Bayeux 
constitution') in June 1946. But this was never put to the vote. 

The first proposed constitution for the new Fourth Republic, 
drawn up by the Communists and Socialists, was rejected in a 
referendum. A modified version, which got the grudging support of 
the Catholic Centre Party (mrp), was finally approved by the French, 
but only 9 million voted for it - fewer than for the earlier version. 
Over 8 million voted against, and 8.5 million abstained in disgust. 44 
Drawn up in a hurry, against the clock, amid acrimonious haggling, 
it was one of the worst constitutions ever foisted on a great and 
intelligent nation. Even its grammar was atrocious. Many provisions 



590 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

were mutually contradictory; others were so complicated as to be 
incomprehensible. Some details were simply left out. Whole chapters 
(on the French Union and 'local collectives') were never im- 
plemented. A number of the procedures, for instance for forming a 
government, votes of no confidence and parliamentary dissolutions, 
proved unworkable. It had so many muddled compromises that even 
those who recommended it did not like it. 45 It retained most of the 
chaotic vices of the Third Republic and added new ones. 

Constitution-making is a thankless task. Constitutional analysis is 
a tedious aspect of history. But constitutions matter. Weimar failed 
because its constitution was clumsy. The Federal Republic succeeded 
because Adenauer gave it a skilfully balanced foundation. The 
constitution turned the Fourth Republic into a mere arena for what 
de Gaulle contemptuously called 'the ballet of the parties'. Thanks 
to its proportional representation system, no party could form a 
homogeneous government. The President was a cipher, the Prime 
Minister, as a rule, largely impotent and often a nonentity. The 
shifting coalition system ruled out continuity and stability of govern- 
ment and, more important, made it exceedingly difficult to push 
through big decisions, especially unpopular measures resisted by 
powerful inter-party lobbies, above all colonial ones. It was no 
accident that the regime drifted into an unwinnable war in Indo- 
China, ending in the surrender at Dien Bien Phu (1954), or that it 
finally came to grief over Algerie franqaise four years later. 

Yet the twelve years of the Fourth Republic were not entirely 
wasted. The technocratic revolution, begun under Vichy, continued. 
Indeed it accelerated, thanks largely to the efforts of one industrious 
enthusiast, Jean Monnet. His family had run a small Cognac business 
of the most old-fashioned, thoroughly French kind, but exporting to 
the world and thus possessing international horizons. He was in 
business abroad from the age of sixteen, usually in merchant banking 
and state loans, but he spent much of the Great War in the office of 
Etienne Clementel, the Minister of Commerce, the first Frenchman 
to believe that government should help capitalist enterprise to plan, 
and that the 'democratic peoples' (by which he meant West Europe 
and America) should form an 'economic union'. 46 In the Second 
World War Monnet performed outstanding services in co-ordinating 
Allied arms production, and was a natural choice, for de Gaulle to 
put in charge of rebuilding France's shattered economy. Monnet set 
up the Commissariat general du Plan, and from this base went on to 
construct the first organs of the future European Economic Com- 
munity. He was that great rarity: a man of ideas and passionate 
conviction who did not believe in ideology. He thought that the only 
kind of industrial planning which worked was by persuasion and 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 591 

consent. To him, planning machinery was a mere framework. 
Regulations should be designed to produce perfect competition, not 
Utopias. The function of planning staff was not to issue orders but to 
bring minds together. Planning was essentially economic diplomacy. 
The virtue of Monnet's approach was that it made possible a 
reconciliation between planning and the market system. It reduced to a 
minimum the planning bureaucracy and the tyranny it breeds: at his 
Commissariat he had only thirty senior officials in all. 47 Monnet was 
small, mousy, quiet, colourless, rhetoric-hating: in appearance and 
manner the exact opposite of de Gaulle. What the two men shared was 
huge persistence and will; and, equally important, the ability to inspire 
and lead the young. De Gaulle bred Gaullists; Monnet, the Eurocrats. 

Monnet's system of 'indicative planning' was the one major 
achievement of the Fourth Republic. But to produce its full results it 
required a framework of political stability capable of producing a 
strong currency and certain harsh and basic decisions affecting whole 
categories of people. That the Fourth Republic could not provide. 
Equally, Monnet set in motion the European Economic Community, 
though he did not invent it. As a customs-union (its essential 
characteristic), it had a long history. The Prussian common external 
tariff of 1818, expanded into the Zollverein (customs union) of 1834, 
had been the basis of German unity finally achieved in 1 8 7 1 . Experience 
seemed to show that common tariffs were the surest road to political 
unity. Luxembourg, originally a member of the Zollverein, had signed a 
convention with Belgium in 1921, involving common customs and 
balance of payments. After the Second World War it was extended to 
the Netherlands, with a common external tariff adopted by the three 
states on 1 January 1948 and a 'harmonization process' of internal 
tariffs beginning 15 October 1949. It was Monnet's idea to expand the 
Benelux concept to include the three major powers of West Europe (he 
wanted Britain too), beginning with coal and steel. His German friends 
sold it to Adenauer, who did not claim to understand the economic 
details but recognized the political importance of the principle. The 
Treaty of Paris, signed in April 1 95 1 by Benelux, France, Germany and 
Italy, brought into existence a common market in coal and steel 
products. Six years later, on 25 March 1957, the Six agreed to the 
Treaty of Rome, creating a general common market, with proposals for 
external and internal tariffs, the end of all restrictions on movements of 
persons, service and capital, 'harmonization' procedures to produce 
perfect competition and, most difficult of all, a common agricultural 
price-support system. 

The Fourth Republic was capable of bringing France into the eec but 
lacked the resolution to make the system work. For the working of the 
system depended essentially on mutual sacrifices, above all from France 



592 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

and Germany. To survive within a common market, France had not 
merely to industrialize fast; it had to cut its traditional, inefficient 
peasant-type agricultural sector by three-quarters. In the early 1950s, 
France still had only one industrial worker per agricultural worker 
(in Britain it was nine to one). Out of a total working population of 
20.5 million, 9.1 million lived in tiny rural communes and of these 
6.5 million actually worked in agriculture; a further 1.25 million 
lived in semi-rural communes. 48 Most of these people had to be 
persuaded to move into the factories, involving a social upheaval 
quite beyond the capacity of the Fourth Republic to carry through. 
To make the voluntary revolution in agriculture possible, palatable 
and in the end profitable, enormous sums of money had to be made 
available for agricultural investment. The French calculation was 
that this should be provided by West Germany, in the form of 
transfer payments or internal market taxes, under a system known as 
the Common Agricultural Policy. In return, Germany's highly effi- 
cient manufacturing industry would get access to French consumer 
markets. The Treaty of Rome was thus a bargain of mutual sacrifice 
but a finely balanced one. The French agricultural revolution had to 
be carried through fast enough to justify the cap. Equally, French 
industry had to modernize and expand with sufficient conviction to 
prevent Germany getting the best of the deal and turning France into 
an economic colony. Both processes required strong, self-confident 
government of the kind the Fourth Republic could not provide. 

Even more was required: a reassertion of French nationhood. In 
the France of the 1950s, the 'Europeans' were essentially an elitist 
minority. The tone of French politics was often xenophobic, indeed 
racist, with the Communists leading the pack. They talked of 
'Schuman le boche'. A cp trade union leader shouted at Leon Blum: 
'Blum - in Yiddish that means a flower!' A cp provincial newspaper 
wrote: 'Blum, Schuman, Moch, Mayer do not smell of good French 
soil.' UHwnanite published a cartoon of 'men of the American 
party' - Schuman, Moch and Mayer - with crooked noses, remark- 
ing in embarrassment while Communists sang the 'Marseillaise': 'Do 
we know that tune?' 'No, it must be one of those French songs.' 49 
Even in the centre and the Right, the coal— steel plan was attacked as 
'A Europe under German hegemony', and on the Left as the 'Europe 
of the Vatican'. A centre Radical like old Daladier insisted: 'When 
they say Europe they mean Germany, and when they say Germany 
they mean Greater Germany.' On the right, Pierre-Etienne Flandin, 
the old Municher, argued that 'European federation' meant 'the 
suicide of France'. The splendidly named Leon Gingembre of the 
Association of Small and Medium Businesses (Petites et moyennes 
enterprises) — perhaps the most characteristic institution of the old 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 593 

France - epitomized the proposed EEC as 'the Europe of trusts, 
international business and high finance'. It was, argued one historian, 
a reactionary attempt to resurrect 'the idea of the Holy Roman 
Empire'. 'The past is not dead,' he argued, 'but survives in the German 
cultural world of Adenauer, Schuman and de Gasperi.' 50 

This combination of enemies would have made the eec unwork- 
able, especially since it had powerful xenophobic opponents within 
West Germany also: Schumacher called the Treaty of Paris 'petty 
European, I mean a Pan-French conception ... he who signs this 
treaty ceases to be a German', since it was the work of Adenauer, 'the 
Chancellor of the Allies'. 51 Had the Fourth Republic survived, the 
resolution needed to prove that a Franco-German bargain could be 
just to both parties would have been missing. 

Hence the return of de Gaulle to power in May 1958 was a 
watershed not only in French but in post-war European history. At 
first glance he did not seem the man to push forward European 
economic unity, any more than he was the man to dissolve VAlgerie 
franqaise. But then de Gaulle was never exactly what he seemed. He 
was one of the master-intelligences of modern times, infinite in 
subtlety, rich in paradox, fathomless in his sardonic ironies. He was a 
pre-war figure with a post-war mind, indeed a futurist mind. He was a 
monarchist who believed Dreyfus was innocent. He was born to love 
the French Empire and provincial France, la France des villages — in 
fact he ended both. 

The most important point to be grasped was that the essential de 
Gaulle was not a soldier or even a statesman but an intellectual. He 
was an intellectual of a special kind, whose entire life was a meditation 
on the theme of mind, power and action. He had, moreover, the 
historian's capacity to see current events sub specie aeternitatis. He 
had been taught by his father: 'Remember what Napoleon said: "If 
Pierre Corneille were alive today, I would make him a prince."' 52 He 
was always anxious to woo intellectuals, not merely because in France 
so many were officially classified as such: over 1,100,000 in the 1954 
census. 53 In 1943 in Algiers, he won over a deputation of intellectuals, 
led by Gide, by telling him: 'Art has its honour, in the same way France 
has hers': they realized he was an intellectual like themselves. 54 On his 
return to power in 1958 he gave pre-eminent place to Andre Malraux, 
who sat at his right hand in cabinet and who carried more weight with 
de Gaulle's inner feelings than any of his prime ministers. As for 
Malraux, as Gaston Palewski said, he 'entered into the epic of de 
Gaulle, as we all did, like a man entering a religious order'. 55 

It was characteristic of de Gaulle's intellectualism that his approach 
to military matters, when he was a theorist, was through philosophical 
and political ideas. 'The true school of command', he wrote in 



594 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

UArtnee de metier, lies 'in the general culture', adding: 'Behind the 
victories of Alexander, one always finds Aristotle.' The same ap- 
proach determined his statesmanship. His favourite quotation (with 
which he opened his War Memoirs) was the famous 'hymn to 
power' from Goethe's Faust, in which Faust rejects 'In the begin- 
ning was the Word' for 'In the beginning was the Deed'. 56 He used 
this to make the point that the French had clarity of thought but 
lacked the will to action. Hence France's need, in the first instance, 
for a strong state: 'Nothing effective and solid can be done without 
the renewal of the state ... for that is where it is necessary to 
begin.' 57 The state's 'role and raison d'etre is to serve the general 
interest'. Only it could personify the whole community, a Leviathan 
with more than the strength of its composing atoms. It was the 
centripetal force, balancing the centrifugal forces which, especially 
in France, threatened general break-up. To de Gaulle, the state was 
not totalitarian. On the contrary, it symbolized moral and cultural 
values: especially, in France, idealism, 'the principal trait in her 
character and the essential element of her influence'. He identified it 
with liberty and the classical civilization, seeing French civilization 
as the democratic civilization par excellence, combining a long 
history of cultural advance with liberty. Democracy at its best 
brought people together in a consciousness of moral community, 
what he termed rassemblement. Democratic rituals were a concrete 
symbol of unity. Consensus preceded democratic forms. 'There is a 
pact twenty centuries old between the greatness of France and the 
liberty of the world.' Hence 'democracy is inextricably intertwined 
with the best understood interests of France'. 58 

De Gaulle's view of the state, then, was essentially pre- 
totalitarian. He identified the state with legitimacy, best embodied 
in the person of a sacral ruler. The monarch was the only individual 
whose personal interests were bound up inextricably, indeed or- 
ganically, with the interests of the whole community, not just one 
or more sections of it (like a party leader). Hence the advice he gave 
to Queen Elizabeth n of England when she asked him about her 
role in a modern society: 'In that station to which God has called 
you, be who you are, Madam ! That is to say, the person in relation 
to whom, by virtue of the principle of legitimacy, everything in your 
kingdom is ordered, in whom your people perceives its own nation- 
hood, and by whose presence and dignity the national unity is 
upheld.' 59 In extremity, and for want of a better, he himself had 
had to take on this role in 1940: 'de Gaulle, alone and almost 
unknown, had had to assume the burden of France', as he put it. 
Again, in 1958, when the hideous Algeria crisis threatened France 
with a Spanish-type civil war, he took the role again: 'de Gaulle, 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 595 

now well-known but with no other weapon save his legitimacy, must 
take destiny in his hands.' 60 He had 'disappeared' in 1946 with 
precisely this purpose, to keep 'a pure image', for (as he put it) 'if 
Joan of Arc had married, she would no longer be Joan of Arc'. 61 He 
developed, indeed, the capacity to dissociate himself as a person from 
his public persona ('de Gaulle interests me only as a historical 
personality'), so that he could say: 'There were many things I would 
have liked to do but could not for they would not have been fitting 
for General de Gaulle.' 62 

The logical consequence of this theory of the state was for 
de Gaulle to set up his own monarchy, as he undoubtedly would 
have done a century before. In 1958, however, he rejected monarchy 
in favour of a plebiscitory democracy, using referenda and (from 
1962) direct universal election of a president endowed with strong 
actual powers as well as a transcendental symbolic role. His 1958 
constitution, adopted by 17.5 million to 4.5 (with 15 per cent 
abstentions), and based on the Bayeux proposals, was by far the 
clearest, most consistent and skilfully balanced France had ever 
received. 63 It induced, as intended, a polarization of the party system 
into two huge blocs of Left and Right (albeit with a four-party 
structure), forcing voters, on the second ballot, to make unambigu- 
ous choices. It reinvigorated the executive, enabling it to take 
decisions authoritatively and to pursue policies consistently. Above 
all, the 1962 presidential election system, approved by 13.15 million to 
7.97 million, gave the head of state, bypassing the parties, a direct 
mandate from the entire electorate. As a result, France enjoyed the 
longest period of political stability in her entire modern history. It 
was twenty-three years from 1958 before there was, effectively, a 
change in governmental philosophy. Even after the victory of the 
Socialists in the presidential election of May 1981, the constitution 
continued to work smoothly, indicating that it was one for all seasons. 
France, like Germany, had got a first-class public framework at last. 

This new stability made possible what had merely been hinted at 
under Vichy and the Fourth Republic: the 'renewal' of France. The 
long decadence of more than a century was not only reversed, but 
spectacularly seen to be reversed. In economic matters, de Gaulle 
proceeded with his paradoxical blend of traditionalism and moder- 
nity. The technocrat he made Chairman of the Economic Commis- 
sion, and the real architect of his economic success, was Jacques 
Rueff, a man who placed his confidence in gold as the best available 
measure of value and who first put into practice the neo-conservative 
policies which, in the 1970s, were to become internationally fashion- 
able under the misleading name of 'monetarism'. Rueffs plan of 
8 December 1958 embraced deflation, severe cuts in government 



596 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

expenditure, devaluation, convertibility and a 'new franc' at 100 
times its previous value; and the plan was linked to the wholesale 
reduction or removal, from 1 January 1959, of external tariffs and 
quotas. France, in short, was delivered over to free enterprise and the 
market. 'It was the coherence and fervour of the plan,' de Gaulle 
remarked later, 'as well as its daring and ambition, which won me 
over.' Its object, he told the nation on television, was to 'establish the 
nation on a basis of truth and severity'. 64 

France is fundamentally a rich country; its people highly intelligent 
and industrious. All that is needed to make France work effectively is 
a stable framework and energetic leadership. Results came fast, gnp 
rose by 3 per cent in the second half of 1959, by 7.9 per cent in 1960, 
4.6 in 1961, 6.8 in 1962; living standards began to improve at the 
rate of 4 per cent a year. For the first time since the Industrial 
Revolution, France became an economic pace-setter. What in effect 
Gaullism did was to accelerate the modest economic progress under 
the Fourth Republic, and then stabilize it on a high plateau, within a 
framework of currency stability and (by French standards) very low 
inflation. Exports doubled, 1956-62, and during the twenty-year 
period beginning 1952, industrial production tripled. The franc 
became a hard currency and early in 1968 French reserves reached 
the extraordinary total of 35,000 million (new) francs. 65 These 
results accompanied and reinforced other long-term trends. Popula- 
tion, which had been 41 million in 1946, rose to 52 million by 1974. 
These new millions were better educated and housed than ever 
before. The number of housing units, stagnant between 1914 and 
1939, increased at ten times the inter-war rate during the 1960s, so 
that by 1968 it numbered 18.25 million, double the 1939 number. 
From the 1960s, too, dated the general use of modern drugs in 
France and the emergence of an effective health service. 66 The 
number of state secondary school teachers rose from 17,400 in 1945 
to 67,000 in 1965, and the private sector (thanks to the famous Loi 
Debre> named after de Gaulle's first prime minister) also expanded 
fast. High-quality mass education in France dates from the late 
1950s. The number of college and university students, only 78,691 in 
1939, had risen to 563,000 by 1968. 67 

Under de Gaulle, in short, France became for the first time a 
modern, industrialized country, in the forefront of technical progress 
and the assimilation of new ideas. It was the very antithesis of France 
in the 1930s. Such a reversal of deep historical trends is very rare in 
history, particularly for an old nation. It gives de Gaulle a claim to 
be considered the outstanding statesman of modern times. The 
transformation, of course, was not accomplished without pain, 
ugliness and shock; and protest. But the very consciousness of French 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 597 

people that their country was again a dynamic force, as under the 
young Louis xiv or Napoleon I, reconciled them to the destruction 
of traditional rural France and, equally important, steeled them to 
the acceptance of co-partnership with Adenauer's Germany in a 
European community. 

De Gaulle did not share Monnet's passion for integration and 
supranationality. Publicly, he always spoke of Europe as '['Europe 
des patties'. Yet, as always, de Gaulle's ostensible behaviour often 
masked quite different and subtler aims. He remained pragmatic. 
He was not against larger entities for specific purposes if, within 
them, French interests could be more surely upheld. In spring 1950 
he had pondered on the battle of the Catalonian Plains, 'in which 
Franks, Gallo-Romans and Teutons jointly routed the hordes of 
Attila .... It is time for the Rhine to become a meeting-place and 
not a barrier .... If one did not force oneself to look coolly at 
things, one would be almost dazzled at the prospect of what 
German qualities and French values, extended to Africa, might 
jointly yield. That is a field of common development which might 
transform Europe even beyond the Iron Curtain.' 68 

In a sense, de Gaulle was more than a French nationalist; he was 
a Carolingian. He shared the view of the French historians of the 
new Annates school, like Fernand Braudel, that history is essentially 
determined by geography. Indeed, it was not new: it went back at 
least to Albert Sorel, who had argued in his great book, L'Europe et 
la Revolution franqaise (1885), that The policy of the French state 
was determined by geography. It was based on a fact - the empire 
of Charlemagne. The starting-point for the great lawsuit which fills 
the history of France is the insoluble dispute over the inheritance of 
the emperor.' 69 From the time of Philippe le Bel, under the Valois, 
Henri iv and Sully, Richelieu and Mazarin, Louis xiv and into the 
age of Danton and Napoleon, France had sought to recreate that 
empire by force and under a solitary French aegis. Was it not now 
possible, with a truncated Germany, deprived of its non- 
Carolingian accretions, to recreate it peacefully, fraternally and in a 
non-proprietory sense? That was just the kind of pragmatic idea to 
appeal to de Gaulle. Unlike most modern French intellectuals, he 
detested Nietzsche; his approach to Germany was through Madame 
de StaePs De VAllemagne (1810), which began in France the cult of 
the 'good' Germans, the Westerners. He shared her passionate 
admiration for Goethe. He perceived in Adenauer a man who fitted 
into this aspect of Germany, another homme providentiel like 
himself, whose fortunate tenure of power provided an opportunity 
for France which might never recur. Adenauer, he wrote, was a 
Rhinelander, 



598 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

. . . imbued with a sense of the complementary nature of the Gauls and the 
Teutons which once fertilized the presence of the Roman Empire on the 
Rhine, brought success to the Franks and glory to Charlemagne, provided 
the rationale for Austria, justified the relations between the King of France 
and the Electors, set Germany afire with the flame of the Revolution, 
inspired Goethe, Heine, Madame de Stael and Victor Hugo, and in spite of 
the fierce struggles in which the two peoples were locked, continued to seek 
a path gropingly through the darkness. 

That was the spirit in which de Gaulle summoned Adenauer to his 
chateau at Colombey-les-deux-eglises on 14 September 1958 for 
what he termed 'the historic encounter between this old Frenchman 
and this very old German'. 70 

The meeting was an unqualified success. De Gaulle warmed to der 
Alte when he was told he would regain his youth in office, 'as has 
been the case with myself'. 71 Adenauer approved of the Frenchman: 
'so clearly upright, correct, moral'. This was the first of forty 
meetings between the two men which took place in growing amity 
until Adenauer retired in 1962. They laid the foundation of the 
Franco-German axis which endured until the early 1980s. It was 
based upon downgrading the supranational aspects of the eec while 
at the same time making its economic aspects work superlatively by 
the mutual interlocking of the French and German economies. Thus 
the balanced bargain, on which the success of the eec depended, was 
turned into working reality by these two old-fashioned conservative 
Catholics, whose politics pre-dated the era of Christian Democracy, 
whose view of the world had been formed before 1914, but who had 
remained astonishingly alert to the changes and opportunities which 
the tragic events of their lifetimes had brought about. It was a 
genuine friendship, and an example of the way in which personalities 
and, still more, personal relationships, radically affect the course of 
international affairs. 

Like many friendships, it was sealed by a common antipathy: 
Britain. De Gaulle did not regard Britain as a true Continental 
power. It was Atlanticist, 'Anglo-Saxon' as he put it, the junior 
member of that English-speaking partnership which had excluded 
him and France from their rightful place in the decision-making 
bodies of the wartime alliance. It was de Gaulle's aim to use the 
Carolingian concept of the eec to create in Europe an alternative 
centre of power to the USA and Soviet Russia. He did not wish a 
British intrusion which would inevitably challenge France's claim to 
sit on Charlemagne's throne. In the first decade after the war, British 
foreign policy had been confused and unrealistic, and made sense 
only on the assumption that France would remain weak and West 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 599 

Germany wholly dependent on the USA. The leadership of a 
European federation was hers for the asking. But with a traditional 
cheap-food policy based on Commonwealth imports, and in the 
confidence of a 'special relationship' with America, Britain did not 
want such a role. At Zurich in 1946 it was Churchill himself who 
called for 'something which will astonish you ... a kind of United 
States of Europe' based on 'a partnership between France and 
Germany'. France and Germany, he said, 'must take the lead toge- 
ther. Great Britain . . . America and I trust Soviet Russia . . . must be 
the friends and sponsors of the new Europe.' 72 

This condescending view was based on the assumption that Britain 
could still be an independent great power, occupying the unique 
geopolitical position a world empire had once given her: as Churchill 
put it (in 1950), Britain was the intersection of three overlapping 
circles, the English-speaking world, the Commonwealth and Europe. 
The assessment was barely plausible in 1950. It made no sense after 
Suez, which had demonstrated that neither the Commonwealth nor 
the 'special relationship' had any value in helping Britain to protect 
what she regarded as a vital interest. The way then pointed clearly to 
a European policy. Harold Macmillan, having succeeded Eden as 
Prime Minister in January 1957, had an opportunity to embark on 
an entirely fresh course and seek to join the negotiations for the 
still-uncompleted Rome Treaty. He missed it. He himself still had 
delusions of grandeur. In February 1959 he went to Moscow, as the 
self-appointed spokesman for the alliance, The Times (no doubt 
suitably briefed) commenting that, with President Eisenhower 'a 
declining force, the German chancellor an old, unhappy man, and 
the French president fully preoccupied with other problems, the 
responsibility falling on the British prime minister to lead the alliance 
sensibly and yet strongly ... is paramount'. 73 

The Moscow visit itself achieved nothing (nor did the Big Power 
summit in Paris in 1960), but it proved a costly error, for it 
persuaded Adenauer that Britain in general, and Macmillan in 
particular, were unreliable partners, capable of doing a deal with 
Russia behind Germany's back and at her expense. 74 It brought out 
his Anglophobia. He saw Britain as an international con-man, 
pretending to a status unjustified by her resources or her efforts. 
'England', he wrote, 'is like a rich man who has lost all his property 
but does not realize it.' 75 He said his three chief dislikes were 'the 
Russians, the Prussians and the British'. Macmillan was trying to 
exploit 'us poor, dumb Continentals'. British policy was just ein 
einziges Feilchen, one long fiddle. 76 De Gaulle, during their long and 
frequent talks together, played skilfully on Adenauer's antipathy and 
suspicions. Macmillan finally applied for Britain to join the EEC in 



600 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

July 1961, by which time it was a working community, becoming set 
in its ways. Britain's adherence meant structural changes which 
threatened the delicate balance of Franco— German advantage. When 
this became apparent, de Gaulle vetoed British entry, at a spectacu- 
lar press conference on 14 January 1963. If Britain entered, he said, it 
would be as a Trojan horse and 'in the end there would appear a 
colossal Atlantic Community under American dependence and 
leadership which would soon completely swallow up the eec\ This 
would jeopardize 'the friendship of Germany and France, the union 
of Europe as they both wish it and their common action in the 
world', which rested 'on incomparable popular support'. 77 To 
Britain's chagrin, Adenauer signified his silent approbation of the 
French non. 

Nevertheless, the way in which these two old men saw the world 
was not the only reason for rejecting British membership. With every 
year that passed Britain was growing poorer relative to the members 
of the eec. This posed a different set of problems. For if the structure 
of the Community (especially the cap) was based on a bargain 
between France and Germany, the bargain would apply even more 
forcibly to Britain, which would have to pay for expensive eec food 
in return for access to markets for its manufactured goods. Would 
these prove competitive enough to make the bargain work? In 
November 1967 de Gaulle again vetoed British entry, and this time 
he pointed to chronic weaknesses in the British economy, and the 
difficulty of correcting them, as his justification. 78 

Structural weakness in the British economy, vis-a-vis her main 
industrial competitors, had become apparent in the period 
1870-1914 and again in the 1920s. But there had been a recovery in 
the second half of the 1930s, especially in high-technology areas; the 
economy had performed well during the Second World War, and it 
continued to do so up to 1950, when exports were 144 on a 1938 
index of 100. 79 In 1950 the British gnp was $47 billion against only 
$75 billion for all six future eec powers. British exports, at $6.3 
billion, were more than two-thirds those of the Six ($9.4 billion) and 
gnp per capita was nearly twice as high ($940 to $477). Twenty 
years later, in 1970, British gnp per capita had rather more than 
doubled, to $2,170. That of the Six had multiplied more than five 
times, to $2,557. While British exports had tripled, those of the Six 
had multiplied nearly ten times. Their reserves, smaller than Britain's 
in 1950 ($2.9 billion against $3.4 billion), had also increased by ten 
times, while Britain's had shrunk. 80 By any conceivable continental 
standard of measurement, the British economy had performed badly. 
The gap widened throughout the 1970s, despite the fact that Britain 
actually joined the eec on 1 January 1973. 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 601 

Why this chronic weakness? Britain had been the first to industria- 
lize, a process starting on a large scale in the 1760s. In the two 
hundred years since, it was the only major industrial power which 
had not suffered the convulsion of revolution, foreign conquest or 
civil war: those fundamental breaks with the past which, as the 
post-war history of France and Germany indicated, promote social 
and economic dynamism. Britain had no constitutional bill of rights, 
no written guarantees designed to protect the assumptions of a 
liberal society. It had instead the Common Law tradition, arbitrated 
by the judges, which effectively upheld rights of liberty and property 
and was, indeed, the legal framework within which the British 
created the first modern industrial society. This continued to func- 
tion throughout the nineteenth century as an effective legal setting 
for industrial enterprise. In 1900, however, the trade unions, which 
already reflected the anachronisms and anomalies of early industria- 
lization, especially in the multiplicity of ancient craft unions, created 
the Labour Party, to promote 'legislation in the direct interest of 
labour' and oppose 'measures having an opposite tendency'. 81 The 
salient characteristic of the British Labour Party, as opposed to other 
socialist movements in the West, was that it was not primarily 
Marxist or even socialist but a form of parliamentary syndicalism. 
The unions owned it. They directly sponsored a hard core of Labour 
MPs (128 in 1975, for instance) and, more important, paid about 
three-quarters of the party's national funds and 95 per cent of its 
election expenses. 82 The party constitution, by a system of union 
membership affiliations expressed in block votes, made the unions 
the overwhelmingly dominant element in the formation of party 
policy. 

Parliamentary power was quickly reflected in statutory measures 
to destroy the Common Law balance within Britain's unwritten 
constitution, and tilt it decisvely towards organized labour. In 1906, 
the first year Labour was strongly represented in parliament, it 
passed the Trade Disputes Act, which gave unions complete immun- 
ity from civil actions for damages (torts) 'alleged to have been 
committed by or on behalf of the trade unions'. Such immunity 
existed nowhere else in the West, for in effect it made unions 
impervious to actions for breach of contract, though the other parties 
to the contract, the employers, might be sued by the unions. Even the 
Webbs regarded it as 'an extraordinary and unlimited immunity'. 
The constitutional lawyer A. V. Dicey protested: 'It makes a trade 
union a privileged body exempted from the ordinary law of the land. 
No such privileged body has ever before been deliberately created by 
an English parliament.' 83 This critical act, giving unions a special 
status in law, became the plinth on which was subsequently erected a 



602 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

weighty and complex superstructure of union statutory privilege. 
The Trade Union Act of 1913 legalized the spending of trade union 
funds on political objectives, that is the Labour Party, and laid down 
that union members with other party affiliations had to 'contract 
out' of their political dues (a difficult and unpopular procedure) if 
they did not want to contribute to Labour funds. This procedure was 
reversed to 'contracting in' by the Conservative Trade Disputes Act 
of 1927, which also made political strikes illegal. But as soon as 
Labour got an absolute majority in parliament in 1945, it repealed 
the 1927 act and went on to give the unions special status within the 
nationalized industries it created and, indeed, within all its social and 
economic policy acts. The judges continued, from time to time, to 
uphold Common Law protection for individuals against unions. But 
whenever they found a hole in union privilege law, the unions were 
able to lean directly on a Labour-dominated parliament to plug it. 
Thus, the House of Lords in Rookes v. Barnard (1964) held that an 
unofficial strike in breach of contract was actionable. The next year, 
a new Labour government legalized it in the 1965 Trade Disputes 
Act. 

In the 1960s and 1970s, growing union power was exerted in a 
variety of ways. In 1969, the unions vetoed the so-called 'In Place of 
Strife' legislation the Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, pro- 
posed to enact to reduce the number of strikes. In 1972 the unions 
introduced new forms of direct action, including 'mass picketing', 
'flying pickets' and 'secondary picketing', which the police were 
unwilling or unable to curb. In 1974 they used these devices to 
destroy a Conservative government responsible for the 1971 Indus- 
trial Relations Act which attempted, albeit ineffectually, to introduce 
a statutory code of union conduct. The Labour government which 
followed not only repealed the 1971 Act but pushed through 
parliament a mass of legislation extending union privileges, of which 
the Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts of 1974 and 1976 and the 
Employment Protection Acts of 1975 and 1979 were merely the most 
important. These extended immunity to tort actions to cases where 
unions induced other parties to break contracts, obliged employers 
to recognize unions and uphold 'closed shops' (to the point where an 
employee could be dismissed without legal remedy for declining to 
join one) and to provide facilities for union organization. The effect 
of this mass of legislation was to increase the number of 'closed- 
shop' industries and to push unionization above the 50 per cent 
barrier of the workforce for the first time, compared with 25 per cent 
or less in the United States, France and West Germany. Even more 
important, however, was that it removed virtually all inhibitions on 
union bargaining power. As the Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning, 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 603 

remarked: 'All legal restraints have been lifted so that they can now 
do as they will.' 84 In the early months of 1979, under chaotic 
leadership, the uninhibited unions effectively destroyed their bene- 
ficiary, the Labour government. Its Conservative successor there- 
upon introduced minor abridgements of union privileges in the 
Employment Acts of 1980 and 1982. 

Excessive union legal privilege and political power contributed 
to Britain's slow growth in three main ways. First, it promoted 
restrictive practices, inhibited the growth of productivity and so 
discouraged investment. In the quarter-century 1950-75, Britain's 
investment and productivity record was the worst of any major 
industrial power. Second, it greatly increased the pressure of wage 
inflation, especially from the late 1960s onwards. 85 Thirdly, trade 
union social and legislative demands on government had a cumula- 
tive tendency to increase the size of the public sector and government 
share of gnp. Britain had traditionally been a minimum-government 
state: that was part of the benevolent framework which made the 
industrial revolution possible. The census of 1851 registered less 
than 75,000 civil public employees, mostly customs, excise and 
postal workers, with only 1,628 manning the central departments of 
civil government, at a time when the corresponding figure for France 
(1846) was 932,000. In the century that followed the proportion of 
the working population employed in the public sector rose from 2.4 
per cent to 24.3 per cent in 1950. To put it another way, during the 
120 years 1790-1910, proportion of gnp accounted for by public 
expenditure never rose over 23 per cent and averaged 13 per cent. 
After 1946 it never fell below 36 per cent. 86 

The really damaging increase, however, occurred after 1964, 
during a period when Labour was in office in eleven years out of 
fifteen. In the 1950s and early 1960s it had been just over 40 per 
cent. In 1965 it passed 45 per cent and in 1967 50 per cent. The 
55-per-cent mark was exceeded immediately after Labour returned 
to office in 1974 and the following year it rose to 59.06 per cent. In 
1975-6 public sector borrowing alone had reached 11.5 per cent of 
total output, and the total of new public borrowing over the past five 
years alone exceeded £31 billion. 87 By this stage the combination of 
public overspending and wage-inflation was in danger of pushing the 
British inflation rate into the 40 per cent band. In the autumn of 
1976 Britain was obliged to call in the broker's men of the 
International Monetary Fund and submit to their diktat. Thereafter 
there was some retrenchment and, after the Conservative electoral 
victory of 1979, a systematic attempt to reduce public borrowing, 
restrain the public sector and expose the economy to the deflationary 
discipline of market forces. This, combined with the impact of the 



604 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

North Sea offshore oilfields, which made Britain self-sufficient in oil 
by 1980 and a substantial net exporter by 1981, stabilized the 
economy and raised productivity to competitive levels, though on the 
lowest level of economic activity since the late 1960s. By 1983 
Britain was recovering, but very slowly, and unlikely to be able to 
exert any form of leadership, inside or outside the EEC, for some time 
to come. 

Britain's relative failure, however, was an exception. Over the 
whole of Europe west of the Iron Curtain, the four post-war decades 
saw a spectacular social and economic improvement. It was accom- 
plished, moreover, against a background of constitutional legality 
and political peace. The contrast with the inter-war period was 
stunning, even in the most favoured areas. The Scandinavian coun- 
tries had one of the worst records for unemployment throughout the 
1920s and 1930s. In the winter of 1932-3 the percentage of the 
labour force out of work rose to 31.5 in Sweden, 42.4 in Norway 
and 42.8 in Denmark. 88 It was a period of intense class-warfare. 
Paramilitary forces had to be created to maintain order, and it was 
from the bitterness of social strife that Vidkun Quisling built his 
Nazi-type movement with its uniformed birdmenn modelled on the 

SA. 89 

The change came in the second half of the 1930s. In Norway 
(1935), Sweden and Denmark (1936) and Finland (1937), Social 
Democratic governments emerged which introduced comprehensive 
social security programmes. They were financed by rapid economic 
recovery. In Norway by 1938 gnp was 75 per cent above its 1914 
figure and in Sweden it increased 50 per cent in the years 1932—9, 
though Social Democracy was no more able than any other pre-war 
system (Hitlerism alone excepted) to solve mass unemployment. 90 
Already, in the later 1930s, British and American observers, such as 
Marquis Childs and Lord Simon of Wythenshawe, were drawing 
attention to what Simon called 'the most encouraging thing in the 
world today'. 91 The Social Democrats continued to dominate Scan- 
dinavian politics until the late 1970s, achieving prodigious democra- 
tic continuity. In Sweden Tage Erlander held the premiership for a 
record twenty-three years. Einar Gerhardsen had a comparable 
record in Norway until his retirement in 1965. The Social Democrats 
retained power from 1936-76 in Sweden and in Norway from 1935 
to 1981 (except 1965-71); and they were dominant throughout this 
period in Denmark and Finland. This social and political stability 
enabled Scandinavia to make a striking contribution, in relation to 
its numbers, to the world economy. In the mid-1970s, 22 million 
Scandinavians produced nearly 20 million tons of grain, 5.6 million 
tons of fish (twice America's and five times Britain's production), 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 605 

25.2 million tons of iron ore (more than Britain, France and 
Germany combined) and 49 million tons of wood and paper (a 
quarter of US production). Scandinavia generated more electric 
energy than France, and its shipbuilding exceeded that of America, 
Britain, France and Germany together. 92 But in the 1970s the 
growing cost of welfare services, the exigencies of the powerful trade 
union movements, as in Britain, and the impact of very high taxes 
combined with the energy crisis to destroy the dynamism of the 
Scandinavian economies, especially in Sweden, and ended the Social 
Democratic power monopoly. Non-socialists recovered office from 
1976-82 in Sweden, in Denmark and in 1981 even in Norway, which 
had benefited from North Sea oil. The Scandinavian experience 
indicated that, even in the most favourable circumstances, there were 
severe practical limits to what a social welfare democracy could 
offer. 

It was notable, indeed, that during the 1970s Switzerland overtook 
Sweden as the country with the highest socially balanced living 
standards, a result achieved by what might be termed plebiscitory 
conservatism. Industrialization came to Switzerland from 1800 
onwards and by 1920 over 40 per cent of the employed population 
were in industry (plus a large service element in hotels and banks), 
against only 25 per cent in agriculture. Universal male suffrage was 
introduced as early as 1848, together with a constitutional referen- 
dum system, augmented by further referenda options in 1874 and 
1891, making direct voting by the mass electorate the normal process 
of legislative change. This was accompanied by a device known as 
'concordance democracy', which entails representation of all major 
parties on the government executive, the Federal Council, and public 
acknowledgement of pressure-groups. 93 This system had two very 
important political consequences. First, referenda forced conserva- 
tives to build up mass parties, which have always been populist 
rather than elitist. The anti-Socialist Biirgerblock, of Radicals, 
Catholic Conservatives and peasants, which dominated Swiss 
politics from 1919 onwards, was a completely multi-class party, 
including some of the poorest elements in the nation: Italian- 
speaking Catholics, who felt discriminated against by progressive, 
French- and German-speaking Protestant liberals. Conservatism 
became a powerful negative force, able to block plebiscitory 
change. 94 Secondly, by preventing the radicalization of the workers, 
Conservative populism drove the Socialists towards the centre. In 
1935 the Swiss Social Democrat Party became the first to renounce 
the principle of class struggle and two years later negotiated a 'Peace 
Agreement' in the engineering industry. This opened the way for a 
Socialist to joint the Federal government in 1943, and in turn to the 



606 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

creation of an integrated bourgeois-Social-democrat state, based on 
conservative negativism. 

The negative approach paradoxically promoted the dynamism of 
the Swiss economy, especially in its biggest growth industry, bank- 
ing. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was the refusal of conservative 
elements to accept the Social Democrat demand to 'democratize' and 
'open' Swiss banking which allowed the economy to continue to 
grow and the banks to survive the 'Chiasso Affair' of 1977 (which 
involved a branch of Credit Suisse and Italian currency smugglers). 
Swiss banks were forbidden to divulge information about accounts 
by a law passed in 1934 to prevent the Nazi government from 
tracking down the savings of German Jews. Information is made 
available through Interpol in cases of kidnapping and robbery and 
(since 1980) to the US government to deal with certain cases of 
organized crime. But Switzerland resolutely refused to divulge finan- 
cial data for political purposes, although it came under a great deal 
of pressure when the Shah of Iran was ejected in 1979. There are 
many thousands of numbered 'political' accounts in Switzerland, 
including many from behind the Iron Curtain. But they represent 
only a tiny fraction of the Swiss banking trade, which at the end of 
1978 held foreign deposits of $115.06 billion, plus a further $123.7 
billion in securities. 95 By the early 1980s total Swiss bank holdings 
were in the trillion-dollar range and to 'democratize' the system 
would, Conservatives argued, destroy the efficiency of a system 
whose secrecy is linked with informality, speed and hatred of 
bureaucracy. Since banking was the source of Swiss industrial 
growth (in 1980 the three largest Swiss banks held 2,200 seats on 
1,700 Swiss corporations), a flight of capital would send the entire 
economy into recession. To defend banking secrecy is perhaps the 
most unpopular cause anyone could now support in the late- 
twentieth century. Yet thanks to Swiss plebiscitory democracy, 
which has made it easy to construct negative coalitions, the line was 
held throughout the 1970s, the Swiss economy remained buoyant, 
the Swiss franc one of the world's strongest currencies and Swiss per 
capita income pulled ahead of Scandinavian and North American 
levels. 

The high performance and the democratic stability of the Swiss 
and Scandinavian countries, generally classified as 'Protestant', fitted 
in with the theories, first advanced in France in the 1830s and 
culminating in Max Weber's 'Protestant ethic' thesis, that religious 
belief tended to determine economic patterns. This was demolished 
on a historical basis in the 1940s and 1950s, but even more 
interesting was its practical refutation, during the post-war period, 
by the development of the south European, 'non-Protestant' econo- 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 607 

mies. Italian Switzerland caught up with the French and German 
cantons. Italy had its industrial 'miracle' in the 1950s, France in the 
1960s. Even more impressive, in view of past performance, was the 
political and social progress of the Iberian peninsula and Greece. 

Antonio Salazar in Portugal and Franco in Spain proved not only the 
most durable but by far the most successful of the pre-war dictators, and 
history is likely to take a far more favourable view of both than was 
fashionable even in the early 1980s. Salazar took over finance in 1928, 
the prime ministership in 1932 and survived until 1970, the only tyrant 
ever to be overthrown by that dangerous instrument, a collapsing 
deckchair. He was also the only one to run a dictatorship of intellectuals 
(though Lenin came near to it). Between 1932 and 1961, university 
professors never made up less than 21 per cent of Salazar's cabinet. 
They held half the cabinet posts 1936—44; about one in four of the 
dictator's colleagues came from a single department, the law faculty at 
Coimbra University. This catedratiocracia^ or rule by dons, was highly 
successful in promoting slow but steady economic growth, maintaining 
a strong currency, holding back inflation and, above all, in giving 
Portugal what it had never possessed in modern times: political 
stability. The last was achieved partly by a small but highly efficient 
secret police force, the pide (International Police for the Defence of the 
State), which dated from 1926. Salazar defended the interests of the 
possessing classes but often went against their wishes, especially in 
hanging on, at great expense, to Portugal's African possessions, long 
after business wanted to compromise. He saw the head of the pide 
every day and supervised its smallest movement. He gaoled his enemies 
for long periods: in the mid-1970s, the twenty-two members of the 
Communist Central Committee claimed they had served a total of 308 
years in prison, an average of fourteen. 96 But he would not impose the 
death penalty, even though he allowed the pide an occasional 
unofficial murder, such as the killing of General Delgado, the leader of 
the opposition, in February 1 965. 97 Because the PiDEwas discreet in its 
brutality it was remarkably hard to expose and even enjoyed some 
esteem. Its commander, Agostinho Lourenco, was head of Interpol in 
Paris in the late 1 940s, and when Pope Paul v I visited Fatima in 1 967 he 
decorated several senior pide officers. 

When Salazar, as a result of his deckchair mishap, lost his senses in 
1969, the professors were sent back to their universities and the pide 
'abolished' or rather renamed. Like most bureaucratic reforms, this 
produced a big increase in numbers and a catastrophic reduction in 
efficiency (though not in cruelty and lawlessness). The secret police 
were taken by surprise by the uprising which overthrew the regime on 
25 April 1974. 98 Portugal was democratized, the empire vanished, the 
economy stumbled, inflation increased. But after three years of 



608 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

confusion Portugal retreated from the headlines and reverted to basic 
Salazarian economic patterns. The astonishing and encouraging 
aspect was that Portugal was able to make the transition from a 
durable police state to a working democracy not only without a 
bloodbath but while conserving most of the achievements of the old 
regime. 

Spain underwent a similar, and in the circumstances still more 
remarkable, experience in the 1970s. When Franco handed over his 
authority in summer 1974 to Juan Carlos (crowned King in Novem- 
ber 1975 immediately after Franco's death), he had held effective 
power for thirty-eight years, an achievement even Philip n might 
have respected. He was probably right in thinking that a Republican 
victory would have produced another civil war and that his regime 
was the one 'which divides us least', for there were two bitterly 
divided monarchical factions, a fascist and a traditional conservative 
faction as well as the mortal enmity between the cp and other 
Republicans. In October 1944, after the liberation of France, 2,000 
republicans 'invaded' across the Pyranees, expecting a general insur- 
rection: nothing happened. A Republican government was formed 
26 August 1945: a non-event. The Allies would not act against 
Franco because they did not want civil war in Spain. To please them 
he gave up the fascist salute (which he had never liked) but would not 
ban the Falange, much as he deplored its posturings, because it was a 
safety-valve for the extremist Right, and controllable. 

In essence Franco was a non-political figure, who ruled through 
men acceptable to the Church, the landed classes and business. That 
was what the army wanted and the army had a veto on policy which 
long antedated Franco. Franco, like the army, was a negative force. 
He kept the state immobile and unadventurous; he prevented 
professional politicians from doing things. He described himself 
dourly to senior army officers as 'the sentry who is never relieved, the 
man who receives the unwelcome telegrams and dictates the answers, 
the man who watches while others sleep.' 99 If he had been a younger 
man he might have devised a plebiscitory framework. As it was, on 
6 July 1947 he submitted a 'Law of Succession', embodying the 
monarchical principle, to a vote. Out of an electorate of nearly 
17,200,000, 15,200,000 cast their votes and 14,145,163 voted 'Yes', 
under conditions which observers testified to be fair. 100 

With that out of the way Franco educated and coached Juan 
Carlos as his successor. In the meantime, within the framework of 
negative government, not unlike Salazar's or, for that matter, the 
Swiss Confederation's, the economy modernized itself with the help 
of market forces. In the twenty years 1950-70, Spain was trans- 
formed. Those living in towns over 20,000 rose from 30 per cent to 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 609 

nearly 5 per cent of the population. Illiteracy dropped from 1 9 to 9 per 
cent in thirty years, and in a mere fifteen years the student population 
doubled. Spain was in some ways more successful in modernizing its 
backward south than Italy. Physically and visually the landscape of 
Andalucia was transformed in the quarter-century 1950—75, and the 
rapidly falling rural population probably benefited more, in terms of 
real wages, than the industrial workers of the swelling towns. But the 
important change was in expectation: surveys showed that workers 
could expect much better jobs, in pay and prestige, than their fathers; 
that a man had higher expectations at forty than at twenty. The old 
hopelessness of Spain, the source of its sullen misery and occasionally of 
its frantic violence, had gone. 101 During the 1950s and 1960s, in effect, 
Spain became part of the general modern European economy, sharing 
its successes and failures and its overall prosperity: the Pyrenees ceased 
to be a cultural-economic wall. 

The relative prosperity made possible by Franconian stability and 
political negativism helps to explain the success of the transition. It was 
characteristic of Franco's attitude that his last Prime Minister, and King 
Juan Carlos's first, Carlos Arias, was not a politician or a technocrat or 
a member of the Falange, but a protege of an important army 
general. 102 It was equally characteristic of Spain's grudging acknowl- 
edgement of Franco's virtues that the first true Prime Minister of the 
democratic regime, Adolfo Suarez, though born only in 1932, had 
created his Right-Centre party, the Union of the Spanish People 
(udpe), on the principle of continuismo. Suarez was assisted by the 
experience of Gaullism: both by its intrinsic success and by its ability to 
survive the death of its creator. He got his political reform through 
Franco's last Cortes without having to dissolve it, had it approved by a 
94.2 per cent 'Yes' vote (15 December 1976), and in the eleven months 
before the elections he abolished Franco's monopoly party structure, 
introduced a multi-party system (including the cp), legalized trade 
unions, restored freedom of speech and the press, besides setting up the 
poll itself, the first free voting since February 1936. The system was 
biased in favour of rural areas: the fifteen smallest provinces, with 3.4 
million population, had fifty-three seats in the Cortes, while Barcelona, 
with 4.5 million, had only thirty-three. But this allowed the emergence 
in the June 1977 vote of a quadripartite structure (as in France), with 
Suarez's re-named Union of the Democratic Centre as the strongest, 
with 34 per cent, followed by the Socialists (29 per cent), and 
Communists and Conservatives equal on the wings. 103 

The concentration of power in the centre was important, for the new 
Cortes had authority to write the constitution. The document which 
was eventually produced and approved by referendum in December 
1978 defined Spain as a 'social and democratic state ruled by law', 



610 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

whose form of government was 'parliamentary monarchy'; but it also 
guaranteed the 'nationalities' autonomy, a major departure from the 
centralism not merely of Franco but of Spain itself ever since it 
accepted Castilian dominance in the late fifteenth century. The King 
was made head of the armed forces as well as the state, a point which 
was to prove vital during the attempted putsch of 1 98 1 : Spain remains 
a country where the army is accorded a special role, though it is not, 
curiously enough, a large force (220,000, plus 46,600 in the navy and 
35,700 in the air force). The constitution abolished the death penalty, 
gave recognition, though not official status, to the Catholic Church, 
opened the way to divorce, and gave legal status to unions and parties. 
It raised a host of problems by laying down very complicated 
procedures for regional devolution, the issue likely to dominate 
Spanish politics in the 1980s. Indeed, being a parliamentary text and 
not a diktat, it was long (169 articles), as well as complex, absurdly 
detailed and gruesomely ill-written. Its great merit, however, was that 
it represented a consensus: Spain's first constitution which did not 
express a single ideology or a party monopoly of power. 104 By the 
early 1980s, the new Spanish establishment, led by a cool and cunning 
monarch (who showed his self-confidence by making Suarez a duke in 
1981, Europe's first new non-royal one since the war), isolated both 
radical terrorism on the one hand, and army conspiracy on the other, 
and successfully pushed both out of the public mainstream, so that in 
1982 the first Socialist government since 1936 was able to take office 
peacefully. Hence in a political sense, too, Spain now joined the 
European culture. 

What was still more striking, and would have gladdened the shade 
of Lloyd George, was that poor, battered Greece at last merged itself 
with that culture too. Eleftherios Venizelos's democratic Greece, an 
intended major beneficiary of Versailles, had in fact gained little, 
though for her the Great War had lasted an entire decade, 1912-22. 
Its wartime Chief of Staff, General John Metaxas, attempted a 
putsch as early as 1923 and finally succeeded in setting up a 
dictatorship in 1936. He promised to 'discipline' the Greek people, 
replace Greek individualism with ernst, 'the serious German spirit'; 
he was 'the First Peasant', 'the First Worker', the 'National Father'. 
All the same it was Metaxas who defeated the Italians in 1940 (he 
died early in 1941), and it was the army, rather than any other 
institution, which emerged with the most honour from Greece's long 
war and post-war agony. Churchill's famous telegram to General 
Scobie may have saved Greece for the West, but Communist 
resistance survived in the north. Not until the summer of 1949 did 
Metaxas's old chief of staff, Field-Marshal Papagos, establish the 
government's authority over the whole country. For Greece, the 



THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 611 

Second World War, too, lasted an entire decade. The civil war killed 
80,000 Greeks, sent 20,000 to prison (including 5,000 executions or 
life-sentences), turned 700,000 into refugees and forced 10 per cent 
of the population to change home. 105 

There had been sixteen transitory governments between 1946 and 
1952, but in the 1952 elections Papagos, who had created a 
'national' party on the lines of de Gaulle's rpf, won an overwhelm- 
ing victory and began eleven years of right-wing rule. When he died 
in 1955, Constantine Karamanlis took over his party, winning the 
1958 and 1961 elections. This was the only kind of democratic 
'normalcy' the army would accept. When George Papandreou, who 
had reconstructed the old Venizelos Centre-Left coalition, ousted 
Karamanlis in 1963 and drove him into exile, a period of confusion 
followed, terminating in an army putsch, under a group of middle- 
ranking officers led by Colonel George Papadopoulos. 

As in Spain, the army considered itself more of a national 
institution than any of the parties. They were run by hereditary 
castes of the middle and upper classes, who operated a spoils system. 
The army, by contrast, claimed it was run on merit, most of its 
officers being recruited from the peasantry. It was closer to the 
Church, too; its hatred of professional politicians was widely shared. 
The Papadopoulos regime echoed Metaxas, with its accent on 
'discipline' and 'Helleno— Christian civilization'. It produced a new, 
authoritarian constitution in 1968 and in 1973 ended Greece's 
always unsatisfactory monarchy. It aroused little opposition among 
workers and peasants; not much enthusiasm either. It imprisoned 
and occasionally tortured its middle-class enemies. It might have 
survived indefinitely, but Papadopoulos lost the confidence of his 
colleagues, was deposed, and the junta then dabbled clumsily in 
Cyprus politics, provoking the Turkish invasion of 1974. Defeated, it 
dissolved in chaos. Karamanlis was summoned from his Paris exile. 
He won an overwhelming electoral victory (219 seats out of 300) 
and so was able to push through in 1975 a constitution with a strong 
executive on Gaullist lines - yet another example of the extraordin- 
ary impact de Gaulle had on the Europe of the 1960s and 1970s. 
This resilient framework produced some confidence that the next 
electoral victory of the Papandreou clan, which duly occurred in 
1981 on a socialist platform, would not introduce another cycle of 
constitutional instability. 

What mattered to most Greeks was not the political ballet, or 
indeed the very exercise of professional politics, but the fact that in 
1952 Papagos had introduced a long era of social and economic 
progress. This continued, at roughly the same pace, under Karaman- 
lis, under the military, and then under Karamanlis again. It illus- 



612 THE EUROPEAN LAZARUS 

trated one of the lessons which emerge from a study of modern times. 
Political activities rarely promoted economic well-being, though they 
might, if intense and protracted enough, undermine it. The most 
useful function of government was to hold the ring, within which 
individuals could advance their own interests, benefiting the commu- 
nal one in the process. The improvement in the fortunes of ordinary 
Greeks in the three decades 1950-80 was by far the most substantial 
in the country's history. 106 This was reflected in the one reliable 
index of popular approval: movement. Men and women are most 
sincere when they vote not with their ballot-papers but with their 
feet. Greeks had emigrated since the eighth century bc. During the 
1970s, of 13 million Greeks, 4 million lived abroad, 3 million of 
them permanently. Emigration reached a peak of 117,167 in 1965, 
but that appears to have been the turning-point. During the later 
years of the military regime, the emigration rate fell fast, except to 
the United States, and more and more overseas Greeks began 
returning home. By 1974, for the first time since statistics were 
compiled in 1850, the number of Greeks joining the home economy 
was greater than those leaving it for work abroad. By 1979, when 
emigration had dropped below 20,000, remittances from abroad 
($1.2 billion) had fallen behind tourism ($1.7 billion) and shipping 
($1.5 billion) as Greece's prime source of income. Indeed during the 
1970s, the Greek economy's growth-rates, averaging 5-6 per cent, 
with only 2 per cent unemployment, were much superior to those of 
Western Europe. 107 By the early 1980s, Greece was quickly ap- 
proaching West European living-standards, and that was an added 
reason to suppose her new political and social stability might be 
lasting. 

The process whereby, over thirty-five years, some 300 million 
people in Europe west and south of the Iron Curtain achieved 
relative affluence within a democratic framework and under the rule 
of law was one of the most striking in the whole of history. It might 
be termed unexpected, too, since it followed hard upon two attempts 
at continental suicide which had come close to success. Yet there was 
a paradox in this new stability and prosperity. In the early 1980s, 
three-and-a-half decades after the end of the war, democratic 
Europe, despite its accruing wealth, was still dependent for its 
security not merely on the guarantees of transatlantic America but on 
the continuing physical presence of American forces. This was 
anomalous. The history of America in the 1960s and 1970s sug- 
gested it was also dangerous. 



EIGHTEEN 

America's Suicide Attempt 



The Eisenhower years were the culmination of the American para- 
mountcy. A wall of collective security was completed around the 
perimeter of the Communist bloc. Behind its ramparts, first America, 
then Western Europe, enjoyed unprecedented prosperity. So both the 
diplomatic and economic lessons of the inter-war period had been 
learnt. Or so it was thought. It was Twenties prosperity over again, 
but less frenetic and more secure, with a far wider social spread and 
on both sides of the Atlantic. The Fifties was the decade of affluence, 
a word popularized by the fashionable economist J.K.Galbraith in 
his 1958 best-seller, The Affluent Society. The book attacked the old 
'conventional wisdom'. In doing so it created a new one. Galbraith 
and his school argued that the days of shortage were over. The world 
was abundant in resources. The advanced economies had mastered 
the difficulty of producing goods. The economic problem was solved. 
What remained was a political one: distributing them equitably. The 
state should play a creative role by employing 'private affluence' to 
end 'public squalor' and cure dangerous imbalances in wealth not 
only within nations but between them. Eisenhower did not share this 
optimism. He thought the American economy could easily be 
wrecked by excessive spending on arms or welfare, let alone both 
together. Indeed it was notable that, unlike the Twenties, it was not 
the Right but the Left who now believed that prosperity would go on 
for ever and who turned the Sixties into the decade of illusion. 

By 1960 Eisenhower was the oldest man ever to occupy the White 
House. He appeared comatose. The cry was for activism, to 'get 
America moving again'. America was presented as falling behind not 
only in welfare provision but in military strength. There was talk of a 
'missile gap'. 1 The Republican candidate in the 1960 election, 
Vice-President Richard Nixon, was young (forty-seven) but asso- 
ciated with the Administration's immobility and, as a hard-line 
Californian, detested by the dominant East Coast media-liberals. The 

613 



614 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

Democrat, John Kennedy, was younger still (forty-three), rich and 
handsome. His strength lay in public relations and in an efficient and 
ruthless political machine, run by his brother Robert. These won him 
the election; that is, if he did win it legally. Of nearly 69 million votes 
cast, Kennedy had a margin of only 120,000, and this was clouded 
by rival interpretations of the vote in Alabama. Kennedy had a 
majority of 84 in the electoral college, which was what mattered. But 
here again irregularities in Texas and, still more, in Illinois by the 
notorious Daley machine, cast doubt on the validity of the Kennedy 
victory. Nixon did not challenge the result because he thought it 
would damage the presidency, and so America. 2 Such restraint 
earned him no credit. Kennedy's contempt for Nixon emerged in his 
post-election comment in 1960: 'He went out the way he came in - 
no class.' 3 

Kennedy had 'class'. He was the first president since Roosevelt 
who had never had to earn his living. Like FDR, he turned 
Washington into a city of hope; that is to say, a place where 
middle-class intellectuals flocked for employment. His wife Jackie 
was a society beauty with a taste for high culture. With such a 
glamorous couple in the White House, some spoke of Kennedy's 
Washington as 'the new Camelot'. Others were less impressed. The 
Kennedy invasion, one visiting statesman observed, was 'like watch- 
ing the Borgia brothers take over a respectable north Italian town'. 
The first beneficiary of the new regime was the 'military-industrial 
complex', as the distrustful Eisenhower had branded it. Spending 
both on conventional and nuclear forces increased sharply. In some 
ways Kennedy and his Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, proved the 
most enthusiastic of the Cold Warriors, though not the most skilful. 
Kennedy gave a universalist twist to America's overseas obligations 
which was entirely new. The classical American attitude had been 
defined by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1821. 'Wherever 
the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be 
unfurled,' he promised, 'there will be America's heart, her benedic- 
tions and her prayers.' But, he added, 'she goes not abroad in search 
of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and 
independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her 
own.' 4 Under Truman and Eisenhower, the doctrine had been 
modified, for 'her own' could be extended to include allies whose 
survival was vital to American self-interest. 

Kennedy went further. He was conscious that the old-style Cold 
War, which Stalin waged by pushing forward his frontiers from a 
central base, was no longer the only one. Stalin's successors had 
introduced a war of movement, in which America's defensive 
barriers could be overlept. Nikita Khrushchev actually defined the 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 615 

new policy, in reality a policy as old as Lenin which Russia now had 
the resources to push vigorously, in a speech of 6 January 1961, 
shortly before Kennedy took over. The Communist victory, Khrush- 
chev said, would not take place through nuclear war, which would 
destroy humanity, nor through conventional war, which might soon 
become nuclear, but through 'national liberation wars' in Africa, 
Asia and Latin America, the 'centres of revolutionary struggle 
against imperialism'. Since 'Communists are revolutionaries', they 
would 'take advantage' of these 'new opportunities'. Kennedy inter- 
preted this as a kind of declaration of war, and he used his Inaugural 
Address to take up the challenge. He declared the time to be an 'hour 
of maximum danger' for freedom. His generation had been given the 
role of defending it. 'I do not shrink from this responsibility,' he said, 
'I welcome it.' America would 'pay any price, bear any burden, meet 
any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, to ensure the 
survival and the success of liberty.' 5 That was an extraordinary 
guarantee; a blank cheque tossed at the world's feet. 

Kennedy made this expansive gesture because he and his advisers 
believed that America could successfully compete with Soviet Russia 
for the allegience of the poorer peoples by promoting the emergence 
of liberal, democratic regimes to serve them. A variety of devices 
advanced this new 'action diplomacy': the Peace Corps of young US 
volunteers to serve abroad, the Green Berets for more forceful 
activities, termed 'counter-insurgency', campaigns for winning 
'hearts and minds', the 'Alliance for progress' for Latin America; 
increased economic and military aid almost everywhere. 6 But this 
was to ignore the central lesson of the British Empire, that the best 
any possessing power can hope to settle for is stability, however 
imperfect. To promote dynamism is to invite chaos. In the end, a 
possessing power always had to defend its system by force, or watch 
it disintegrate, as Britain had done. America had now created a new, 
post-colonial system, as Kennedy's Inaugural acknowledged. But it 
was still a possessing one, dependent on stability for its well-being. 
America's resources were far greater than Britain's had been. But 
they were still limited. The art, therefore, lay in selecting those 
positions which must be defended and could only be defended by 
force, and devising workable alternatives for the others. Therein lay 
the weakness of Kennedy's universalism. 

The problem immediately arose in an acute form in Latin America. 
Under the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 the United States had policed 
the hemisphere, in theory to preserve the independence of its nations 
from European covetousness, in reality to protect America's own 
interests. This often involved military intervention, especially in 
Central America and the Caribbean. The Monroe Doctrine was 



616 America's suicide attempt 

based on the reasoning that the Caribbean was America's 'inland sea' 
and part of the US economic structure. In Cuba, which America had 
liberated from Spain, the US right of intervention was actually 
written into the Cuban constitution, through the so-called 'Piatt 
Amendment'. In the inter-war period, under the impact of Wilsonian 
doctrines of self-determination, the system foundered. In the 1928 
Clark Memorandum, the State Department itself argued that Mon- 
roe did not justify US intervention since 'it states a case of United 
States vs. Europe, not the United States vs. Latin America'. 7 
Roosevelt accepted this logic, scrapped the Piatt Amendment in 1934 
and introduced instead a 'Good Neighbour' policy, which in theory 
treated the Latin American states as equals. This might in time have 
worked very well, with the larger nations forming the same kind of 
relationship with their giant patron as Canada. 

The most likely candidate for this role was Argentina, whose 
economy in the inter-war period was developing on the lines of 
Canada's and Australia's. Like Canada it had boomed from 1900 to 
1914, experienced slower growth in the 1920s, a sharp setback from 
1929 to 1933, but thereafter a long period of growth at an average of 
2—3 per cent a year, with steady progress in the manufacturing, 
mining, oil, public utilities and electrical sectors: achieving, in fact, 
economic take-off — the first Latin American country to do so. 8 It 
had a market economy, minimum government, a growing middle 
class, a free press and the rule of law. During the Second World War 
it enjoyed a prosperity unknown in the southern hemisphere outside 
Australia, with wages rising to West European levels. It accumulated 
what was then the princely reserves of $1,500 million in dollar and 
sterling balances — more than Britain, Argentina's chief economic 
partner, had been able to invest there in over seventy years. 9 If the 
money had been used to create steel, petroleum and other import- 
substitution industries, the likelihood is that Argentina would have 
achieved dynamic, self-sustaining economic growth during the 
1950s, and the whole history of Latin America would have been 
different. 

Instead, Argentina fell victim to both the twin evils which poison 
Latin America: militarism and politics. In the nineteenth century the 
military coup had become a standard means to change government. 
This disastrous practice continued after the arrival of universal 
suffrage. In the years 1920-66, for instance, there were eighty 
successful military coups in eighteen Latin-American countries, 
Ecuador and Bolivia leading with nine each, Paraguay and Argentina 
following with seven each. 10 The key one in Argentina came in 1943. 
The junta appointed to the Labour Ministry a certain Colonel Juan 
Peron, the son of a poor farmer who had done well in the army; a 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 617 

handsome ski and fencing champion, flashy in mind and body, 
student of sociology, a pseudo-intellectual of the type that was to 
become very common in the post-war era. The military had hitherto 
stamped on unions. Peron discovered that, by patronizing labour, he 
could build himself a mass-following. As Labour Minister, he took 
over the unions. Hitherto, union leaders had been bribed personally. 
Peron bribed the entire labour movement. 11 

Peron's career illustrated the essential identity of the Marxist and 
the fascist will to power, for at times he borrowed from Lenin, 
Mussolini, Hitler, Franco and Stalin. He had great personal charm; a 
superb speaking voice; a gift for ideological verbiage. He spoke of his 
labour followers as 'the shirtless ones' (they were in fact well paid). 
He called his philosophy Justicialismo, the first of the bogus 'isms' of 
what was to become the Third World. Peron could claim to be the 
prototype not merely of a new kind of Latin-American dictator but 
of all the post-colonial charismatics of Africa and Asia. He was the 
link between the old-style mountebank dictator and the new Ban- 
dung model. He showed how to manipulate head-counting dem- 
ocracy. He had no substance. When he quarrelled with his military 
colleagues in 1945, all he could think of was to fall on his knees and 
beg for mercy. It was his mistress Eva Duarte, a militant feminist, 
who roused the workers and got him released. By marrying her he 
squared the church. Then he swept on to a handsome victory (24 
February 1945) in one of the few free elections in Argentina's 
history. 12 

As President, Peron gave a classic demonstration, in the name of 
socialism and nationalism, of how to wreck an economy. He 
nationalized the Central Bank, railways, telecommunications, gas, 
electricity, fishing, air-transport, steel and insurance. He set up a 
state marketing agency for exports. He created Big Government and 
a welfare state in one bound: spending on public services, as 
percentage of gnp, rose from 19.5 to 29.5 per cent in five years. 13 He 
had no system of priorities. He told the people they would get 
everything at once. In theory they did. The workers were given 
thirteen months' pay for a year's work; holidays with pay; social 
benefits at a Scandinavian level. He would track down a highly 
successful firm which spent lavishly on its workers and force all firms 
to copy its practices, regardless of their resources. At the same time 
he carried out a frontal assault on the agricultural sector, Argentina's 
main source of internal capital. By 1951 he had exhausted the 
reserves and decapitalized the country, wrecked the balance of 
payments and built wage-inflation into the system. Next year 
drought struck the land and brought the crisis into the open. Seeing 
his support vanish, Peron turned from economic demagoguery to 



618 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

political tyranny. He destroyed the Supreme Court. He took over the 
radio station and La Prensa, the greatest newspaper in Latin 
America. He debauched the universities and fiddled with the consti- 
tution. Above all, he created public 'enemies': Britain, America, all 
foreigners, the Jockey Club, which his gangs burnt down in 1953, 
destroying its library and art collection. Next year he turned on 
Catholicism, and in 1955 his labour mobs destroyed Argentina's two 
finest churches, San Francisco and Santo Domingo, and many others. 

That was the last straw. The army turned him out. He fled on a 
Paraguayan gunboat. But his successors could never get back to the 
minimum government which had allowed Argentina to become 
wealthy. Too many vested interests had been created: a huge, 
parasitical state, over-powerful unions, a vast army of public em- 
ployees. It is one of the dismal lessons of the twentieth century that, 
once a state is allowed to expand, it is almost impossible to contract 
it. Peron's legacy proved more durable than his verbiage. But he 
himself proved durable enough. In 1968 the head of the military, 
General Alejandro Lanusse, swore: 'If that man . . . should set foot in 
this land again, one of us, he or I, will leave it feet first, because I 
shall not let my sons suffer what I have.' Five years later, as Presi- 
dent, he organized the elections which swept Peron back into power, 
aged seventy-nine: a case, as Dr Johnson said of second marriage, of 
'the triumph of hope over experience'. 14 By this point the whole 
course of Argentina's history had been changed. It had forfeited its 
chance of becoming an advanced economy and had been perma- 
nently downgraded to the status of a second-rate Latin-American 
republic, condemned to industrial backwardness, political instability 
and military tyranny. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the public 
life of Argentina became increasingly savage, and in 1982 it even 
embarked on a reckless military adventure against Britain's Falkland 
Isles, which ended in humiliating defeat. 

The Peronist revolution was a wider disaster for Latin America as 
a whple, and for the USA also. The Canadian analogy receded. In 
frustration and despair, demagoguery flourished; and demagogues, 
as Peron himself had done, took the easy way out and blamed 
America. Moreover, Peron himself remained a potent exemplar. He 
had 'stood up to the Yanquis'; he had made his country truly 
independent for the first time. His economic failure was forgotten; 
his political success was remembered and imitated. 

Peron's shadow fell over Cuba. It, like Argentina before Peron, 
was one of the richest Latin-American countries. But its economic 
structure was very different. It was really part of the US economy. 
When it became independent in 1898 it should, in logic, have become 
a US state, like Texas or New Mexico, or a colony, like Puerto Rico, 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 619 

to be later upgraded. In 1924 US investment in Cuba was already 
$1.2 billion. Cuba got 66 per cent of its imports from the US and sent 
it 83 per cent of its exports, chiefly sugar. In 1934 the Reciprocal 
Trade Agreement forbade Cuba to impose tariffs or quotas on a wide 
range of US imports; the quid pro quo, the Jones-Costigan Act, 
guaranteed the USA would take the Cuban sugar crop at generous 
prices. The arrangement was termed by Earl Babst, head of the 
American Sugar Refining Company, 'a step in the direction of a 
sound colonial policy'. 15 After 1945 the dominance of the USA in 
the Cuban economy slowly declined. But even in the 1950s the US 
Ambassador in Havana, as one of them testified, was 'the second 
most important man in Cuba; sometimes even more important than 
the president'. 16 Cuba, in fact, was a kind of US satellite. But the 
ending of the Piatt Amendment had made it a full independent 
country - in theory. Therein lay the source of much anger. 

Like the vast majority of Latin-American dictators, Cuba's had 
always begun as liberals and ended as tyrants, usually becoming 
reconciled to the US paramountcy in the process. The last old-style 
dictator, a former liberal, of course, had been Gerardo Machado, 
thrown out in 1933 by an ncos' coup led by Fulgencio Batista. This 
sergeant-stenographer was a genuine man of the people, half-Indian, 
whose father had been a sugar-worker. He had worked on the 
plantations himself. He was an extreme radical. The US ambassador, 
Sumner Welles, thought his regime 'frankly communistic' and 
wanted battleships sent. 17 The Communist leader, Bias Roca, called 
Batista the father of the Popular Front, 'this magnificent reserve of 
Cuban democracy', 'the people's idol, the great man of our national 
politics'. 18 Batista ruled as president himself, 1940-4, but usually 
through others. He was in league with the radical students, and his 
favourite substitute as president was their leader, Ramon Grau San 
Martin, who created the Authentic Revolutionary Movement 
(Autenticos, as opposed to Ortodoxos, the opposition revolution- 
aries). But Grau turned out a crook, a weak man run by a grasping 
mistress. 'Have a word with Paulina' was his system of government. 
By the time that Batista took power himself again, in 1952, the 
damage was done, and he himself was sucked into the morass of 
graft. So was virtually everyone else in public life. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, Cuba became a radical gangster society. 
In the old days America would have intervened and imposed 
somebody honest. Now that was ruled out. But America was 
necessarily involved in all major Cuban transactions. In the age of 
Peronismo, it was blamed for everything. Cuba illustrated the gap 
between words and reality which was to become the most striking 
characteristic of the Third World. Everyone in politics talked revolu- 



620 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

tion and practised graft. Of course corruption was linked to violence. 
The presidency of the students' union at Havana University, an 
institution almost as important as the army, was settled by guns. The 
police were not allowed on campus. The campus police were 
murdered or terrorized. Many students carried Forty-fives, and 
lectures were punctuated by shots. The Communists were as corrupt 
as anyone. Grau used to say, when they greeted him with clenched- 
fist salutes, 'Don't worry: tomorrow they will open their fists!' 19 The 
only opponents of corruption were a few rich men, such as the 
eccentric Eduardo Chibas, leader of the Ortodoxos, and even he 
joined in the violence by fighting duels. The various police forces 
fought gang-battles with each other; most gangsters held police as 
well as political rank. The political pistoleros, organized in 'action 
groups', and spouting Marxist, fascist or Peronist slogans, were 
reminiscent of Germany in the early 1920s. Students supplied the 
worst killers and the most pathetic victims. 

One of the student gunmen was Fidel Castro. His father came 
from Galicia, from a family of right-wing Carlists, and like most 
Spanish immigrants hated the Americans. He worked for United 
Fruit, got a farm himself, prospered and ended with 10,000 acres and 
a labour force of five hundred. His son Fidel became a professional 
student politician - he never seems to have wanted any other 
occupation than politics - and, being rich, supported Chibas's 
Ortodoxos. On his own admission, he carried a gun as a student. 20 
In 1947, aged twenty, he took part in an invasion of the Dominican 
Republic by an 'action group', armed with a sub-machine gun. The 
next year he was involved in appalling violence in Bogota, during the 
Pan-American Conference; he was said to have helped to organize 
the riots, in which 3,000 were killed. 21 The same year he was in a 
gun-battle with Cuban police, and ten days later was accused of 
murdering the Minister for Sport. Batista, hearing he was an 
exceptionally gifted political gangster, tried to enlist him. Castro 
declined for what he termed 'generational reasons'. According to a 
fellow law-student, he was 'a power-hungry person, completely 
unprincipled, who would throw in his lot with any group he felt 
could help his political career'. 22 He later claimed his 'vocation' was 
'being a revolutionary'. He had the urges, in short, of a Lenin as well 
as a Hitler: the two streams came together in his violent personality. 
But, like Peron, he modelled his political prose-style on the Spanish 
proto-fascist Primo de Rivera until he adopted Marxist cliches. 23 

Castro's chance came in 1951-2, when Chibas went mad and shot 
himself, leaving the 'idealist' role vacant, and Batista, in an attempt 
to end gangsterism, abolished the parties and made himself dictator. 
His 'freedom coup' was popular with the workers and he would 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 621 

probably have restored constitutional rule eventually, as he had done 
before. But Castro did not give him time. He seems to have 
welcomed the coup as a chance to get down to serious fighting: Le 
hora es de lucha, as he put it in his first political statement. He took 
to the Sierra with 150 other gunmen. His guerrilla campaign was 
never very serious, though urban terrorism cost many lives. The 
Cuban economy continued to flourish until 1957. In all essentials, 
the battle for Cuba was a public relations campaign, fought in New 
York and Washington. Castro's principal advocate was Herbert 
Matthews of the New York Times, who presented him as the 
T.E.Lawrence of the Caribbean. 24 Just as the Hearst press helped to 
make the Cuban revolution in 1898, so the Times sponsored Castro. 
This swung round the State Department. William Wieland, in charge 
of the Caribbean desk, had hitherto taken the view, 'I know Batista is 
considered by many as a sonofabitch . . . but American interests 
come first ... at least he is our sonofabitch.' 25 Now Wieland 
changed sides. Earl Smith, appointed Ambassador to Havana in 
1957, was told: 'You are assigned to Cuba to preside over the 
downfall of Batista. The decision has been taken that Batista has to 
go.' Wieland sent him to be briefed by Matthews, who told him: 'it 
would be in the best interests of Cuba and ... the world ... if Batista 
were removed.' Roy Rubottom, Assistant Secretary of State, was also 
pro-Castro, as were the cia in Havana. 26 

Once in Cuba, however, Smith grasped that a Castro victory 
would be a disaster for America, and sought to prevent it. He insisted 
on flying to Washington, at his own expense (Rubottom refused to 
authorize it from state funds), to hold a warning press conference, at 
which he said that 'the US government' would never be able 'to do 
business with Fidel Castro' because he 'would not honour inter- 
national obligations'. 27 Thereafter the State Department worked 
behind his back. The pattern of muddle, duplicity and cross-purpose 
recalled Roosevelt diplomacy at its worst, and attempts by some 
State Department officials to undermine the Shah of Iran in 1979. 
On 13 March 1958 Smith saw Batista in his study lined with busts of 
Lincoln, and agreement was reached to hold free elections and for 
Batista to stand down on 24 February 1959. The next day, unknown 
to Smith, Washington took the decision to suspend all official arms 
sales to Cuba. A shipment of Garrand rifles was stopped at the New 
York dockside. As Castro's American well-wishers continued to 
subscribe for arms to him, America was now, from early 1958, 
arming one side: the rebels. The US arms embargo was the turning- 
point in Castro's road to power. Before it, he had never had more 
than three-hundred men. After it, the Cubans concluded the Ameri- 
cans had changed their policy and switched sides accordingly. 



622 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

Castro's support rocketed up; the economy plummeted. Even so, 
Castro never had more than 3,000 followers. His 'battles' were 
public relations exercises. In the so-called 'Battle of Santa Clara' his 
losses were six, and only forty in the defeat of Batista's 1958 summer 
offensive, the largest engagement in the 'war'. Batista's total losses 
were only 300. The real fighters were the anti-Batista elements in the 
towns, of whom between 1,500 and 2,000 were killed. The 'guerrilla 
war' was largely propaganda. 28 As Che Guevara admitted, after it 
was over: 'The presence of a foreign journalist, American for 
preference, was more important for us than a military victory.' 29 
Apart from America's switch, the morale of the Batista regime was 
destroyed by the urban bands, which were non-Castroist. At the last 
minute, in November 1958, the American government sought to 
organize the succession of a non-Castro government, characteristi- 
cally without telling their Ambassador. 30 But by then it was too late. 
Batista got out in January 1959, and Cuba was at Castro's mercy. 
At what point Castro became a Leninist is unclear. He had 
obviously studied carefully the methods both Lenin and Hitler had 
used to make themselves absolute masters. When he took over in 
January 1959 he had himself made Commander-in-Chief and, using 
as his excuse the necessity to prevent the re-emergence of gangster- 
ism, secured for himself a monopoly of force. All police forces were 
placed under himself, not the Interior Ministry, and key posts in both 
police and army were rapidly taken over by his guerrilla colleagues. 
The critical moment was when he got the rival anti-Batista forces, 
especially the democratic Directorio Revolucionario, to lay down 
their arms. 31 Thereafter he could do what he liked; and did so. The 
provisional president, Judge Manuel Urrutia, was made to agree with 
Castro's demand to postpone elections for eighteen months, with 
rule by decree in the meantime. This was the Lenin technique. One of 
the first decrees abolished all political parties, his paper, Revolution, 
explaining: 'Worthy men who belong to definite political parties 
already have posts in the provisional government .... The others . . . 
would do better to be silent' (7 January 1959). That was the Hitler 
touch. So was the decree of 7 February, described as 'a fundamental 
law of the republic', investing legislative power in the cabinet - the 
equivalent of Hitler's Enabling Law. Immediately after it, Castro 
took over as Prime Minister, banning the President from cabinet 
meetings. 32 Thus, within weeks of the take-over, the liberals and 
democrats had been effectively excluded from power. The cabinet 
was the Politburo; and, within it, thanks to his relations and cronies, 
Castro was dictator, exactly like Batista. But Batista had the saving 
grace of caring for money as well as power. Castro wanted power 
alone. 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 623 

Castro had already been running purge courts-martial to kill his 
enemies. The first unambiguous act of tyranny came on 3 March 1 959, 
after forty-four Batista air force men, accused of 'war crimes', were 
acquitted in a Santiago court for lack of evidence. Castro immediately 
announced on TV that the trial was a mistake. There would be another. 
The president of the court was found dead. A creature of the Castros 
was appointed in his place. The men were retried and sentenced to 
twenty to thirty years' imprisonment. Castro announced: 'Revolution- 
ary Justice is based not upon legal precepts but on moral conviction.' It 
was the end of the rule of law in Cuba. 33 When Grau asked when 
elections would be held, Castro replied when the agrarian reform was 
complete, when all children went free to school and could read and 
write, when all had free access to medicine and doctors. Never, in short. 
He got rid of Urrutia over the Agrarian Reform law in summer 1959. 
The President fled to the Venezuelan Embassy and then out of the 
country. 

The movement to Soviet Russia began at the same time. The truth is, 
Cuba had, and has, a dependent economy. If America was unacceptable 
as a patron, another great power had to fill the role. And America was 
unacceptable, in the sense that Castro, like other Third World dictators, 
needed an enemy. After Batista went, it had to be America. And with 
America as enemy, he needed an ally; it had to be Soviet Russia. With 
Russia as ally and, from mid- 1959, paymaster, Castro's ideology had to 
be Marxism, which fitted in well with his Left— fascist brand of domestic 
autocracy. Castro was never an orthodox Marxist- Leninist ruler in that 
he governed not merely by secret committee but by public oratory, in 
the tradition of Mussolini, Hitler and Peron. But in the second half of 
1959 he signed his treaty with Mephistopheles by getting Soviet arms, 
advisers and kgb assistance in organizing his security services. He was 
hooked. From now on, for a Cuban just to hold anti-Communist views 
was enough for arrest. At the same time, the first gangland killing of 
Castro's opponents started, with the mysterious death of the army 
Commander-in-Chief Camilo Cienfuegos. Purge-trials of old Castro 
associates, such as Hubert Matos, who would not accept his 
totalitarian system, began in December 1959. By the end of the year 
Cuba was a Communist dictatorship. 34 

For an island only forty miles from America to transform itself 
abruptly from a dependent ally into a Soviet satellite was in itself a 
momentous shift in the world balance of power, especially since Castro 
himself, in a four-thousand- word manifesto published in 1957, had 
openly proclaimed that, once in power, he would pursue an active 
foreign policy against, as he put it, 'other Caribbean dictators'. 35 
America would have been within her rights to reverse the development 
by any means, including force. Perhaps the best analogy was with 



624 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

neutral Finland, whose foreign and defence policy, because of the 
proximity to Russia, were conducted subject to a Soviet veto. But by 
the end of 1959, Dulles was dead and Eisenhower was a lame-duck 
president not running for re-election. Nothing definite was done, 
though many plans were considered. When Kennedy took over, early 
in 1961, he found a proposal, supported by the cia and the chairman 
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for 12,000 armed Cuban exiles, known as 
the Cuban Liberation Corps, to land in Cuba's Bay of Pigs and 
detonate a popular rising against Castro. It is hard to believe the wily 
and experienced Eisenhower would have given final approval to the 
scheme. It had all the disadvantages of involving America morally 
and politically (the first two men to step ashore were cia 
operatives 36 ) with none of the real advantages of US air and naval 
participation. Naively and weakly, Kennedy allowed it to go ahead 
on 17 April. It proved a fiasco. The invasion should have got full 
American backing, or been dropped. This was Kennedy's instinct. As 
he said to his brother Robert, he would 'rather be called an aggressor 
than a bum'. 37 But in the event he lacked the resolution: in its 
political and military miscalculations, the Bay of Pigs raised uneasy 
echoes of Eden's Suez misadventure. 38 For Cuba it was a disaster, for 
it gave Castro the opportunity to wage a terror-campaign against the 
opposition. Most of those already in custody were shot. Perhaps as 
many as 100,000 were arrested. They included the real underground, 
most of the cia's 2,500 agents, and 20,000 counter-revolutionary 
sympathizers. 39 On 1 May Castro announced that Cuba was now a 
socialist state. There would be no more elections: there was, he said, 
an election every day in Cuba since the revolutionary regime 
expressed the will of the people. 40 

American opinion was outraged by the Bay of Pigs failure and 
would have supported direct intervention. One senior policy-maker, 
Chester Bowles, thought a decision by Kennedy 'to send in troops or 
drop bombs or whatever . . . would have had the affirmative votes of 
at least 90 per cent of the people'. Richard Nixon, consulted, told the 
President: 'I would find a proper legal cover and I would go in.' 41 But 
the Administration dithered. Defence Secretary Robert McNamara 
admitted: 'We were hysterical about Castro at the time of the Bay of 
Pigs and thereafter.' 42 At various times, there were plans to employ 
gangsters to attack Cuban officials, to spread the rumour that Castro 
was Antichrist and a Second Coming imminent, with a submarine 
letting off star-shells, to attack sugar-workers with non-lethal chemi- 
cals, to use thallium salts to make Castro's beard fall out, to lace his 
cigars with disorienting chemicals or impregnate them with deadly 
botulinus, to give his mistress, Marie Lorenz, poison capsules, to use 
Cuban— American gangsters to assassinate him under contract, to 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 625 

give him a scuba-diving suit impregnated with a tuberculus bacillus 
and a skin-fungus, and to plant a rare seashell, filled with an 
explosive device, in the area where he dived. Richard Helms, whom 
Kennedy had made head of the cia, later testified: 

It was the policy at the time to get rid of Castro, and if killing him was one 
of the things that was to be done ... we felt we were acting well within the 
guidelines .... Nobody wants to embarrass a President ... by discussing 
the assassination of foreign leaders in his presence. 43 

None of these wild schemes came to anything. In the event it was 
Khrushchev who provided Kennedy with another opportunity to 
settle the Cuban problem. Khrushchev, too, had his 'missile gap', real 
or imaginary. By stationing medium-range missiles in Cuba he would 
alter the strategic nuclear equation drastically in Russia's favour at 
virtually no extra expense. Once they were installed and properly 
defended, they could not be attacked without nuclear war, thus 
ensuring the inviolability of the Castro regime - Khrushchev was, it 
appears, scared of 'losing' Cuba to America and being blamed by his 
colleagues. 44 According to Castro's account, given to two French 
journalists, the 'initial idea originated with the Russians and with 
them alone .... It was not in order to ensure our own defence but 
primarily to strengthen socialism on the international plane.' Castro 
said he finally agreed because it was 'impossible for us not to share 
the risks which the Soviet Union was taking to save us .... It was in 
the final analysis a question of honour.' 45 

In fact honour had nothing to do with it. The cost to Russia of 
maintaining the Cuban economy and financing Castro's ambitious 
scheme was mounting rapidly, and Castro had no alternative but to 
provide his island as a missile-base in return. He also thought his 
regime, though not the Cuban people, would be safer with the missiles 
than without them. The scheme was as crackbrained as the Bay of Pigs 
venture and infinitely more dangerous. Castro claimed that Khrush- 
chev boasted his move was something Stalin would never have dared. 
His colleague Anastas Mikoyan told a secret briefing of Soviet 
diplomats in Washington that it was designed to achieve 'a definite 
shift in the power relationship between the socialist and the capitalist 
worlds'. 46 What made the venture still more reckless was that 
Khrushchev deliberately lied to Kennedy. He admitted that Russia 
was arming Castro but gave secret assurances that only short-range 
surface-to-air missiles would be installed. In no circumstances would 
long-range strategic missiles be sent. In fact he sent forty-two medium- 
range 1,100-miles nuclear missiles and twenty-four 2,200-miles 
missiles (the latter never arrived), together with twenty-four sam 
anti-aircraft missile groups and 22,000 Soviet troops and technicians. 



626 America's suicide attempt 

There was never any possibility of concealing this activity, and its 
true nature, from US air observation. The sites were photographed 
by a U-2 aircraft on 15 October. It was clear that by December at least 
fifty strategic missiles would be deployed, armed with nuclear 
weapons and strongly protected, only a few miles from American 
territory. From 16 October the Administration debated what to do. 
It divided into 'Hawks' and 'Doves', as they were now termed. The 
Hawks, led by Dean Acheson, who was brought into the secret 
debate, advocated, as he put it, 'cleaning the missile bases out 
decisively with an air attack', without further warning. The Doves, 
led by Robert Kennedy and Robert McNamara, deplored the idea of 
a 'Pearl Harbor in reverse', which would be sure to kill 'several 
thousand' Russians as well as Cuban civilians - the Chiefs of Staff 
calculated that 800 sorties would be required. Moscow, argued 
McNamara, would feel obliged to make 'a very major response. In 
such an event the United States would lose control of the situation 
which could escalate to general war.' Instead they urged a blockade 
or (to use the more cunning term Roosevelt had applied to Japan) a 
'quarantine', which would give Russia a chance to retreat from the 
brink without too much loss of face. 47 

President Kennedy wavered from one side to the other. He ordered 
preparations for an air-strike to continue but finally opted for 
quarantine and announced it publicly on 22 October, with a deadline 
two days later. The deadline was put in because by 23 October four 
out of six medium-range missile sites were operational and it was 
essential to prevent the Russians from working on the sites under 
cover of diplomatic delays. On 24 October, Soviet missile-carrying 
cargo ships approached the quarantine line and stopped. But it 
remained to get the existing missiles out. So the following day 
President Kennedy cabled Khrushchev asking for 'a restoration of the 
earlier situation' (i.e., removal of the missiles). Khrushchev sent two 
replies. The first, on 26 October, indicated compliance in return for 
an American pledge not to invade Cuba. The second, the next day, 
demanded a further US concession: removal of its own medium- 
range Jupiter missiles from Turkey. Kennedy ignored the second 
letter and accepted the non-invasion deal proposed in the first. It was 
on this basis that Khrushchev agreed to remove the missiles on 28 
October. 48 

President Kennedy's handling of the missile crisis was much 
praised at the time and for some years thereafter. Khrushchev was 
blamed by his own colleagues. When the Soviet Presidium dismissed 
him in October 1964, it referred to his 'hairbrained scheming, hasty 
conclusions, rash decisions and actions based on wishful thinking'. 49 
There was no doubt the world came close to large-scale nuclear war. 



AMERICA'S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 627 

On 22 October all American missile crews were placed on 'maxi- 
mum alert'. Some 800 b47s, 550 b52s, and seventy b58s were 
prepared with bomb-bays closed for immediate take-off from their 
dispersal positions. Over the Atlantic were ninety b52s carrying 
multi-megaton bombs. Nuclear war-heads were activated on 100 
Atlas, fifty Titans and twelve Minuteman missiles, and on American 
carriers, submarines and overseas bases. All commands were in a 
state of Defcon-2, the highest state of readiness next to war itself. 50 
Robert Kennedy spoke of '60 million Americans killed and as many 
Russians or more'. Khrushchev himself claimed that in arguing with 
his own military he warned of 'the death of 500 million human 
beings'. 51 He took a gigantic risk, but pulled back from the brink 
when his bluff was called. Castro, who was not consulted about the 
climb-down, was furious when he got the news. According to Che 
Guevara, who was present, he swore, kicked the wall and smashed a 
looking-glass. 52 More than a decade later, however, he told George 
McGovern: 'I would have taken a harder line than Khrushchev. I was 
furious when he compromised. But Khrushchev was older and wiser. 
I realize in retrospect that he reached the proper settlement with 
Kennedy. If my position had prevailed there might have been a 
terrible war.' 53 

In fact both Castro and Russia did very well out of Khrushchev's 
brinkmanship. Before Russia started arming Cuba on a big scale in 
September 1962, Castro was an easy target for American interven- 
tion. No American president was under any contractual restraints in 
handling the danger. Properly considered, Khrushchev's installation 
of strategic missiles was tantamount to a major act of aggression. 
When Kennedy called Khrushchev's bluff, he had Russia at a 
disadvantage. As de Gaulle rightly perceived, Russia really had no 
alternative but to back down completely. Khrushchev admitted this 
himself: 'Cuba was 11,000 kilometres from the Soviet Union. Our 
sea and air communications were so precarious that an attack 
against the United States was unthinkable.' 54 The missile crisis took 
place at a time when the strategic nuclear equation was still strongly 
in America's favour, and in a theatre where America enjoyed 
overwhelming advantage in conventional power. Kennedy was thus 
in a position to demand an absolute restoration of the status quo 
ante. He could have gone further: he could have insisted on 
punishment - on Soviet acceptance of a neutral, disarmed Cuba: the 
Finnish analogy. As Dean Acheson rightly observed: 'So long as we 
had the thumbscrew on Khrushchev, we should have given it another 
turn every day.' 55 

Instead, Kennedy, while winning a public relations victory, re- 
warded the aggressive Soviet act with two substantial concessions. 



628 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

The minor one was the withdrawal of the Jupiter missiles, suppos- 
edly on the grounds of their obsolescence. 56 Far more important, 
however, was Kennedy's acquiescence in the continuation of a 
Communist regime in Cuba, in open military alliance with Soviet 
Russia. 57 On the practical issue of Cuba and Caribbean security, 
Kennedy lost the missile crisis. It was an American defeat: the worst 
it had so far suffered in the Cold War. 

Thus in an area which, by any definition, was vital to America's 
interests, Castro survived to become, for a quarter of a century, her 
most persistent and successful enemy; to export revolution to South 
America in the 1960s and, far more successfully, to Central America 
in the late 1970s and early 1980s; to vilify American 'imperialism' 
systematically at Third World gatherings, while posing as a 'non- 
aligned' power; and, in the 1970s, to send no less than three 
expeditionary forces to Africa as executants of Soviet policy. With 
remarkable audacity, Castro posed as a defender of the oppressed in 
the United States itself, and was rewarded by the adulation of a 
segment of American progressive opinion. To Saul Landau, Castro 
was 'steeped in democracy', to Leo Huberman and Paul Sweezy he 
was 'a passionate humanitarian', and other visitors testified to his 
'encyclopaedic knowledge'. He made them think of 'the connection 
between socialism and Christianity'. He was 'soft-spoken, shy, 
sensitive' and, at the same time, vigorous, handsome, informal, 
undogmatic, open, humane, superbly accessible and warm. Norman 
Mailer thought him 'the first and greatest hero to appear in the world 
since the Second World War'. When Castro stood erect, wrote Abbie 
Hoffman, 'he is like a mighty penis coming to life, and when he is tall 
and straight the crowd immediately is transformed'. 58 Many of the 
Western liberal fantasies once woven around Stalin were transferred 
to Castro. Mao's eventual fall from grace left Castro the last 
charismatic of the totalitarian world. 

The ordinary Cubans, by contrast, voted with their feet and their 
outboard motors: in the 1960s alone over a million fled from Castro. 
By 1980, in which year alone 150,000 political refugees were added 
to the total, about a fifth of the population were living in exile, most 
of them in the USA. In 1981 it was calculated that, since Castro took 
charge, Cuba had had an annual growth-rate per capita of minus 1.2 
per cent; that from being one of the richest Latin-American countries 
it had become one of the poorest, and with a national income of only 
$810 per head, worse off than neighbouring Jamaica, the Dominican 
Republic, Colombia and Mexico; and, finally, that with armed 
forces of 200,000 (a quarter abroad on active service), it was the 
largest military power in Latin America, except for Brazil - indeed, 
per capita, probably had more men under arms than any other 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 629 

country in the world. 59 That was Castro's work; and Kennedy's 
legacy. 

President Kennedy's handling of Cuba suggested an imperfect 
understanding of America's vital interests and a failure to distinguish 
between image and reality. These weaknesses, which were character- 
istic of Kennedy's public-relations approach to politics, were exhi- 
bited in other fields, notably the space programme and Vietnam. 
With the assistance of captured German scientists, Soviet Russia had 
given highest priority (next to the nuclear-weapons programme 
itself) to heavy, long-range rockets. The rewards began to come in 
the late 1950s. On 4 October 1957 Americans were stunned when 
Russia put Sputnik 1, a 184-pound satellite, into orbit. The next 
month a much larger one weighing 1,120 pounds followed, with a 
dog Laika inside it. The first American satellite, Explorer 1, did not 
go into orbit until 31 January 1958, and it weighed only thirty 
pounds. An American general was quoted as saying, 'We captured 
the wrong generals.' In fact America was building big rockets too, 
including the army's enormous Saturn rocket, developed by Werner 
Von Braun in Huntsville, Alabama. Equally important was American 
progress in miniaturization, which explains America's greater will- 
ingness to accept low payloads. 60 It was all a question of aims, 
priorities and finance. Eisenhower, rightly obsessed as he was with 
the strength of the US economy, would not invest heavily in space 
beyond the pragmatic needs of the defence programme. He was flatly 
opposed to luxurious space ventures run for the purpose of 'prestige', 
a word he detested. He took no notice of the post-Sputnik panic. 

With Kennedy in office the priorities changed totally. His Vice- 
President, the Texan Lyndon Johnson, who was placed in charge of 
Space, was a big-spending Texan with many connections in the 
aerospace business world. He picked James Webb, a publicity- 
conscious business operator, as director of the National Aeronautics 
and Space Administration. On 12 April 1961, less than three months 
after Kennedy had taken over, Russia launched the first man, Yuri 
Gagarin, into orbit, beating the Americans by nearly four weeks. We 
have a vivid record of a frenzied meeting Kennedy held two days 
later in the White House, storming: 

Is there any place where we can catch them? What can we do? Can we go 
around the Moon before them? Can we put a man on the Moon before 
them? . . . Can we leapfrog? ... If somebody can just tell me how to catch 
up! Let's find somebody, anybody. I don't care if it's the janitor over there, 
if he knows how. 61 

Three days later came the Bay of Pigs disaster, and on 19 April a grim 
Kennedy summoned Johnson for a forty-five-minute session, foil- 



630 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

owed by an excited directive (20 April 1961), ordering him to find 
out: 'Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a 
laboratory in space, or by a trip round the Moon, or by a rocket to 
land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a 
man? Is there any other space programme which promises dramatic 
results in which we could win?' 62 The wording was characteristic: 
'beating', 'dramatic results', 'win'. 

There was a sense in which Kennedy was a professional sports- 
man, a propagandist and a political huckster rather than a man of 
state. In May he publicly committed America to the Apollo pro- 
gramme, with its aim to land a manned spacecraft on the Moon 
'before this decade is out'. It was a project typical of Sixties illusion, 
with its contempt for finance, its assumption that resources were 
limitless. The programme got going in 1963, and for the next ten 
years, America spent up to $5 billion a year on space. Of course the 
aim was achieved. On 20 July 1969, Apollo 11 landed Neil Arm- 
strong and Edwin Aldrin on the moon. There were four more Moon 
landings by 1972, when the programme petered out. By then 
America and Russia had launched over 1,200 satellites and space- 
probes, at a combined cost of something like $100 billion. In the 
more austere conditions of the mid-1970s, the space-effort shifted 
from propaganda to pragmatism, to space laboratories and shuttles. 
In 1981 NASA created the first genuine space-ship, the shuttle, while 
the Russians developed a 300-foot freighter, capable of lifting 
220,000 pounds into low earth-orbit. The showbiz era of space- 
travel was over. 

While President Kennedy was launching America on the Moon- 
race to reassert her prestige and leadership in technology, he was 
looking for an area in which his foreign policy, too, could produce a 
resounding success, especially after the Bay of Pigs humiliation. A 
National Security Council member advised him: 'It is very important 
that the government have a major anti-Communist victory to its 
credit . . . here [Vietnam] the odds are still in our favour.' On 1 May 
1961, two weeks after the Bay of Pigs, the Defense Department 
produced a report outlining how Vietnam could be 'saved'; eleven 
days later, Kennedy approved the plan in nsc Memorandum 52, 
which authorized various actions to achieve a clearly stated objec- 
tive, 'to prevent Communist domination of South Vietnam'. The 
next month, after the Vienna Summit with Khrushchev, Kennedy 
told a journalist: 'Now we have a problem in making our power 
credible and Vietnam looks like the place.' 63 

Yet the blame heaped on Kennedy for involving America in 
Vietnam is only partly merited. He inherited a crisis. Immediately 
after his Inauguration, he was handed a report written by Edward 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 631 

Lansdale (the c I A agent portrayed by Graham Greene in his 1 95 6 novel, 
The Quiet American) advising him that the situation in Saigon was 
deteriorating fast. He commented, This is the worst one we've got, isn't 
it?' 64 The Indo-China War, which began soon after the collapse of the 
Japanese occupation and continued into the 1980s, has been sur- 
rounded by more mythology than any other post-war event. It was 
complicated enough to baffle any western statesman, as it eventually 
baffled the Chinese. Every American president contributed his quota of 
error. Roosevelt, knowing nothing about it, offered the country to 
China. Immediately after his death, the fervent anti-colonialists of his 
Office of Strategic Services (the precursor of the ci a) worked hard to set 
up a left-wing nationalist regime. Three weeks after the Japanese 
surrender, the Communist leader Ho Chi Minh, sponsored by the o s s, 
staged a putsch, known as the 'August Revolution', which ousted the 
abdicating Emperor of Vietnam. The man who, in effect, crowned Ho 
as the new ruler was an oss agent, Archimedes Patti. 65 

It is important to grasp that America never had any territorial 
ambitions in Indo-China, either as a base or in any other capacity. 
But its policy was usually muddled and invariably indecisive. In the 
first phase it was entirely Europe-oriented. Truman, on taking office, 
was advised that Indo-China was secondary to the absolute necessity 
to bolster France as a stabilizing power in Europe and assist her 
'morally as well as physically, to regain her strength and influence'. 66 
To feel confident again, France needed to get back her Indo-China 
empire (or so it was argued); and in December 1946 the French 
drove Ho into the jungle and brought the Emperor Bao Dai back 
from Hong-Kong. Reluctantly the Americans acquiesced in the 
French creation of three puppet nations, Laos, Cambodia and 
Vietnam, and gave them recognition as independent states within the 
French Union on 7 February 1950. At the same time Russia and 
China recognized Ho's regime. It was at this point that the struggle 
became an international one. Russia and China poured in arms. In 
May America did the same, and with the outbreak of the Korean 
War the next month the US aid programme accelerated fast. In 1951 
it was $21.8 million in economic and $425.7 in military assistance. 
By next year the military aid had risen to over half a billion dollars: 
40 per cent of France's costs. Dean Acheson was warned by State 
Department officials that America was 'moving into a position in 
Indo-China' in which 'our responsibilities tend to supplant rather 
than complement those of the French'. But he decided that 'having 
put our hand to the plough, we would not look back'. He argued that 
the situation in Europe was too dangerous for America to think of 
deserting the French in the east. 67 By 1953-4, America was paying 
for 80 per cent of the French war effort. 



632 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

Then, qt\ 8 May 1954, the French fortress at Dien Bien Phu 
surrendered. The defeat was made possible by the unexpected scale 
of the arms assistance now being provided by Russia and China to 
Ho's forces. The French asked for direct participation by American 
air-power, and when this was refused they formed a new government 
under Pierre Mendes-France to negotiate a French withdrawal and a 
political settlement. The cease-fire agreement, signed at Geneva in 
July, provided for a division of the country along the 17th parallel, 
the Communists keeping the North, the West the rest, unity to be 
brought about by elections in two years' time under an International 
Control Commission. 

It was at this point that Eisenhower's customary good sense failed 
him: indeed, it can be argued that he was more responsible for the 
eventual mess in Vietnam than any other American. He should have 
signed the accords and compelled the premier of the South, Ngo 
Dinh Diem, to abide by them. It is possible Ho would have won free 
elections and become ruler of a united Communist country. Would 
that have been a disaster for America? Even Acheson, in his famous 
'perimeter' speech of January 1950, had not considered a non- 
Communist government in Indo-China essential to American secur- 
ity. 68 George Kennan, in a memo dated 21 August 1950, argued that 
it was 'preferable to permit the turbulent political currents of that 
country to find their own level . . . even at the probable cost of an 
eventual deal between Vietnam and Vietminh, and the spreading 
over the whole country of Vietminh authority.' 69 This was Eisen- 
hower's own feeling. He said he could not 'conceive of a greater 
tragedy for America than to get heavily involved'. 'There is going to 
be no involvement,' he repeated. If America did go in, it would only 
be in agreement with her principal Allies and with explicit constitu- 
tional approval from Congress. He worked on the Chiefs of Staff and 
got from them the assurance (May 1954) that 'Indo-China is devoid 
of decisive military objectives and the allocation of more than token 
US armed forces to that area would be a serious diversion of limited 
US capabilities.' 70 

But Eisenhower was in two minds. He popularized the theory that, 
if Vietnam was 'lost', the whole of Indo-China would vanish into 
Communist hands; and that if Indo-China was swallowed, other 
countries in South-East Asia must follow. He spoke of 'a cork in a 
bottle', a 'chain-reaction' and 'falling dominoes'. 71 Not only did he 
refuse to sign the Geneva Accords himself, but he acquiesced in 
Diem's refusal to submit to the test of free elections. That was a 
fundamental departure from American global policy in the Cold 
War, which had always rested on the contention that conflict 
between East and West should be decided not by force of arms but by 



America's suicide attempt 633 

the test of an honest poll. Diem was permitted to evade this basic 
principle and, indeed, was rewarded by American military and 
economic assistance, for the first time direct and not through a 
French intermediary. Thus it was Eisenhower who committed Am- 
erica's original sin in Vietnam. In default of unitary elections, the 
Vietcong emerged in 1957 and a new war started up in the South. 
Eisenhower made America a party to that war, claiming, in his 
last major statement on the subject (4 April 1959): The loss of 
South Vietnam would set in motion a crumbling process that 
could, as it progressed, have grave consequences for us and for 
freedom.' 72 

When Kennedy reached the White House, Vietnam was already 
one of America's largest and costliest commitments anywhere in the 
world. It is hard to understand why he made no attempt to get back 
to the Geneva Accords and hold unified free elections. In Paris on 3 1 
May 1961, de Gaulle urged him urgently to disengage: 'I predict you 
will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political 
quagmire.' 73 Nevertheless, in November that year Kennedy autho- 
rized the despatch to Vietnam of the first 7,000 American troops, for 
'base security'. General Maxwell Taylor, who recommended the 
step, warned him that, if things got worse, 'it will be difficult to resist 
the pressure to reinforce' and that 'there is no limit to our possible 
commitment'. 74 Kennedy himself shared the unease. He told his 
colleague Arthur Schlesinger: 'The troops will march in; the bands 
will play; the crowds will cheer; and in four days everyone will have 
forgotten. Then we will be told to send in more troops. It's like 
taking a drink. The effect wears off, and you have to take another.' 75 
That was an accurate prediction. Kennedy's instinct was either to 
stay out or bring things to a head by a direct American attack on 
Hanoi. An American invasion of the North, which would have been 
successful at this stage, would at least have had the merit of putting 
the clock back to 1954 and the Geneva Accords. There could be no 
fundamental moral objection to such a course, since by 1961 the 
North had effectively invaded the South. It must always be borne in 
mind, when analysing the long tragedy of Indo-China, that it was the 
determination of Ho, his colleagues and successors, to dominate the 
entire country, including Laos and Cambodia, which was, from 1945 
onwards, the principal dynamic of the struggle and the ultimate 
cause of all the bloodshed. America's errors were merely a contribu- 
tory factor. Nevertheless they were serious. Unwilling to leave the 
country to its fate, or to carry the land-war to the North, Kennedy 
settled for a hopeless compromise, in which military aid, in ever- 
growing but never decisive quantities, was given to a client- 
government he could not control. Diem was by far the ablest of the 



634 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

Vietnam leaders and he had the great merit of being a civilian. 
Lyndon Johnson, then Vice-President, termed him with some exag- 
geration 'the Churchill of South-East Asia', and told a journalist, 
'Shit, man, he's the only boy we got out there.' 76 But Kennedy, 
exasperated by his failure to pull a resounding success out of 
Vietnam, blamed the agent rather than the policy. In the autumn 
of 1963 he secretly authorized American support for an anti-Diem 
coup. It duly took place on 1 November, Diem being murdered 
and the cia providing $42,000 in bribes for the soldiers who set 
up a military junta. This was America's second great sin: 'the 
worst mistake we ever made', as Lyndon Johnson put it. 77 Three 
weeks later Kennedy himself was murdered and Johnson was 
president. 

Johnson was no more decisive than Kennedy, whose compromise 
policy he continued in irresolute fashion until August 1964, when 
North Vietnam attacked American destroyers in the Gulf of Ton- 
kin. There is no evidence, as was later alleged, that the incident was 
contrived, to get America deeper into the war. 78 In fact Johnson 
was very reluctant to escalate: he was entering a presidential 
campaign on a peace platform against the Republican Barry Gold- 
water, who wanted to use nuclear weapons, if necessary, to win the 
war. But Congress, by an overwhelming majority (out of 535 
members of both houses, only Senators Wayne Morse and Ernest 
Gruening voted against), passed what became known as the 'Ton- 
kin Gulf Resolution' authorizing the President to take vigorous 
measures to protect US forces. Senator William Fulbright, then a 
supporter of the war, who steered the motion through the Senate, 
said it effectively gave Johnson the right to go to war without 
further authorization. Johnson made no use of it for nearly six 
months. Then, having won an overwhelming electoral victory on an 
anti-escalation platform, he behaved like Wilson and Roosevelt 
before him, and proceeded to do the opposite. In February 1965, 
following heavy US casualties in a Vietcong attack on a barracks, 
he ordered the bombing of the North. 79 

This was the third critical American mistake. Having involved 
itself, America should have followed the logic of its position and 
responded to aggression by occupying the North. To bomb was a 
weak compromise, absolutely characteristic of the irresolution which 
dogged American policy throughout the tragedy. Once aircraft from 
Da Nang began to bomb the North, security had to be provided for 
the base: so on 8 March 3,500 marines were landed at Da Nang. 
The troop level rose to 82,000 in April. In June a demand came for 
forty-four more battalions. On 28 July Johnson announced: 'I have 
today ordered to Vietnam the Airmobile Division and certain other 



America's suicide attempt 635 

forces which will raise our fighting strength ... to 125,000 men 
almost immediately. Additional forces will be needed later and they 
will be sent as requested.' 80 There was no attempt by the military to 
deceive the politicians (as Kennedy had suspected). The Joint Chiefs 
reported on 14 July: There seems to be no reason we cannot win if 
such is our will - and if that will is manifested in strategy and tacti- 
cal operations' The underlining was in the original. 81 When Johnson 
asked General Wheeler of the jcs, 'Bus, what do you think it will 
take to do the job?', the answer was 700,000 to a million men and 
seven years. 82 Johnson went into the war with his eyes open. He 
whistled to keep his courage up: 'After the Alamo,' he said, 'no one 
thought Sam Houston would wind it up so quick.' 83 

But Johnson was no Sam Houston. Even as a bomber he was 
indecisive. The Air Force told him they could promise results if the 
offensive was heavy, swift, repeated endlessly and without restraint. 
That was the whole lesson of the Second World War. They promised 
nothing if it was slowed and restricted. 84 Yet that was precisely what 
Johnson did. From start to finish, the bombing was limited by 
restrictions which were entirely political. Every Tuesday Johnson 
held a lunch at which he determined targets and bomb- weights: it 
was Eden and Suez all over again. Johnson was not the ruthless man 
he liked to impersonate: he was paralysed by moral restraints. As his 
biographer, Doris Kearns, shrewdly observed, to him 'limited bomb- 
ing was seduction, not rape, and seduction was controllable, even 
reversible'. 85 Thus the bombing intensified very slowly and the 
Vietminh had time to build shelters and adjust. When Soviet Russia 
moved in defensive missiles, American bombers were not allowed to 
attack while the sites were under construction. There were, in 
addition, sixteen 'bombing pauses', none of which evoked the 
slightest response, and seventy-two American 'peace initiatives', 
which fell on deaf ears. 86 Unlike the Americans, the North Viet- 
namese leaders never once wavered in their determination to secure 
their political aim — total domination of the entire country — at any 
cost. They do not seem to have been influenced in the smallest degree 
by the casualties their subjects suffered or inflicted. There was thus a 
bitter irony in the accusations of genocide hurled at the Americans. 
An examination of classified material in the Pentagon archives 
revealed that all the charges made against US forces at the 1967 
Stockholm 'International War Crimes tribunal' were baseless. Evacu- 
ation of civilians from war zones to create 'free fire' fields not only 
saved civilian lives but was actually required by the 1949 Geneva 
Convention. The heavy incidence of combat in civilian areas was the 
direct result of Vietcong tactics in converting villages into fortified 
strongholds, itself a violation of the Geneva agreement. It was the 



636 AMERICA'S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

restrictions on American bombing to protect civilian lives and 
property which made it so ineffective. The proportion of civilians 
killed, about 45 per cent of all war-deaths, was about average for 
twentieth-century wars. In fact the population increased steadily 
during the war, not least because of US medical programmes. In the 
South, the standard of living rose quite fast. 87 

But the experience of the twentieth century indicates that self- 
imposed restraints by a civilized power are worse than useless. They 
are interpreted by friend and foe alike as evidence, not of humanity, 
but of guilt and lack of righteous conviction. Despite them, indeed 
because of them, Johnson lost the propaganda battle, not only in the 
West as a whole but especially in the USA, where it mattered most. 
Initially the Vietnam war had the support of the moderate liberal 
consensus. 'The US has a major interest in the defence of Vietnam,' 
the Washington Post wrote, 7 April 1961. 'American prestige is very 
much involved in the effort to protect the Vietnamese people from 
Communist absorption.' The New York Times admitted, 12 March 
1963, that 'The cost [of saving Vietnam] is large, but the cost of 
South-East Asia coming under the domination of Russia and Com- 
munist China would be still larger.' On 21 May 1964 the Times 
urged: 'If we demonstrate that we will make whatever military and 
political effort [denying victory to Communism] requires, the Com- 
munists sooner or later will also recognize reality.' The Post insisted, 
1 June 1964, that America continue to show in Vietnam that 
'persistence in aggression is fruitless and possibly deadly'. But the 
Times deserted Johnson early in 1966, the Post in summer 1967. 88 
About the same time the TV networks became neutral, then increas- 
ingly hostile. 

What the Administration came to fear was not editorial censure so 
much as the tendentious presentation of the news. The US media 
became strongly biased in some cases. More often it was misled, 
skilfully and deliberately; or misled itself. A much publicized photo- 
graph of a 'prisoner' being thrown from a US helicopter was in fact 
staged. Accounts of American 'tiger cages' at Con Son island were 
inaccurate and sensationalized. Another widely used photo of a 
young girl burned by napalm created the impression, which was in 
fact quite untrue, that many thousands of children had been incin- 
erated by Americans. 89 

Even more serious was the notion increasingly conveyed by the 
media that Vietcong victory was inevitable. This came to a decisive 
head in the handling of the Vietcong 'Tet Offensive' on 30 January 
1968. It was the first major offensive in the open the Communists 
had tried. It was designed to achieve complete tactical success and 
detonate a mass-uprising. In fact it failed on both counts. For the first 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 637 

time the Vietcong suffered heavy casualties in conventional combat, 
and their army emerged from the engagement very much weaker 
militarily. 90 But the media, especially TV, presented it as a decisive 
Vietcong victory, an American Dien Bien Phu. An elaborate study 
of the coverage, published in 1977, showed exactly how this 
reversal of the truth, which was not on the whole deliberate, came 
about. 91 The image not the reality of Tet was probably decisive, 
especially among influential East Coast liberals. In general, Ameri- 
can public opinion strongly backed the war, which was throughout 
more popular than the Korean War. According to the pollsters the 
only hostile category was what they described as 'the Jewish sub- 
group'. 92 Johnson's popularity rating rose whenever he piled on the 
pressure: it leapt 14 per cent when he started the bombing. 93 
Throughout the fighting, far more Americans were critical of John- 
son for doing too little than for doing too much. The notion of a 
great swing away from the war in public opinion, and above all the 
axiom that the young opposed it, was an invention. In fact support 
for withdrawal was never over 20 per cent until after the November 
1968 election, by which time the decision to get out had already 
been taken. Support for intensifying the war was always greater 
among the under thirty-fives than among older people; young white 
males were the most consistent group backing escalation. 94 

It was not the American people which lost its stomach for the 
kind of sacrifices Kennedy had demanded in his Inaugural. It was 
the American leadership. In the last months of 1967, and especially 
after Tet, the American establishment crumpled. The Defence Sec- 
retary, Clark Clifford, turned against the war; so did old Dean 
Acheson. Senate hard-liners began to oppose further rein- 
forcements. 95 Finally Johnson himself, diffidently campaigning for 
re-election, lost heart on 12 March 1968 when his vote sagged in 
the New Hampshire primary. He threw in the electoral towel and 
announced he would spend the rest of his term making peace. It 
was not the end of the war. But it was the end of America's will and 
effort to win it. The trouble with the American ruling class was that 
it believed what it read in the newspapers, and they saw New 
Hampshire as a victory for peace. In fact, among the anti-Johnson 
voters the Hawks outnumbered the Doves by three to two. 96 John- 
son lost the primary, and with it the war, because he was not tough 
enough. 

There was, however, an additional and more sinister factor which 
knocked the stuffing out of the President, whose slogan was 'All the 
Way with LBJ\ In March 1968, when the Vietnam command asked 
for an additional 206,000 men, the Treasury Secretary, Henry 
Fowler, protested. To grant the request, he warned, would mean 



638 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

cutting not only other defence programmes but major domestic 
programmes as well; and, even so, the dollar would suffer. 97 The 
move recalled Macmillan's chilling intervention in the cabinet debates 
during Britain's Suez crisis. It was a significant turning-point in 
American history: the first time the Great Republic, the richest nation 
on earth, came up against the limits of its financial resources. 

For Johnson himself the warning was a particularly bitter blow. 
More than Kennedy even, more perhaps than anyone, he had revelled 
in the illusions of the 1960s. No one had believed more passionately in 
the strength of the West and in particular in the boundless capacity of 
the American economy to deliver. He was not merely the last, he was 
the greatest, of the big spenders. He referred to his domestic spending 
programme as 'the beautiful woman'. He told his biographer: 'I was 
determined to be a leader of war and a leader of peace. I wanted both, I 
believed in both and I believed America had the resources to provide 
for both.' 98 Under Truman and Eisenhower, defence was the biggest 
item in Federal spending. Spending on housing, education, welfare 
and other 'human resources' (as they were termed) was only about a 
quarter of the budget and less than 5 per cent of gnp. Some attempt 
was made to balance the budget, except in a bad recession year. Until 
Eisenhower retired, American public finance was run in all essentials 
on conventional lines. 

The big change in principle came under Kennedy. In the autumn of 
1962 the Administration committed itself to a new and radical 
principle of creating budgetary deficits even when there was no 
economic emergency, the budget being already in deficit and the 
economy moving upward. Having thus given himself financial leeway, 
Kennedy introduced a new concept of 'big government': the 'problem- 
eliminator'. Every area of human misery could be classified as a 
'problem'; then the Federal government could be armed to 'eliminate' 
it. 'The poverty problem' had been made a fashionable subject in the 
early 1960s by Michael Harrington's best-seller, The Other America 
(1962), which Kennedy found shocking and stimulating. In 1963 he 
introduced his 'poverty programme', along with a mass of other 
high-spending legislation. Kennedy found it difficult to re-educate 
Congress to his new expansionist ideas, and his legislation piled up. 
But resistance was beginning to collapse even before Kennedy was 
murdered; 99 and Lyndon Johnson was able to use the emotional 
response to the assassination, plus his own wonderful skills as a 
Congressional manager, to push through the greatest and most 
expensive legislative programme in American history. 

In his first State of the Union address, 8 January 1964, Johnson 
announced: 'This Administration today, here and now, declares 
unconditional war on poverty.' When he signed his first anti-poverty 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 639 

bill, the Equal Opportunities Act, on 20 August 1964, he boasted: 
Today, for the first time in the history of the human race, a great 
nation is able to make and is willing to make a commitment to 
eradicate poverty among its people.' 100 That summer, preparing for 
his election campaign, he turned his 'beautiful woman' into flesh: 
the 'Great Society'. America, he said, had to acquire 'the 'wisdom 
to use wealth to enrich and elevate our national life', to move not 
only to 'the rich society and the powerful society but upward to the 
Great Society', which rested on 'abundance and liberty to all', 
where 'every child' would 'find knowledge to enrich his mind and 
enlarge his talents' and everyone would be able to satisfy 'the desire 
for beauty and the hunger for community'. 101 
The Great Society was supposedly endorsed in the November 

1964 elections, which Johnson won overwhelmingly against an 
exceptionally weak opponent. The bills came rolling out: the Ele- 
mentary and Secondary Education Act, the Medicare Act, the Rent 
Supplement Act, various poverty acts. Johnson called 20-27 July 

1965 'the most productive and most historic legislative week in 
Washington during this century'. 'They say Jack Kennedy had 
style,' he snorted, 'but I'm the one who got the bills passed.' One 
liberal journalist, Tom Wicker, exulted in the New York Times: 
'They are rolling the bills out of Congress these days the way 
Detroit turns super-sleek, souped-up autos off the assembly-line.' 
The first session of the 89th Congress was the most productive in 
fundamental legislation since the early days of Woodrow Wilson. 
Johnson had a 68 per cent success-rate, the highest in history, for 
his bills, 207 of which were made law, 'the building-blocks of a 
better America', as he called them. 102 He drew a conscious parallel 
with the war in Vietnam, also - as he saw it - an exercise in 
idealism, by the blatant use of military metaphor. He created ten 
anti-poverty 'task forces'. He told housing bureaucrats: 'I'm going 
to convert you from armchair generals to front-line commanders.' 
There was a Youth corps for 'neighbourhoods', a Job corps for 
'dropouts', Head Start for pre-school children, Outward Bound for 
college students, and countless other schemes. The cost soared: $30 
billion a year in the first poverty programme; then another $30 
billion added towards the end of the term. 103 These sums soon 
became built into the structure of the Federal outlay and proved 
impossible to reduce. Indeed they were increased. Thanks to John- 
son's efforts, by 1971, for the first time, government spent more on 
welfare than defence. Between 1949 and 1979, defence costs rose 
ten times (from $11.5 billion to $114.5 billion) but remained 
roughly 4-5 per cent of gnp. But welfare spending rose twenty-five 
times, from $10.6 billion to $259 billion, its share of the budget 



640 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

went up to more than half, and the proportion of the gnp it absorbed 
tripled to nearly 12 per cent. 104 

This momentous change in the fundamental purpose and cost of 
American central government began to impose growing strains even 
before Johnson ceased to be president. By that stage, the government's 
slice of the gnp had risen from 28.7 per cent under Eisenhower to 33.4 
per cent. Treasury control disintegrated. Under Eisenhower, the very 
efficient Bureau of the Budget (as it was called up to 1970) operated as 
Harding had conceived it: as an objective agency, rather like a court of 
law, to supervise all spending. Under Kennedy, characteristically, the 
Office was politicized and under Johnson it became activist: the Budget 
Director had to share big-spending values. 105 Moreover, though 
Congress would vote for the programmes, it was much less willing to 
provide the taxes to pay for them. Johnson quarrelled bitterly with the 
House finance-boss, Wilbur Mills, and the Republican leader Gerald 
Ford. Unable to get the taxes, he printed money. His fear of inflation 
and his inability to cope with it was a hidden factor in his decision to 
leave public life in 1 968 . 'I told [Mills] that whether he realized it or not, 
the country's economy was about to go down the drain.' 106 

By that time some of Johnson's own illusions about the virtues of big 
spending had been undermined. It was no longer clear to him that the 
results justified the damaging impact on the economy. The most 
important one, and certainly the most permanent, was unintentional: 
the government's share of all workers doubled and by 1976 one in six 
(over 13 million) was directly on Washington's payroll. But the 
beneficiaries of this shift were overwhelmingly middle class. Johnson 
claimed that, during his time in office, of the 35 million 'trapped in 
poverty' in 1964, he 'lifted out' 12.4 million or almost 36 per cent. 107 
But this was only one way of looking at the statistics. As living standards 
rose, the definition of poverty changed, and the poor 'felt' just as poor as 
before, though their real incomes had risen. The danger of the kind of 
welfare state Johnson was creating was that it pushed people out of the 
productive economy permanently and made them dependents of the 
state. Poverty increased when families split up, either by old people 
living apart or by divorce, with consequent divisions of income. 108 
Legislation often promoted these processes. It emerged that perhaps the 
biggest single cause of poverty in the USA was the instability of black 
marriages. Daniel P.Moynihan, Johnson's Assistant-Secretary of 
Labour, argued in the Moynihan Report (March 1965) that half the 
black population suffered from a 'social pathology' whose source was 
the black family, where husbands deserted wives and children in 
distressingly large numbers. The object of policy should be 'the 
establishment of a stable family structure'. 109 But the poverty war did 
not do this. It did the opposite, for often the structure of welfare 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 641 

provision made it pay for a poor family to split up. By the time 
Johnson was ready to quit, Moynihan was arguing that the whole 
poverty programme was misconceived and ill-directed. 110 

Even more tragic and painful was the loss of illusions over 
education. This was, indeed, the central mirage of the decade of 
illusion. It was an old liberal belief, popularized by Macaulay, that 
universal education alone could make democracy tolerable. That 
accomplished manufacturer of progressive cliches, H.G.Wells, had 
defined modern history as 'a race between education and catastro- 
phe'. This belief survived the melancholy fact that the nation which 
took Hitler to its heart and waged his fearful war with passionate 
industry was easily the best-educated on earth. In the 1950s the myth 
that education was the miracle cure for society emerged stronger 
than ever. No one believed in it more devotedly than Johnson. As 
President he said: The answer for all our national problems comes in 
a single world. That word is education.' 111 

Johnson reflected the conventional wisdom of his day. In the late 
1950s, C.P.Snow had argued that there was a direct causal link 
between the amount of money invested in higher education and a 
country's gnp. 112 E.F.Denison showed that, over the three decades 
1930-60, half America's growth was accounted for by the expansion 
of education, especially of the universities. The same year, 1962, 
Fritz Machlup calculated that the 'knowledge industry' accounted 
for 29 per cent of America's gnp and was growing at twice the rate 
of the economy as a whole. 113 In the 1963 Godkin Lectures at 
Harvard, the President of Berkeley, Clark Kerr, America's leading 
academic statesman, argued that knowledge was now the 'leading 
sector' in the growth of the economy. 'What the railways did for the 
second half of the last century and the automobile for the first half of 
this century', he argued, 'may be done for the second half of this 
century by the knowledge industry: that is, to serve as the focal point 
for national growth.' 114 

Against this background, the 1960s became the most explosive 
decade in the entire history of educational expansion. The process in 
America had begun with the 1944 'gi bill', allocating public funds 
for the college education of returned veterans, and continued with 
the 1952 Korean War gi bill. The 1958 National Defense Education 
Act doubled the Federal education budget and, for the first time, 
made central government the financial dynamic of education. The 
number of state teachers grew from 1 million in 1950 to 2.3 million 
in 1970, as spending per person rose by over 100 per cent. The 
growth of higher education was the most marked because it was now 
contended it should be universally available. 'The important ques- 
tion', an official report argued, 'need be not "Who deserves to be 



642 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

admitted?" but "Whom can the society, in conscience and self- 
interest, exclude?'", since nobody could be 'justly' denied a univer- 
sity education unless 'his deficiencies are so severe' that even the 'most 
flexible and dedicated institution' could not help him. 115 The phe- 
nomenon was international in the West. In Britain the 1963 Robbins 
Report led to the doubling of university places within a decade, with 
a projected student body of 2 million by 1981. Similar expansion 
plans were adopted in France, Canada, Australia, West Germany 
and elsewhere. The American experience was most striking because 
of the statistics involved. Between 1960 and 1975, the number of 
American colleges and universities rose from 2,040 to 3,055. During 
the 'golden years' of expansion, new ones were opening at the rate of 
one a week. Students rose from 3.6 million in 1960 to 9.4 million in 
1975, the bulk of the increase (4 million) coming in the public sector. 
Including non-degree students, they passed the 11 -million mark in 
1975, at an annual cost of $45 billion. 116 

It was confidently expected that this vast investment in human 
resources would not only stimulate growth still further but achieve 
moral and social purposes by furthering the embourgeoisement of 
the working class. It would make 'middle-class democracy . . . with 
all its freedoms', as Clark Kerr put it, 'the wave of the future', thus 
ensuring general contentment and political stability, and in particu- 
lar underpinning the enlightened capitalist system which made it all 
possible. In fact the reverse happened. At the pre-college level, while 
spending doubled, then trebled, educational performance fell. Some 
decline had been expected as the system absorbed large minority 
groups, but not of this precipitous magnitude. The best index, 
Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, showed over the years 1963-77 a 
forty-nine-point decline in verbal and thirty-two-point decline in 
mathematical skills (on a scale of 800). 117 In the mid-1970s a rash of 
gloomy reports suggested that more, and more expensive, education 
did not solve any social problems. 118 Crime-rates among children in 
full-time education rose inexorably. In the second half of the 1970s, 
opinion turned against the education process, as cities and states cut 
their teacher forces. The end of the post-war 'baby boom bulge' was 
only one factor. The chief reason was loss of confidence in the 
economic advantages of more education. Over the years 1970-8, 
some 2,800 public-sector schools and colleges were shut, the first 
time this had ever happened in American history. By the mid-1980s, 
public-sector enrollments were expected to decline by 4 million. 119 
By 1978, American workers had an average of 12£ years schooling, 
and 17 per cent had a college degree. But graduates (especially 
women) were finding it increasingly difficult to get professional or 
managerial employment. The ratio between length of education and 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 643 

salary declined sharply. Equalizing educational opportunity, it was 
found, did not promote greater equality among adults. 120 So the 
attractions of university declined. The proportion of young men 
starting college, which rose rapidly to 44 per cent in the 1960s, fell to 
34 per cent by 1974. It levelled off among women, too. 

Nor did more education promote stability. Quite the contrary. As 
it happened, this had been foreseen by Joseph Schumpeter, who had 
been born in the same year as Keynes, and who had some claim to 
rival him as the greatest economist of modern times. It was Schum- 
peter's view, first expressed in an article he wrote in 1920, expanded 
into Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), that capitalism 
tended to promote its own self-destruction in a number of ways. 
Among them was its propensity to create, and then give full rein to, 
by virtue of its commitment to freedom, an ever-expanding class of 
intellectuals, who inevitably played a socially destructive role. 121 
This point was overlooked in the university-expansion plans of the 
1950s and 1960s, though it had in fact already been vindicated, to 
some extent, in the 1930s. At all events, Schumpeter was certainly 
proved right in the Lyndon Johnson era. The first signs of radical 
student interest in social and political issues appeared in 1958. In 
spring 1960 came the first 'sit-in' protests, demohstrations in San 
Francisco against the House Un-American Activities Committee, and 
West Coast Vigils' against the execution of the fashionable mur- 
derer, Caryl Chessman. Protests against university training corps, 
loyalty affidavits, fraternity and sorority discrimination and other 
matters of university discipline - or simple civil rights issues - 
broadened into directly political campaigns. 

At first, student activism was welcomed, as a sign of 'maturity' and 
'awareness'. The earliest sign of large-scale violence came during 
'freedom summer' in 1964, at Clark Kerr's own university, Berkeley. 
What was supposed to be the 'leading sector' in gnp growth became 
a leading sector in something quite different: the 'student revolt'. By 
December the Governor of California had called in the riot police 
and Berkeley had become the world's chief 'political' campus. 122 
Johnson's Great Society programme merely poured fuel into this 
gathering conflagration. The next year 25,000 students invaded 
Washington to protest against the Vietnam war. In 1966-7, more 
and more campuses were 'radicalized'. The 'campus riot' became 
part of the college culture, as university presidents compromised, 
surrendered or abdicated. On 23 April 1968 there was a devas- 
tating smash-up at Columbia, one of America's leading universities. 
Professor Archibald Cox of the Harvard Law School was called in to 
report, and did so in the smug optimism of the time: 'The present 
generation of young people in our universities are the best informed, 



644 America's suicide attempt 

the most intelligent and the most idealistic this country has ever 
known.' As Lionel Trilling sourly commented, Cox 'celebrated as 
knowledge and intelligence' what was in fact 'merely a congerie of 
"advanced" public attitudes'. Cox, he insisted, was deriving his 
values not from knowledge and experience but from the young: their 
'certification' was enough to prove them sound. 123 

Whether or not the students were the most intelligent in history, 
they were certainly the most destructive. Cox-type complacency did 
not survive summer 1968, especially after the wild Paris student riots 
in May, which began a new and much more savage cycle of student 
violence all over the world but especially in America. The National 
Student Association claimed there were 221 major demonstrations at 
universities in America during 1968. 124 It was student radicals who 
ran the campaign of Eugene McCarthy, which knocked Johnson out 
of the presidential race in New Hampshire. But student power was 
essentially negative. At the Chicago Democratic Convention in 
August 1968 students fought a pitched battle with 11,900 of Mayor 
Daley's police, 7,500 of the Illinois National Guard, and 1,000 fbi 
and Secret Service agents. They won the media contest in that they 
succeeded in branding Daley's law-enforcement a 'police riot', but 
they could not get McCarthy the nomination, nor could they prevent 
the man they hated most, Richard Nixon, from becoming president. 
When in 1972 they finally secured the Democratic nomination for 
their own choice, George McGovern, the only result was to secure 
Nixon a landslide. 

What student violence did above all was to damage American 
higher education and demoralize its teachers. Reflecting on it in 
1971, Professor Louis Kampf, in his presidential address to the 
Modern Languages Association, said that since 1968 'the young go 
into the profession with dread, the old can scarcely wait for 
retirement, and those of the middle years yearn for sabbaticals'. 125 
The great German scholar Fritz Stern, noting the 'excremental 
language' of student activists, saw it as the only novelty: the rest 
reproduced the pattern of extremist behaviour among the students 
who led Germany in putting Hitler into power. 126 

The promotion of student violence by the well-intended expansion 
of higher education was an excellent example of the 'law of 
unintended effect'. The attempt by successive presidents to obtain 
justice for American blacks was another. Here again, good intentions 
produced death and destruction. The problem was seen as threefold. 
First, to end segregation, especially in education. Second, to enable 
blacks to exercise voting rights. Third, to bring black incomes into 
line with white ones. It was believed that if the first two were solved, 
the third would ultimately solve itself. In 1954 the Supreme Court 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 645 

had ruled that public-sector education must be integrated. The 
problem was to get the law enforced in practice. In 1957, when 
Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas defied the Supreme Court, 
Eisenhower dispatched troops to Little Rock to enforce compliance. 
Again, in 1962, Kennedy used troops to enable a black student, 
James Meredith, to attend the hitherto all-white state university of 
Mississippi. It was Kennedy's policy to proceed by executive action: 
that is, to use Federal power to make the existing law stick. The 
difficulty with this procedure was that it moved from one public 
confrontation to another, and in the process a huge and increas- 
ingly militant civil rights movement was created, from which white 
liberals were progressively eliminated. Physical action was seen by 
blacks as the answer, and as with the agitation Gandhi created in 
India, protest tended to degenerate into violence. The real solution 
was to get blacks voting quickly, because once politicians needed 
their votes, concessions would follow, even in the deep South. 
Eisenhower had put through Congress two weak Civil Rights acts, 
in 1957 and 1960. Kennedy eventually tabled a much stronger one, 
but it was blocked in Congress. Johnson was much more successful. 
He pushed through a monumental Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 
immediately after his November election victory he got to work on 
a bill which became the decisive Voting Rights Act of 1965. In the 
state of Mississippi, which had a higher proportion of blacks (36 
per cent) than any other, only 6 per cent were registered to vote, 
because of complicated tests and other barriers. The new Act had 
the right to vote enforced by Federal examiners, and within thirty 
days of its enactment, black registration in Mississippi rose 120 per 
cent. By the end of 1970, the percentage of registered black voters 
in the state was comparable to white registrations (71 to 82 per 
cent) and in 1971 fifty blacks were elected to public office in the 
state. 127 By the early 1970s, the black vote had become a significant 
factor in many states of the old South, thus bringing about a 
progressive transformation of Southern politics. 128 

But voting could not equalize black and white incomes. Nor 
could the huge and increasing sums of Federal money which John- 
son poured into the black 'problem'. The more progress made, the 
more cash available, the more black anger increased. In the 1950s 
and early 1960s, Federal power had been used to protect blacks 
from white violence. In the course of the series of enforcement 
battles staged under Kennedy, the initiative in violence shifted to 
the blacks. The turning-point was the night of 10 May 1962, in 
Birmingham, Alabama. There was a black riot, with police forced 
onto the defensive and white shops demolished: 'Let the whole 
fucking city burn,' shouted a mob-leader, This'll show the white 



646 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

motherfuckers!' This was a new cry, and a new attitude, in American 
race-politics, and it could not be confined to the South. 129 

To Johnson's consternation, the scale and intensity of black violence, 
especially in the big cities outside the South, advanced step by step with 
his vigorous and effective efforts to secure black rights. The first really 
big and ugly black riots broke out in Harlem and Brooklyn on 18 July 
1964, only two weeks after the epoch-making Civil Rights Act was 
passed. The violence spread to Rochester in New York State, to Jersey 
City, Patterson and Elizabeth in New Jersey, to Dixmoor in Chicago, 
and Philadelphia. In August 1965 the Watts riots in Los Angeles lasted 
six days, involved 15,000 National Guardsmen, killed thirty-four, 
injured 856 and destroyed $200 million of property. Thereafter, 
large-scale riots by blacks in the inner cities became a recurrent feature 
of the Sixties, in sinister counterpoint and sometimes in deliberate 
harmony with student violence on the campuses. The riots in Detroit on 
24-28 July 1967 were among the most serious in American history, 
killing forty-three people and forcing a distraught President Johnson to 
move in the 18th Airborne Corps of paratroopers, whose commander 
said he entered a city 'saturated with fear'. 130 By 1968, with the 
Vietnam War moving to its sickly climax, students rioting on over 200 
campuses, and blacks putting some of the biggest cities to fire, Johnson 
seemed a failure. His decision not to seek re-election was an admission 
of defeat. He was the first major casualty of the Sixties illusions. But not 
the last. America's troubles were only beginning. 

Nor was Johnson a victim of lost illusions alone. He was also, in a real 
sense, a victim of the media, and especially of the East Coast liberals 
who controlled the most influential newspapers and the big three TV 
networks. The two points were connected, for one of the deepest 
illusions of the Sixties was that many forms of traditional authority 
could be diluted: the authority of America in the world, and of the 
president within America, Lyndon Johnson, as a powerful and in many 
ways effective president, stood for the authority principle. That was, for 
many, a sufficient reason for emasculating him. Another was that he did 
not share East Coast liberal assumptions, in the way that Roosevelt and 
Kennedy had done. He had been doubtful about running for president 
even in 1964 for this reason: 'I did not believe. . .that the nation would 
unite definitely behind any Southerner. One reason . . . was that the 
Metropolitan press would never permit it.' 131 The prediction proved 
accurate, though its fulfilment was delayed. By August 1967, the 
Washington Correspondent of the St Louis Post-Dispatch, James 
Deakin, reported, 'the relationship between the President and the 
Washington press corps has settled into a pattern of chronic 
disbelief'. 132 Media misrepresentation of the Tet Offensive was 
immediately responsible for Johnson's departure. But more fundamen- 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 647 

tal still was its habitual presentation of any decisive and forceful act 
by the White House as in some inescapable sense malevolent. 

This was quite a new development. Opposition to a strong 
presidency had hitherto come, as was natural, from the legislature, 
especially from the senate. As Roosevelt had put it, 'the only way to 
do anything in the American government was to bypass the 
senate'. 133 His Republican opponent, Wendell Wilkie, had spoken of 
devoting his life to 'saving America from the Senate'. 134 Under 
Roosevelt and Truman the press and academic constitutionalists had 
strongly supported firm presidential leadership, especially in foreign 
policy, and contrasted it with Congressional obscurantism. 135 Dur- 
ing the McCarthy investigations, Eisenhower had been severely 
criticized by the press for failing to defend executive rights against 
Congressional probing. The New Republic commented (1953): 'The 
current gravitation of power into the hands of Congress at the 
expense of the Executive is a phenomenon so fatuous as to be 
incredible if the facts were not so patent.' 136 When Eisenhower 
invoked 'executive privilege' to deny information about government 
acts to the Un-American Activities Committee, he was warmly 
applauded by the liberal media. The Committee, said the New York 
Times, had no right 'to know the details of what went on in these 
inner Administration councils'. Eisenhower, wrote the Washington 
Post, was 'abundantly right' to protect 'the confidential nature of 
executive conversations'. 137 Until the mid-1960s, the media con- 
tinued to support resolute presidential leadership on civil rights, on 
social and economic issues and, above all, on foreign policy, endors- 
ing Kennedy's dictum (1960): 'It is the President alone who must 
make the major decisions on our foreign policy.' 138 

The change came after the Tonkin Gulf resolution. By the time 
Johnson handed over the White House to Richard Nixon in 1969, 
the East Coast media, along with many other vociferous elements in 
the nation, had moved into permanent opposition. As one comment- 
ator put it, 'The men and the movement that broke Lyndon 
Johnson's authority in 1968 are out to break Richard Nixon in 1969 
. . . breaking a president is, like most feats, easier to accomplish the 
second time around.' 139 Nixon was peculiarly vulnerable. He was a 
Californian whom the Eastern press had hated since the late 1940s. 
He felt the media had helped to deprive him of the presidency in 
1960 and had made a concerted effort to destroy his political career 
for good in 1963; he returned their antipathy with interest. 'Remem- 
ber,' he told his staff, 'the press is the enemy. When news is 
concerned, nobody in the press is a friend. They are all enemies.' 140 
In 1968 Nixon won despite the media, but only just. He got 43.4 per 
cent of the vote to Hubert Humphrey's 42.7. This was the smallest 



648 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

proportion of the popular vote of any president since 1912, and as 
the poll was low (61 per cent), it meant only 27 per cent of all voters 
favoured him. He did not carry a single big city. 141 In parts of the 
media there was an inclination to deny his legitimacy as president 
and to seek to reverse the verdict by non-constitutional means. 

Despite these handicaps, Nixon had considerable success in clear- 
ing up the anarchic heritage of the Johnson— Kennedy years, and 
especially in his skilful disengaging from Vietnam. He proclaimed the 
same objective as all his predecessors: 'We seek the opportunity for 
the South Vietnamese people to determine their own political future 
without outside interference.' 142 So long as he was fully in charge of 
American policy this aim was upheld, but at far smaller cost. In four 
years he reduced American forces in Vietnam from 550,000 to 
24,000. Spending declined from $25 billion a year under Johnson to 
less than $3 billion. 143 This was made possible by a more intelligent 
and flexible use of American force, in Cambodia in 1970, in Laos in 
1971, in bombing North Vietnam in 1972, which kept the deter- 
mined men in Hanoi perplexed and apprehensive about America's 
intentions. At the same time Nixon actively pursued peace- 
negotiations with the North Vietnamese. More important, he did 
something neither Kennedy nor Johnson had dared: he exploited the 
logic of the Sino-Soviet dispute and reached an understanding with 
China. 

It was Nixon's Californian orientation which inclined him to- 
wards Peking; he saw the Pacific as the world-arena of the future. He 
began his new China policy on 31 January 1969, only eleven days 
after he started work in the White House. The policy was embodied 
in National Security Study Memorandum 14 (4 February 1969), and 
it was reinforced by a conversation Nixon had with Andre Malraux, 
who told him it was a 'tragedy' that 'the richest and most productive 
people in the world' should be at odds with 'the poorest and most 
populous people in the world'. 144 Because of Chinese fears, the moves 
towards a rapprochement with China were conducted in private, and 
Nixon went to considerable lengths to get pledges of secrecy from the 
Congressional leaders he consulted. He told his staff: 'A fourth of the 
world's people live in Communist China. Today they're not a 
significant power, but twenty-five years from now they could be 
decisive. For the US not to do what it can at this time, when it can, 
would lead to a situation of great danger. We could have total 
detente with the Soviet Union, but that would mean nothing if the 
Chinese are outside the international community.' 145 

The new China policy, and the change in US military strategy, 
made possible peace with Hanoi. On 27 January 1973 in Paris, 
Nixon's Secretary of State, William Rogers, and Nguyen Duy Trinh of 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 649 

North Vietnam signed an 'Agreement on Ending the War and Restoring 
Peace in Vietnam'. The merit of this understanding, which made it 
possible for America to leave Vietnam, was that it reserved Nixon's 
right to maintain carriers in Indo-Chinese waters and to use aircraft 
stationed in Taiwan and Thailand if the accords were broken by 
Hanoi. 146 So long as Nixon held power, that sanction was a real one. 
Granted the situation he had inherited and the mistakes of his 
predecessors, Nixon had performed a notable feat of extrication. 

But America, and more tragically the peoples of Indo-China, were 
denied the fruits of this success because, by 1 973, Nixon and the nation 
were already engulfed in the maelstrom of hysteria known as 
'Watergate'. America seems peculiarly prone to these spasms of 
self-righteous political emotion in which all sense of perspective and the 
national interest is lost. The outbreak of xenophobia in 1918-20 was 
the work of right-wing Democrats. The anti-Communist scare of the 
late 1940s and early 1950s was largely directed by conservative 
Republicans. The Watergate witch-hunt, by contrast, was run by 
liberals in the media. In their eyes Nixon's real offence was popularity. 
Though he won narrowly in 1968, he successfully appealed, as 
president, over the heads of opinion-formers and a Democratic 
Congress, to unfashionable, inarticulate 'middle Americans', family- 
loving, church-going, patriotic, industrious and anti-liberal. On 3 
November 1969 he made a highly successful speech appealing for 
support in his foreign policy to those he termed 'you, the great, silent 
majority of my fellow Americans'. This ended, for the time being, the 
'breaking of Nixon' campaign by the media. 147 In the 1 972 campaign, 
Nixon was delighted when the Democrats nominated the ultra-liberal 
George McGovern. 'Here is a situation', he told his staff, 'where the 
Eastern Establishment media finally has a candidate who almost totally 
shares their views.' The 'real ideological bent of the New York Times, 
the Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and the three tv networks' was 
'on the side of amnesty, pot, abortion, confiscation of wealth (unless it is 
theirs), massive increases in welfare, unilateral disarmament, reduction 
of our defences and surrender in Vietnam.' At last, he concluded, 'the 
country will find out whether what the media has been standing for 
during these last five years really represents the majority thinking.' 148 
Whether or not that was the issue, Nixon won by a landslide, carrying 
the electoral college by 521 to 17 and securing 60.7 of the popular vote, 
only just short of Johnson's record in 1964. 149 

Among the media there were many who were not merely humiliated 
by Nixon's triumph but genuinely frightened. As one powerful editor 
put it: 'There's got to be a bloodletting. We've got to make sure nobody 
even thinks of doing anything like this again.' 150 The aim was to use 
publicity to reverse the electoral verdict of 1 972, which was felt to be, in 



650 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

some metaphysical sense, illegitimate — rather as conservative Ger- 
mans had regarded Weimar as illegitimate. The Nixon White House 
played into the hands of this desire by the use of extra-legal means to 
protect the President and his policies. The tradition of presidential 
skulduggery had begun with Franklin Roosevelt. He had created his 
own 'intelligence unit', responsible only to himself, with a staff of 
eleven and financed by State Department 'Special Emergency' 
money. 151 He used Hoover's fbi and the Justice Department to 
harass his enemies, especially in the press, and to tap their phones - 
the mineworkers' leader John L.Lewis being one victim. 152 He made 
a desperate effort to 'get' the Chicago Tribune, which he hated, in the 
courts. He even used the intelligence service to bug his wife's hotel 
room. 153 Though Truman and Eisenhower kept clear of clandestine 
activities by their staffs and the cia, they were aware of them, 
considering that, in dealing with Soviet Russia and other totalitarian- 
terror regimes, they were unavoidable. Kennedy and his brother 
Robert positively revelled in the game, and Kennedy's chief regret 
was that he had not made Robert head of the cia, to bring it under 
close family control. At the Justice Department, Robert Kennedy in 
1962 had fbi agents carry out dawn raids on the homes of executives 
of US Steel who had defied his brother's policies. 154 In their civil 
rights campaign, the Kennedy brothers exploited the Federal con- 
tracts system and used executive orders in housing finance (rather 
than legislation) to get their way. 155 They plotted against right-wing 
radio and tv stations. 156 Under Kennedy and Johnson, phone- 
tapping increased markedly. 157 So did executive 'bugging': the 
large-scale womanizing of the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, 
was tapped and then played to newspaper editors. 158 Johnson used 
secret government files, the Internal Revenue Service and other 
executive devices to protect himself against exposure in the Bobby 
Baker scandal of 1963, potentially the biggest since Teapot Dome. 

Until the Nixon presidency the media was extremely selective in its 
publicizing of any presidential misdemeanours. Working journalists 
protected Roosevelt from the exposure of his love-affairs. 159 They 
did the same for Kennedy, concealing the fact that, while President, 
he kept a Washington apartment for his mistresses, one of whom he 
shared with a gangster. 160 In Johnson's struggle to extricate himself 
from the Bobby Baker scandal, the Washington Post actually helped 
him to blacken his chief accuser, Senator John Williams. 161 Johnson, 
as Vice-President, accepted bribes, as did Nixon's Vice-President, 
Spiro Agnew: Agnew was exposed and convicted; Johnson went on 
to the White House. 162 

Nixon enjoyed no such forbearance from the media. Quite the 
contrary. But then it is likely that, in certain respects, he went further 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 651 

than any of his predecessors. This was partly a matter of size: the 
White House was expanding out of control. Lincoln had to pay a 
secretary out of his own pocket. Hoover had to struggle hard to get 
three. Roosevelt appointed the first six 'administrative assistants' in 
1939. Kennedy had twenty-three. The total White House staff had 
risen to 1,664 in Kennedy's last year. Under Johnson it was forty 
times the size of Hoover's. Under Nixon it rose to 5,395 in 1971, the 
cost jumping from $31 million to $71 million. 163 Much of the 
expansion was the work of Henry Kissinger, Nixon's Security 
Assistant and later Secretary of State, who controlled the Vietnam 
negotiations. It was Kissinger who fundamentally expanded the 
phone-tapping operations, in theory to assist his peace offensive. 164 
Vietnam, where world peace and American lives were at stake, was 
the ostensible, and for Nixon the real, justification for many 
questionable activities. He saw secrecy as paramount to success. In 
1971 a huge series of secret Administration papers (the 'Pentagon 
Papers') were stolen and given to the New York Times, which 
published them. In Britain and most other Western democracies, 
those concerned would have been gaoled under government secrecy 
laws. That was not possible in the USA, where the press enjoys 
constitutional privileges under the First Amendment. To Nixon, as 
one of his colleagues put it, this publication was 'a challenge by the 
elite, unelected press to the primacy of power of the democratically 
elected government. A moral issue was at stake.' 165 A 'Special 
Investigations unit' of the Executive was authorized to use illegal 
means (including a break-in) to nail the leaker. This 'plumbing' unit 
became the prototype for other task-forces, one of which broke into 
Democratic Party headquarters, in the Watergate building, in 
late-May 1972 and again on 17 June. On the second occasion, about 
which the Democrats may have known in advance, the 'plumbers' 
were arrested. 166 

Political espionage, even theft, had never hitherto been taken 
seriously in America. Johnson had 'bugged' Goldwater in 1964. The 
NBC TV network had bugged Democratic Party headquarters in 
1968. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times pub- 
lished purloined material, of an extremely valuable nature (the 
Haldeman and Kissinger memoirs), during this period. But the 
Washington Post, in a series of articles beginning on 10 October 
1972, decided to make the Watergate break-in a major moral issue, a 
lead followed by the rest of the East Coast media. This in itself might 
not have been serious. It failed to prevent the Nixon landslide. But it 
caught the attention of a publicity-hungry federal judge, John Sirica, 
known as 'Maximum John' for the severity of his sentences - and 
not, in any other circumstances, a justice likely to enjoy the approval 



652 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

of the liberal press. When the burglars came before him, he gave 
them provisional life sentences to force them to provide evidence 
against members of the Administration. That he was serious was 
indicated by the fact that he sentenced the only man who refused to 
comply, Gordon Liddy, to twenty years in prison, plus a fine of 
$40,000, for a first offence of breaking and entering, in which 
nothing was stolen and no resistance offered to police. 167 This act of 
judicial terrorism, which would have been impossible in any other 
country under the rule of law, was to be sadly typical of the juridical 
witch-hunt by means of which members of the Nixon Administra- 
tion were hounded, convicted (in some cases pleading guilty to save 
the financial ruin of an expensive defence) and sentenced. 168 But it 
had the desired effect and 'broke' the Watergate scandal, that is, it 
allowed the machinery of Congressional investigation, where of 
course the Democrats enjoyed majority control, to make a frontal 
assault on the 'imperial presidency'. In the process the notion of 
executive privilege, once so hotly defended by the liberal media, was 
scrapped. Indeed, in the overwhelming desire to destroy Nixon, all 
considerations of national security were cast aside. 

Matters were made easy for the witch-hunters by the admission, 
on Friday 13 July 1973, by one of the White House staff, that all 
Nixon's working conversations were automatically taped. Again, 
there was nothing new in this. Roosevelt had stationed stenographers 
in a specially constructed cubicle beneath his office to eavesdrop on 
callers. In 1982 it was revealed that in 1940 he had also used secret 
tapes, with the help of the Radio Corporation of America, which 
owned one of the big networks. At the same time it emerged that 
Truman had made tapes, that Eisenhower used a combination of 
tapes and dicta-belts, that Kennedy secretly taped visitors (and his 
wife) for the last sixteen months of his presidency, and that Johnson 
was an inveterate taper. 169 In fact one of Nixon's first acts, in 
February 1969, was to have Johnson's taping system ripped out: he 
thought it wrong. Then, in February 1971, worried that liberal 
historians of the future would misrepresent his Vietnam policy, he 
ordered a new system to be installed. His Chief of Staff, Bob 
Haldeman, picked one which was indiscriminate and voice- 
activated, 'the greatest single disservice a presidential aide ever 
performed for his chief'. 170 These transcribed tapes, which the courts 
and Congressional investigators insisted that Nixon surrender - 
under the ironic gaze, presumably, of a ghostly Senator Joe McCar- 
thy - were used to mount a putative impeachment of the President. 
Whether Nixon was actually guilty of an attempt to interfere with 
the course of justice, as alleged, and whether such an attempt, if 
made, was covered by a legitimate interpretation of raison d'etat, 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 653 

was never established. Nixon never put his side of the case since, 
rather than risk the prolonged national convulsion of an impeach- 
ment, which might have lasted years, he resigned in August 1974. 
Thus the electoral verdict of 1972 was overturned by what might be 
described as a media putsch. The 'imperial presidency' was replaced 
by the 'imperial press'. 171 

The fall of Nixon was made the occasion for a radical shift in the 
balance of power back towards the legislature. Some movement in 
this direction was perhaps overdue. In the event it proceeded much 
too far in the opposite direction. In 1973 the War Powers Resolu- 
tion, passed over Nixon's veto, imposed unprecedented restraints on 
the power of the President to commit US forces abroad, compelling 
him in any event to seek Congressional authority within sixty days. 
Further limitations on presidential foreign policy were imposed by 
the Jackson-Vanik and Stevenson Amendments of 1973-4. In 
July-August 1974 Congress paralysed the President's handling of the 
Cyprus crisis; in the autumn it imposed restrictions on the use of the 
cia. In 1975 it effectively hamstrung the President's policy in 
Angola. Later that year it passed the Arms Export Control Act, 
removing the President's discretion in the supply of arms. It used 
financial controls to limit severely the system of 'presidential 
agreements' with foreign powers, over 6,300 of which had been 
concluded from 1946-74 (as opposed to only 411 treaties, which 
required Congressional sanction). It reinforced its aggressive restric- 
tions on presidential power by enabling no less than seventeen 
Senatorial and sixteen House committees to supervise aspects of 
foreign policy, and by expanding its expert staff to over 3,000 (the 
House International Relations Committee staff tripled, 1971-7), to 
monitor White House activities. 172 By the late 1970s, it was calcu- 
lated that there were no less than seventy limiting Amendments on 
the presidential conduct of foreign policy. It was even argued that a 
test of the War Powers Act would reveal that the President was no 
longer Commander-in-Chief and that the decision whether or not 
American troops could be kept abroad or withdrawn might have to 
be left to the Supreme Court. 173 

The immediate, and in terms of human life the most serious, 
impact of the Watergate hysteria was the destruction of free institu- 
tions in the whole of Indo-China. Nixon's policy of withdrawal 
made sense only if the North Vietnamese were kept guessing about 
America's willingness to provide forceful backing to its allies in the 
South. The War Powers Act, the 1974 Congressional ban on 
American military involvement, and Congress's further reductions of 
all assistance to the South, the direct results of the Watergate 
degringolade, ended the necessary ambiguities about American 



654 AMERICA'S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

policy. Nixon and his successor, Gerald Ford, were powerless to 
prevent the North Vietnamese from breaking the accords and taking 
everything. Some French experts had argued all along that the true 
cause of the Indo-Chinese struggle, and the dynamic throughout, was 
the aggressive expansionism of the North Vietnamese and their 
centuries-old desire, which Communist organization and ruthless- 
ness provided the means to gratify, to dominate all the peoples of 
Indo-China. That thesis was now strengthened by events. As US aid 
tailed off, the military balance shifted decisively to the North in 
1973. By the end of the year the North had achieved a two-to-one 
superiority and launched a general invasion. In January 1975 the 
whole of central Vietnam had to be evacuated, and a million refugees 
fled towards Saigon. In a last desperate appeal to Congress, President 
Ford pleaded: 'American unwillingness to provide adequate assis- 
tance to allies fighting for their lives could seriously affect our 
credibility throughout the world as an ally.' 174 But Congress did 
nothing. At his news conference on 26 March Ford appealed again, 
warning of 'a massive shift in the foreign policies of many countries 
and a fundamental threat ... to the security of the United States'. 175 
The face of Congress remained averted. Less than four weeks later, 
on 21 April, the Vietnamese government abdicated. Marine helicop- 
ters lifted American officials, and a few Vietnamese friends, from the 
rooftop of the US embassy in Saigon. Nine days later Communist 
tanks entered the city. It was the gravest and most humiliating defeat 
in American history. For the peoples of the region it was a catastro- 
phe. 

The Communist elites which seized power by force all over 
Indo-China in April 1975 immediately embarked on nationwide 
programmes of social engineering which recalled Stalin's collectiviza- 
tion of the peasants, though in some respects they were even more 
inhuman. The best-documented is the 'ruralization' conducted in 
Cambodia by the Communist Khmer Rouge, which entered the 
capital Phnom Penh in mid- April, the American embassy having been 
evacuated on the 12th. The atrocities began on 17 April. They were 
carried out mainly by illiterate peasant soldiers, but they had been 
planned two years before by a group of middle-class ideologues who 
called themselves Angka Loeu ('the Higher Organization'). Details of 
their plan had been obtained by a State Department expert, Kenneth 
Quinn, who circulated it in a report dated 20 February 1974. 176 The 
scheme was an attempt to telescope, in one terrifying coup, the social 
changes brought about over twenty-five years in Mao's China. There 
was to be 'total social revolution'. Everything about the past was 
'anathema and must be destroyed'. It was necessary to 'psychologi- 
cally reconstruct individual members of society'. It entailed 'stripping 



AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 655 

away, through terror and other means, the traditional bases, struc- 
tures and forces which have shaped and guided an individual's life' 
and then 'rebuilding him according to party doctrines by substituting 
a series of new values'. 177 Angka Loeu consisted of about twenty 
professional political intellectuals, mainly teachers and bureaucrats. 
Of the eight leaders, all in their forties (one a woman), five were 
teachers, one a university professor, one an economist, one a 
bureaucrat. All had studied in France in the 1950s, where they had 
absorbed the doctrines of 'necessary violence' preached on the 
radical Left. They were Sartre's children. It is notable that, while this 
group of ideologues preached the virtues of rural life, none had in 
fact ever engaged in manual labour or had any experience at all of 
creating wealth. Like Lenin, they were pure intellectuals. They 
epitomized the great destructive force of the twentieth century: the 
religious fanatic reincarnated as professional politician. What they 
did illustrated the ultimate heartlessness of ideas. In any other age or 
place, the plans of these savage pedants would have remained in their 
fevered imaginations. In Cambodia in 1975 it was possible to put 
them into practice. 

On 17 April over 3 million people were living in Phnom Penh. 
They were literally pushed into the surrounding countryside. The 
violence started at 7 am with attacks on Chinese shops; then general 
looting. The first killings came at 8.45 am. Fifteen minutes later 
troops began to clear the Military Hospital, driving doctors, nurses, 
sick and dying into the streets. An hour later they opened fire on 
anyone seen in the streets, to start a panic out of the city. At noon the 
Preah Ket Melea hospital was cleared: hundreds of men, women and 
children, driven at gunpoint, limped out into midday temperatures of 
over 100 Fahrenheit. Of 20,000 wounded in the city, all were in the 
jungle by nightfall. One man humped his son, who had just had both 
legs amputated; others pushed the beds of the very ill, carrying 
bottles of plasma and serum. Every hospital in the city was emptied. 
All papers and records in the city were destroyed. All books were 
thrown into the Mekong River or burned on the banks. The paper 
money in the Banque Khmer de Commerce was incinerated. Cars, 
motorbikes and bicycles were impounded. Rockets and bazookas 
were fired at houses where any movement was detected. There were 
many summary executions. The rest were told, 'Leave immediately 
or we will shoot all of you.' By evening the water-supply was cut off. 
What gave the episode its peculiar Kafkaesque horror was the 
absence of any visible authority. The peasant-soldiers simply killed 
and terrified, obeying orders, invoking the commands of Angka 
Loeu. Nothing was explained. The intellectuals who had planned it 
all never appeared. 178 



656 AMERICA S SUICIDE ATTEMPT 

On 23 April troops began emptying the other cities, with popula- 
tions ranging from 15,000 to 200,000. There were many atrocities. 
In Siem Reap over one-hundred patients in the Monte Peth hospital 
were murdered in their beds with clubs and knives; forty more were 
killed in the military hospital. Following the pattern of Stalin in 
Poland, there were massacres of officers: at Mongkol Borei, for 
instance, a group of two-hundred were driven into a minefield laid 
specially for the purpose. At the Svay Pagoda near Sisophon, 
eighty-eight pilots were clubbed to death. Other groups murdered en 
masse were street beggars, prostitutes, the seriously wounded and 
incurably sick found in hospitals, civil servants, teachers and 
students. As in the big Indonesia massacre, the families of the 'guilty' 
were slaughtered to prevent 'revenge': Khmer Rouge girl-soldiers 
took off the women and small children to the death-pits. But little 
attempt was made to hide the killings: bodies were left to decompose 
or floated in scores down the rivers. 179 

By June 3,500,000 people from the cities and 500,000 from 'bad' 
villages had been scattered over the countryside, and set to work to 
build new villages, often with their bare hands. Slackers were told 
they would be 'ground down by the wheel of History', a striking 
image of Leninism in practice. Sexual intercourse was forbidden; 
adultery or fornication punished by death, the sentence being carried 
our ruthlessly. Married couples were forbidden to have prolonged 
conversations together: this was known as 'arguing' and punished by 
death on the second offence. As famine and epidemic developed, the 
old and sick and the very young (especially if orphans) were 
abandoned. Executions were in public, relatives being forced to 
watch while their brother, mother or child was garotted or decapi- 
tated, stabbed, bludgeoned or axed to death. Sometimes entire 
families were executed together. Former officials were often tortured 
to death, or mutilated before execution. At Do Nauy, Colonel Saray 
Savath had his nose and ears cut off and was then crucified to a tree, 
dying the third day. In the same place a teacher called Tan Samay, 
who disobeyed orders not to teach his pupils anything except 
soil-tilling, was hanged, his own pupils, aged eight to ten, being 
forced to carry out the execution, and to shout 'Unfit teacher!' as 
they did so. 180 The sickening list of cruelties is endless. 

In April 1976, the leader of the Angka Loeu, Khieu Samphan, 
became head of state, being succeeded as head of government by 
another middle-class fanatic intellectual, Pol Pot. As head of state, 
Khieu attended a conference of so-called non-aligned nations in 
Colombo in August 1976, and in a confused interview with an 
Italian magazine appeared to admit that a million 'war criminals', as 
he termed them, had died since the Khmer Rouge took over. At that 



America's suicide attempt 657 

time large-scale murders were continuing. According to one set of 
calculations, based on interviews with over 300 witnesses and the 
work of the French scholar Francois Ponchaud, who questioned 
many more, about 100,000 Cambodians were executed, 20,000 died 
trying to flee, 400,000 died in the forced exodus from the towns, a 
further 430,000 died in the camps and 'villages' before the end of 
1975, and 250,000 more in 1976. Hence between April 1975 and the 
beginning of 1977, the Marxist-Leninist ideologues ended the lives of 
1,200,000 people, a fifth of the population. 181 

Although the Cambodia atrocities attracted the most attention in 
the West, social engineering of a similar kind took place in Laos and 
South Vietnam. In Laos the middle class had been destroyed or 
driven out to Thailand by the end of 1975, when a People's 
Democratic Republic was declared, in reality a cover for colonization 
by North Vietnamese. Minorities were destroyed or expelled and in 
the north mass-settlement by North Vietnamese peasants took place 
in the years 1977-8. In July 1976, South Vietnam was 'unified' with 
the North under Northern control. As in Cambodia, large but 
unknown numbers of city-dwellers were moved by force into the 
countryside. The Secretary-General of the Vietnamese Communist 
Party, Le Duan, announced that living standards would now fall. 
'People in the South', he said, had 'attained living-standards too high 
for the country's economy'. Such a 'consumer society' was the 
'complete opposite of a truly happy and civilized life'. So that was 
that. The party journal wrote of 'our entire people's submission to 
the will of the advanced class representing society'. By January 1977 
there were 200,000 political prisoners, in addition to many thou- 
sands of executions. In December 1978 the North Vietnam elite 
finally broke with the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, invaded the 
country and occupied Phnom Penh on 7 January 1979. The whole of 
Indo-China was now in practical terms 'united' under a North 
Vietnamese military dictatorship, with 200,000 Viet troops in Kam- 
puchea (as Cambodia was now called) and 20,000 in Laos. By 1980, 
Vietnam had well over 1 million in its armed forces, next to Cuba the 
largest, per capita, in the world. 182 It was a gruesome climax to the 
'liberation struggle', which now entered a new phase, with guerrilla 
movements, supported by China, taking the field against Hanoi, and 
with Soviet Russia supplying the North Vietnamese imperialists with 
the helicopter gunships to maintain their paramountcy. But the 
twentieth century has been crowded with such ironies. 

These events were viewed apathetically in America, and indeed in 
the West as a whole. They were merely one marginal aspect of the 
process of disillusionment so characteristic of the Seventies decade, 
and which centred increasingly on the flagging performance of the 



658 America's suicide attempt 

world economy. The Vietnam War and its bitter sequel, the Great 
Society and its collapse, the Imperial Presidency and its demolition: 
these constituted, in combination, a suicide attempt by the super- 
power of the West. They were powerful factors in ending the great 
post-war economic expansion and in returning international society 
to the fear and disarray of the 1930s. Equally important, they 
undermined the capacity of American leadership to respond to the 
new instability. 



NINETEEN 

The Collectivist Seventies 



Economic disorder precedes the military disorder of war. The 
economic collapse of the early 1930s undoubtedly made possible the 
Second World War. In its aftermath, Western statesmen earnestly 
sought guidance to prevent this pattern recurring. The result was the 
Keynesian age. He had defined the essence of his philosophy in his 
famous letter to the New York Times in 1933: *I lay overwhelming 
emphasis on the increase of national purchasing power resulting 
from governmental expenditure, which is financed by loans.' 1 Dur- 
ing the 1950s and 1960s this Keynesian emphasis became the leading 
principle of economic policy in all the major Western economies. 
Moreover, Keynesianism was adopted at the international level. In 
July 1944 at Bretton Woods in New Hampshire, he and the 
American Treasury official Harry Dexter White created the World 
Bank and the International Monetary Fund. The haughty King's man 
found White intolerably rude: he had 'not the faintest conception' of 
'civilized behaviour'. White called Keynes 'Your Royal Highness'. 
But in practice these two men, both of whom had guilty secrets, 
worked well together. Keynes contended that London's pre-1914 role 
of running the international money system had been left vacant, 
because of British weakness, between the wars: hence the disaster. 
The new system was to fill the gap. It extended 'the principles of local 
banking to the international field . . . when one chap wants to leave 
his resources idle, those resources are not therefore withdrawn from 
circulation but are made available to another chap who is prepared 
to use them - and to make this possible without the former losing his 
liquidity.' 2 

The new system came into existence in May 1946. It worked very 
well, mainly because the US economy boomed, and American 
policy-makers were prepared to run the world on Keynesian lines. 
There was a world-wide, insatiable demand for dollars, and Wash- 
ington was prepared to provide them either through Marshall Aid, 

659 



660 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

other foreign aid programmes, or cheap loans. The result was the 
most 'rapid and prolonged economic expansion in world history. 
World trade, which had actually contracted by 3 per cent in the early 
1930s, and only recovered the lost ground in the late 1930s, grew 
over the quarter-century 1948—71 at the remarkable average annual 
rate of 7.27 per cent. 3 Nothing like this had ever been experienced 
before. Even in the brief 1926-9 frenzy, the rate had been only 6.74 
per cent. Industrial expansion was comparably exotic. In the 
260-odd years for which reasonable figures are available, 
1705—1971, the quantity of industrial production in the world rose 
1,730 times. Considerably over half this increase came in the 
post- 1948 quarter-century. The growth in industrial production over 
the whole world averaged 5.6 per cent, sustained year after year. 4 

The framework of stability which made possible this phenomenal 
material improvement in the human condition was provided by the 
dollar as a generously administered international currency. But the 
reliability of the dollar depended on the strength of the American 
economy. And in the 1960s successive American presidents placed 
that economy under growing strain. Moreover, America's was 
essentially a businessman's economy. Its success lay in great part in 
the existence of a favourable climate, in which businessmen felt safe 
and esteemed. That climate had existed in the 1920s. It had 
disappeared in the 1930s. It had reappeared in the war, when 
business was needed to destroy Hitler, and it had been sustained until 
the end of the Eisenhower administration. In the 1960s came a great 
change. The national climate turned hostile to business. The first sign 
of trouble was a return to the vigorous enforcement of anti-trust 
legislation. The Justice Department made a frontal assault on the 
electric industry. Early in 1961, top officials of General Electric and 
Westinghouse, and the companies themselves, were convicted of 
price-fixing. Sentencing alone took two days. Seven leading business- 
men went to gaol; the fines totalled nearly $2 million. 5 

That was only a foretaste. The Kennedy brothers had been 
brought up by their speculator-father to hate businessmen. 6 The 
result was the 1962 attack on the steel industry, led by the 
Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy, who had learnt the techniques 
of harassment and judicial manipulation as one of Joe McCarthy's 
staff. The Christian Science Monitor asked: 'After this display of 
naked power . . . how free will the American economy be?' The Wall 
Street Journal complained that the government was coercing the steel 
industry 'by the pressure of fear — by naked power, by threats, by 
agents of the state security police'. 7 The result was the first big 
post-war fall in the New York stock market. It recovered, but stocks 
in some industries never again kept ahead of inflation. In 1966, with 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 661 

inflation passing the 3 per cent barrier for the first time, and with 
interest-rates pushing up to the then-daunting level of 5 5 per cent, the 
sparkle went out of the Great Bull Market. In 1968, the culminating 
year of Lyndon Johnson's troubles, the growth of stocks ended 
completely, with the Dow-Jones industrial index short of the magic 
1,000-mark. Twelve years later, adjusted for inflation, it had fallen 
to about 300. 8 In the decade of the 1970s alone the value of common 
stocks on the New York Stock Exchange fell by about 42 per cent. 9 
Cumulatively, the loss of confidence in stocks - that is, in the 
American business economy - was as great as in the Hoover collapse, 
though spread over a much longer period. 

The flagging stock exchange was only the beginning of the troubles 
of American business. In 1961 Rachel Carson published The Sea 
Around Us and the next year The Silent Spring, in which she drew 
attention to the alarming pollution of natural resources and the 
destruction of organic life caused by the processes of booming modern 
economies, especially the dumping of toxic chemicals and the use of 
insecticides to raise agricultural production. In 1965 Ralph Nader 
published Unsafe at Any Speed, presenting the characteristic product 
of the American auto industry, the very heart of the industrial 
economy, as a death-trap. These books were necessary correctives to 
the harmful side-effects of rapid growth. But they introduced an era in 
which the protection of the environment and the consumer became a 
quasi-religious crusade, fought with increasingly fanatical zeal. It had 
a peculiar appeal to the hundreds of thousands of graduates now 
pouring off the campuses as a result of the expansion of higher 
education, keen to find ways to express the radicalism they absorbed 
there. Nothing was more calculated to produce a climate hostile to 
business than the growth of the health and safety lobby. It became a 
salient feature of American life from the mid-1960s onwards and was 
soon reflected in a mass of regulatory legislation. With his extraordin- 
ary capacity to get laws through Congress, Lyndon Johnson began the 
process: in 1964 the Multiple Use Act and the Land and Water Act; in 
1965 the Water Pollution Act and the Clean Air Act; in 1 966 the Clean 
Water Restoration Act. When Johnson faltered, the 'Conservation 
Congress' of 1968 took the initiative and held it into the 1970s, when 
a series of gigantic Acts imposed what was termed 'Ecotopia' on 
American business: the Environmental Protection Act, the Toxic 
Substances Control Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act, the 
Clean Air Amendments Act and a whole series of Food and Drug Acts. 
By 1976 it was calculated that compliance with the new regulations 
was costing business $63 billion a year, plus a further $3 billion to the 
taxpayer to maintain the government regulatory agencies. Total costs 
rose to over $100 billion by 1979. 10 



662 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

Equally serious was the effect on productivity. One example was 
the coal industry, where production stood at 19.9 tons per worker 
per day in 1969. By 1976, when the full effects of the 1969 
Coal-Mine Health and Safety Act (in some ways a highly desirable 
statute) had been felt, production had slipped to 13.6 tons, a fall of 
32 per cent. 11 In 1975, over the whole of American industry, 
productivity was 1.4 per cent lower than otherwise as a result of 
meeting government pollution and job-safety regulations. 12 During 
the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, therefore, excessive 
government regulation was applying the same kind of destructive 
friction to the American economy as trade union legal privilege in 
Britain. As a result, in the decade 1967-77, productivity in American 
manufacturing industry grew by only 27 per cent, about the same as 
in Britain (the corresponding figure for West Germany was 70 per 
cent, for France 72 per cent and for Japan 107 per cent). From the 
mid-1970s onwards, American productivity actually declined. The 
most detailed analysis of this stagnation and decline in American 
economic dynamism suggested the causes were mainly political: 
failure to control the money supply, excessive tax burdens and above 
all government intervention and regulation. 13 

But the anti-business climate was not the creation of politics alone. 
It was also the work of the courts, which in the 1960s entered a 
period of aggressive expansion - part of the movement towards a 
litigious society - led by the Supreme Court. Chief Justice Waite 
had laid down the correct principle in 1877: Tor protection against 
abuses by legislatures, the people must resort to the polls, not the 
courts.' But in the 1950s and early 1960s, liberal America had 
appealed to the courts to remedy the refusal of Congress to pass 
effective civil rights legislation. The courts responded and, having 
acquired the taste for power, indulged it long after the essential civil 
rights battle was won. They eroded the legitimate sphere not only of 
Congress but of the presidency, not only in the area of rights but in 
the conduct of the economy. Thus the early 1970s saw the birth not 
only of the 'imperial press' but of the 'imperial judiciary'. 

The animus of the courts was directed particularly against busi- 
nessmen, notably when the judiciary, by an extension of the civil 
rights concept, embraced the principle of 'affirmative action' (that is, 
discrimination in favour of 'underprivileged groups') and began the 
process of imposing 'race quotas'. This was only one aspect of 
'rights': the rights of women, homosexuals, the handicapped and 
many other collective entities were interpreted by the courts as 
enforceable against powerful institutions, such as business or govern- 
ment. The Supreme Court in effect reinterpreted the constitution to 
sustain the particular political and legislative preferences of the 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 663 

judiciary, which were liberal. Hence constitutional principles, and 
the legal practice derived from them, changed with frightening 
speed. 14 A growing proportion of business resources and executive 
time was devoted to responding to litigation: in the 1970s, America 
had four times as many lawyers per capita as West Germany, twenty 
times as many as Japan. 15 

The courts also moved to make it difficult for government, at 
local, state or federal level, to reduce the size and cost of the public 
sector. When Nixon provided no funds for the 1974 Office of 
Economic Opportunity, which meant closing down its nine hundred 
Community Action agencies (a bureaucratic extravaganza of no 
great practical value), a federal judge ruled the action illegal. 16 The 
courts also ruled that a governing authority failing to provide social 
or welfare services in such a way as to infringe the civil rights of 
citizens was liable for damages; that an authority which reduced 
prison staff as an economy measure damaged the civil rights of 
prisoners; that for Congress to refuse funds in a specific civil rights 
area (e.g., the right to abortion) was unconstitutional; and that all 
government departments, and all private companies receiving gov- 
ernment funds or contracts, must employ races by quota. 17 The 
cumulative effect of these and many similar decisions was to make it 
exceedingly difficult to reverse the growth of government expendi- 
ture and create room for a revival of business confidence and 
efficiency. 

The peak post-war year for the American economy, relative to the 
rest of the world, was 1968, when American industrial production 
was more than one-third (34 per cent) of the world total. It was also 
the climax of the American global paramountcy, the year of Lyndon 
Johnson's agony, the point at which the combined burden of foreign 
and domestic spending became too great to bear. Thereafter all was 
decadence. And with America's relative economic decline came a 
progressive softening of the dollar as a reserve currency. This 
inevitably undermined the Bretton Woods arrangements. From the 
late 1960s Washington ceased to control the world monetary system. 
To some extent it ceased to control its own currency since the 
quantity of unrepatriated dollars — what de Gaulle stigmatized as 
'America's export of her own inflation' - now reached catastrophic 
proportions. The age of the dollar was over. The age of the 
Eurodollar dawned. 

As long ago as 1949 the Communist Chinese, fearing America 
might block any dollars they earned, decided to keep their dollars 
outside the US in a Soviet Paris bank. Its cable address was 
'Eurobank' - hence . the term Eurodollar. America first went into 
deficit in 1958, and thereafter the flow of dollars into Europe 



664 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

increased steadily. A British financier, Sir George Bolton, of the Bank 
of London and South America, now grasped the idea that here, for 
the first time, was a currency growing up outside national supervi- 
sion, an expatriate currency capable of providing colossal amounts 
of credit. He made London the centre of the new Eurodollar 
system. 18 The Eurodollar market tripled in 1959 alone; doubled 
again in 1960. Attempts by Kennedy to break it up by controls 
merely boosted its attractiveness. Similar measures by European 
governments were equally counter-productive. It was a good exam- 
ple of the way in which the market defies the suppressive puritanism 
of governments and world agencies. As Walter Wriston of New 
York's Citibank put it, the Eurocurrency market was 'fathered by 
controls'. It was, in fact, a kind of black market world financial 
system. Freed of government interference, it was able to make the 
maximum use of the new electronic communications devices which 
became available in the 1960s and 1970s. To quote Wriston again: 
'Mankind now has a completely integrated international financial 
and information marketplace, capable of moving money and ideas to 
any place on this planet within minutes.' 19 

But of course the Eurodollar market, the product of American 
inflation, was itself highly inflationary. It reproduced some of the 
worst features of the 1920s New York money market, especially in 
its international loans. It increased the volatile nature of money, 
stacked up credit in multiple tiers of borrowings, thus creating 
'dollars' which did not exist. 20 Eurobonds and Eurocredits were 
invented. All the world's major banks came into the market, and 
formed syndicates to handle loans to governments on a scale never 
before imagined. The first Eurodollar syndicated loan was to the 
Shah's Iran in 1969. It was for $80 million. Italy got a $200 million 
loan later that year. Soon up to two hundred banks joined syndi- 
cates, and the size and number of loans, and the speed at which they 
were packaged, grew dramatically. The billion-dollar loan became 
routine. Commercial banks replaced wealthy Western governments 
and development aid as the chief source of finance for the Third 
World. In 1967, commercial banks accounted for only 12 per cent of 
external public debt in the world. By the end of 1975 they passed the 
50 per cent mark at a trot. 21 

As the banks took over the international monetary system, the 
supervisory role of Washington collapsed. In 1971 the Nixon 
administration lost or abandoned control of what was happening. 22 
Two years later, in March 1973, Nixon cut the link between gold 
and dollars, and thereafter most major currencies floated, either 
singly or in groups. The float revealed the weakness of the dollar, 
which lost 40 per cent of its value against the Deutschmark 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 665 

between February and March 1973. It also increased the speed and 
hysteria of monetary movements which, thanks to electronic gadge- 
try, surged backwards and forwards across frontiers in gigantic 
masses (in the late 1970s, money transactions in New York alone 
averaged $23 billion a day 23 ). In short, by autumn 1973, the financial 
underpinning of the world economy was coming apart. To produce 
disaster, all that was required was a sudden shock. What happened 
was by no means a mere shock: it was an earthquake. 

It was no accident that the earthquake emanated from the Middle 
East. The great post-war boom had been propelled by cheap energy. 
Between 1951 and 1972, the price of fuel declined consistently 
compared to the price of manufactured goods. It fell sharply in relative 
terms 1953-69, and in the years 1963-9 it actually fell in absolute 
terms. 24 This fall in price was made possible by the rapid increase of 
exports of cheap Middle East oil. It is significant that the three leading 
sectors in the Western economic boom, motors, chemicals and 
electricity, were all energy-intensive, indeed oil-intensive. 25 By assum- 
ing energy would remain cheap, all the industrial nations were 
short-sighted. But American energy policy was a particularly sad tale 
of improvidence, since government intervention kept domestic prices 
well below world averages. From being a world exporter of energy 
America became a net importer - 7 per cent of the total by 1 960 - with 
her energy consumption increasing fast every year (5 per cent annually 
in the second half of the 1960s). Her imports of petroleum products 
were particularly disturbing: in 1960 she imported 10 per cent; by 
1968 28 per cent; by 1973 36 per cent. 26 America's own oil 
production peaked in 1970 and thereafter declined. 

The rulers of the Middle East oil states noted this growing 
dependence of the West and Japan on their oil exports, and the failure 
to devise supplementary or alternative sources of energy. Some of 
them, and especially the Shah of Iran, were impressed by the 
arguments of the ecologists that the advanced industrial nations, 
especially America, were using up natural resources too fast because 
they were underpriced. In 1972-3 there were already signs that raw 
materials and other commodities, such as farm products, were rising 
in price, and oil began to follow. The Shah sought to persuade his 
fellow-rulers that the oil-exporting countries of the Middle East 
would do better to expand production more slowly and push up 
prices: thus their oil in the ground would increase in value. But to heed 
his advice they required not only a reason but an emotion - hatred of 
Israel, and of Israel's ally America. 

Strictly speaking, there had been no paramount power in the 
Middle East since the Suez fiasco of 1956-7. But though Britain kept a 
much lower profile she was quite active and surprisingly effective in 



666 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

the area for the next few years. British military interventions in 
Jordan in 1958, in Oman in 1959, in Kuwait in 1961, were 
successful in keeping the area reasonably stable. It was the progress- 
ive British military withdrawal from Aden and from the Gulf in the 
late 1960s which made the real difference. 27 Thereafter the area 
lacked an international policeman. The late Dag Hammarskjold's UN 
force was, in fact, a force working for instability, since under the UN 
doctrine of sovereignty President Nasser could ask for its withdrawal 
as soon as he felt strong enough to overwhelm Israel. That is 
precisely what he did on 16 May 1967. The UN complied three days 
later and the same evening Cairo Radio announced: 'This is our 
chance, Arabs, to deal Israel a mortal blow of annihilation.' Nasser, 
27 May: 'Our basic objective will be the destruction of Israel.' 
President Aref of Iraq, 31 May: 'Our goal is clear: to wipe Israel off 
the map.' Ahmed Shukairy, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation 
Organization, 1 June: 'The Jews of Palestine will have to leave .... 
Any of the old Jewish Palestine population who survive may stay, but 
it is my impression that none of them will survive.' 

In view of the withdrawal of the UN, these threats, and the 
concentration on her borders of armies outnumbering her own by 
three to one, heavily armed with modern Soviet material, Israel 
launched a preventive war on 4 June, beginning with strikes against 
Egyptian air-power. It lasted six days and was wholly successful. The 
Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian forces were routed, and in Egypt's 
case humiliated. Sinai and the West Bank were occupied. The Syrian 
Golan Heights, which made possible the bombardment of the Israeli 
settlements in Upper Galilee, were stormed. Above all, Old Jeru- 
salem, including the Wailing Wall and the Holy Places, the great 
prize which had eluded Israel in 1948, was now brought into the new 
state. Thus the war corrected a painful anomaly. In its 4,000-year 
history, Jerusalem had been besieged, occupied, destroyed and 
rebuilt repeatedly, under Canaanites, Jebusites, Jews, Babylonians, 
Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mame- 
lukes, Ottomans and British. But it had never been divided, except 
during the years 1948—67. The reunification of the city under the 
Israelis made possible an agreed administration of the Holy Places by 
Muslims, Jews and Christians, within the framework of a national 
capital. 28 

In other respects the Israeli victory brought no permanent gains. 
Nasser survived, thanks to some adroit crowd-manipulation. 29 His 
forces were rearmed by Soviet Russia, at more than twice the 
strength of the 1967 level. The thrust of his propaganda became 
increasingly anti-American, summed up in his endlessly repeated 
slogan 'Israel is America and America is Israel.' It was one of 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 667 

Nasser's arguments that to strike at America was to hurt Israel and 
that America's growing dependence on Middle East oil was a means 
to do so. But Egypt was not an oil power. Nasser died on 28 
September 1970 of a heart-attack, a propagandist of genius, a total 
failure as a military and political leader. There was no one to replace 
him as the cynosure of Arab hopes, delusory though they might be. 
But Nasser's destructive role as an advocate and practitioner of 
violence was soon filled by Colonel Mohammed Gadafy of Libya. A 
year before, he and other young officers had overthrown the coun- 
try's pro-Western monarchy rather as Nasser had despatched 
Farouk. In many ways Gadafy modelled himself on Nasser and 
repeated his Pan-Arabist and anti-Israeli rhetoric word-for-word. 
Libya was one of the smallest Arab states with only 2 million 
inhabitants. But it was by far the largest Arab oil producer west of 
Suez, and the importance of its geographical location was stressed in 
the aftermath of the 1967 war, when the canal was closed and 
Middle East oil supplies to the West disrupted. From the earliest days 
of his dictatorship Gadafy stressed the importance of the oil weapon 
in hitting back at 'western imperialism' for its support of Israel. 

Gadafy proved extremely adroit in bargaining with the oil compa- 
nies and the consumer nations, showing that both could successfully 
be divided and blackmailed separately. When he took power Libyan 
oil was virtually the cheapest in the world. In a series of negotiations, 
in 1970, 1971 and again in 1973, he obtained the biggest oil price 
increases ever granted to an Arab power, with additional upward 
adjustments to account for the fall in the dollar. The importance of 
his success was that it was quickly imitated by the Arab-dominated 
Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, opec had been 
formed as a defensive body to protect the oil price when it fell. 
Hitherto it had engaged in no collective action except to agree a 
royalty formula in 1965. In 1971, following Gadafy's move, the 
opec states of the Gulf bargained together as a group against the oil 
companies for the first time. 30 At Teheran on 14 February 1971, they 
secured a 40-cents-on-the-barrel price increase. This was the 
beginning of the energy price revolution. The new agreement was to 
hold for five years, 'a solemn promise', as Henry Kissinger put it, 
'that must hold a world record in the scale and speed of its 
violation'. 31 

The likelihood that the oil weapon would now be used more 
skilfully was much increased in July 1972 when Nasser's successor, 
General Anwar Sadat, threw off the Soviet alliance, expelled his 
Soviet advisers and technicians, and aligned Egypt with Saudi Arabia 
and the other oil states of the Gulf. Sadat was not a verbalizer like 
Nasser. In spirit he was not of the Bandung generation. He was a 



668 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

realist. He recognized that the Egypt-Israel antagonism was opposed 
to Egypt's historic tradition and detrimental to her current interests, 
especially economic. He wanted to end it. But to have the power to 
make peace he first needed the prestige of military victory. On 
Saturday 6 October 1973, on the festival of Yom Kippur or Day of 
Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, he launched a 
co-ordinated Egyptian— Syrian attack on Israel. The initial success was 
considerable. The Israeli 'Bar-Lev line' in Sinai was pierced. A large 
part of the Israeli air force was destroyed by Soviet ground-to-air 
missiles. Golda Meir, the Israeli Prime Minister, appealed in some 
panic to Washington. Some $2.2 billion of the latest American arms 
was airlifted to Israel. From 8 October the Israelis began counter- 
attacking. Before a cease-fire was signed on 24 October, Israel had 
recovered the lost territory, advanced to within range of Damascus, 
established a bridgehead on the western side of the Suez Canal, and 
surrounded a large part of the Egyptian army. 32 Egypt had demon- 
strated an unexpected military capacity, and that was enough for 
Sadat; Israel had shown she could survive initial disaster. 

The war brought out the ultimate military dependence of Israel on 
American will. It also drew attention to the damage inflicted on 
America's leadership of the West by the pursuit of the Watergate affair 
by the American media and the Congressional Democratic majority. 
When Israel counter-attacked successfully, Sadat appealed for Soviet 
support and Brezhnev sent a message to Nixon on 24 October 
warning that Soviet troops might be sent to fight the Israelis without 
further warning. Though Nixon had earlier ordered full logistical 
backing for the Israelis and now agreed to an alert of US forces 
throughout the world, the first on such a scale since the Cuban missile 
crisis of 1962, he was so cocooned in the Watergate tangle that he felt 
obliged to hand over control of the crisis to Kissinger, now the 
Secretary of State. It was Kissinger, not the President, who presided 
over the White House meeting which responded to the Brezhnev 
message; and he issued the orders for the alert. To the charge by some 
of the Watergate witch-hunters that the crisis had been engineered to 
divert attention from Nixon's difficulties, Kissinger scornfully replied 
(press conference, 25 October): 

We are attempting to conduct the foreign policy of the United States with 
regard for what we owe not just to the electorate but to future generations. 
And it is a symptom of what is happening to our country that it could even be 
suggested that the United States would alert its forces for domestic reasons. 33 

With the American President paralysed by his domestic enemies, 
there was no one to lead the West on behalf of the world's oil 
consumers when the Arab opec states responded to Israel's survival 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 669 

by employing the oil weapon with brutal violence. Already, on 16 
October, they politicized oil exports, cut oil production and (with 
non-Arab producers) raised the price 70 per cent. On 23 December 
they again raised the price, this time by 128 per cent. As a result, 
crude oil prices quadrupled in less than a year. The decision, as 
Kissinger put it, 'was one of the pivotal events in the history of this 
century'. 34 It transformed a general but gradual rise in prices into a 
price-revolution of a kind the world had never before experienced 
over so short a period. The worst hit were the poorest countries, 
most of which had acute debt-burdens and imported all their energy. 
In countries with per capita incomes around or below the $100 a 
year mark, where a billion people lived, and whose incomes had been 
rising slowly (about 2 per cent a year) in the 1960s decade, a 
downturn in growth was already occurring before the oil-price 
revolution hit them. For them it was a catastrophe. 35 They found 
themselves worse off at the end of the 1970s than they were when the 
decade opened, the first such reversal in modern times. At such low 
levels, such a direct fall in incomes meant malnutrition and related 
epidemics. The number of Africans and Asians who died in conse- 
quence of Arab oil policy in the decade after 1973 must be calculated 
in tens of millions. 

The world as a whole experienced a decline in wealth since the loss 
of output was worth twice the extra funds transferred to the 
oil-producing countries. For the industrialized countries, the result 
was a form of economic malady which Keynesianism had not 
envisaged: stagflation. From a 5.2 per cent rate of growth with 4.1 
per cent average price increases, the world moved in 1974-5 to nil or 
minus growth with 10-12 per cent average price increases a year. 
This was high inflation, and in many countries it accelerated into 
hyper-inflation. The price revolution, with the oil jump at its heart, 
spanned the years 1972-6. It was by far the most destructive 
economic event since 1945. It acted as a fierce brake on the 
energy-intensive leading sectors responsible for the prolonged expan- 
sion in the American, West European and Japanese economies, 
producing abrupt declines in output and unemployment on a scale 
unknown since the 1930s. 36 By the early 1980s, the number of 
unemployed in America and West Europe alone was 25 million. 

The disaster might have been still more serious but for the 
resiliency of the banking system. In November 1973, in the immedi- 
ate aftermath of the Middle East crisis, a big London fringe bank, the 
London and County, tottered. The Bank of England hastily launched 
a 'lifeboat', getting the major banks to provide $3 billions support 
for twenty-six other fringe banks. A bad moment occurred in the 
following June, when the German Herstatt Bank collapsed, owing 



670 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

huge sums to British and American banks, and with disturbing 
echoes of the fall of Credit Anstalt in 1931. But again the support 
system worked. At the end of 1974, the Comptroller of Currency in 
Washington was keeping under special observation some 150 US 
banks, including two of the biggest, which were known to be under 
strain. In London the property boom foundered, dragging down 
some glittering companies. The Financial Times index, 543 in March 
1972, fell to 146 at the beginning of 1975, with shares worth less, in 
real terms, than at the depths of the war in 1940. In America, New 
York city finances, long suspect, finally succumbed when the banks 
refused further loans. The richest city in the world appealed to the 
White House, but Gerald Ford refused to intervene, an event 
celebrated in a famous New York Daily News headline: 'Ford to 
City: Drop Dead'. 37 But by then the worst of the money crisis was 
over and all the banks and institutions that really mattered were still 
erect. 

Indeed the commercial banks, whose Eurodollar frenzy had contri- 
buted to the instability, now used similar methods to produce some 
kind of order out of the chaos. The problem was as follows. The oil 
price revolution meant that the opec countries took an extra $80 
billion a year out of the world economy. That was 10 per cent of all 
world exports. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait alone, with tiny popula- 
tions, received an extra $37 billion a year, enough over twenty-five 
years to buy all the major companies on all the world's stock 
exchanges. There was real terror that the Arabs would use the new 
'money weapon' as they used the oil weapon. In any case it was 
essential to get the cash back into the world's productive economy 
quickly. Washington, still paralysed by Watergate, could provide no 
leadership. Happily, the extra-governmental Eurodollar system, used 
to responding to pure market needs without bureaucratic help or 
hindrance, was waiting to be used. Eurodollars were renamed 
petrodollars. A new term, 'recycling,' came into use. The petrodoll- 
ars were quickly packaged into huge loans for the hard-hit advanced 
industrial countries and for the still more disturbed developing 
countries, like Indonesia, Zaire, Brazil, Turkey and even new compe- 
titors for the Arab oil producers, like Mexico. 

The Arabs had no wish to help the Third World, except through 
government loans with strings attached. But once they put their 
money into the world banking system, they lost sight of it. And they 
had nowhere else to put it. Like Croesus, they were baffled. They did 
not like what was happening. But not as yet having a banking system 
of their own, for Koranic reasons, there was nothing they could do. 
As a Congressional witness put it: 'All they have is an iou in a bank 
account which can be frozen at any time in the United States or in 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 671 

Germany or wherever it is.' 38 If a nation has more money than it can 
spend, it has to share the use, willingly or unwillingly. America did so 
willingly, in the years after 1945, in the form of Marshall Aid, Point 
Four Aid, and in the military containment of Soviet expansion. The 
Arabs had no such altruism, but they could not stop the banks 
lending their money. Walter Wriston of Citibank put the situation 
neatly: 

If Exxon pays Saudi Arabia $50 million, all that happens is that we debit 
Exxon and credit Saudi Arabia. The balance-sheet of Citibank remains the 
same. And if they say they don't like American banks, they'll put it in Credit 
Suisse, all we do is charge Saudi Arabia and credit Credit Suisse: our 
balance sheet remains the same. So when people run around waiting for the 
sky to fall there isn't any way that money can leave the system. It's a closed 
circuit. 39 

It would, of course, have been a different matter if the Arabs had 
possessed a sophisticated banking network, as they belatedly real- 
ized. By the time they had begun to build up their own international 
banks, in the early 1980s, the industrial nations had tapped alterna- 
tive sources of energy, including non-Arab oil, world oil supplies 
were in surplus, and the problem of petrodollars was unlikely to 
recur, at any rate in such an intense form. The point of maximum 
Arab power had passed. That point came in the years 1974—7, when 
the Arabs had half the world's liquidity. Thanks to the commercial 
banking system, the world's financial black market, the money 
vanished into the bottomless pit of the needs of the developing 
nations. By 1977, they owed the commercial banks $75 billion, more 
than half of it to American banks. Nearly all of this was Arab money. 
In global terms it was less efficient than the pre- 1973 pattern, which 
kept the industrial West expanding steadily. Indonesia borrowed 
over $6 billion, most of which was wasted, before defaulting. One 
official put $80 million into his own accounts. 40 Zaire, which had 
borrowed $3 billion by 1979, was an equally bad case of folly and 
corruption. 41 The biggest borrowers, Brazil and Mexico, made on 
the whole productive use of what they received. And much of the 
money ended up where it started, in the industrial economies. But 
the huge total of indebtedness led to recurrent fears of a world 
banking crisis. Hence the Seventies were a period of deepening 
dismay for the West. The comforting facts of recycling took some 
time to make themselves felt. In the meantime the recession had a 
political as well as an economic impact. As we have noted, the Great 
Depression of the Thirties demoralized the democracies, producing a 
lack of will to deal with aggression, or of energy to devise collective 
security against the growth of illegitimate power and the practice of 



672 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

violence. This time, fortunately, nato and other regional pacts 
already existed. They continued to function after a fashion. But 
leadership was lacking to devise responses to new threats or varia- 
tions on old ones. The relative decline in American power and will 
was greatly accelerated by the price revolution and the recession. The 
dollar lost half its value in the later 1970s. The 'American Century' 
seemed to have ended only twenty-five years after it began. From 
virtual self-sufficiency, America had moved into world-wide depen- 
dence. It imported half its oil, from Canada, Venezuela, Mexico, 
Nigeria and Indonesia as well as the Arab states, and most of its 
chrome, bauxite, manganese, nickel, tin and zinc, from all over the 
Western Hemisphere and from Malaysia, Zambia, Australia, Zaire 
and South Africa. 42 While reliance on the sea-lanes had grown, the 
ability to keep them open had declined. Secretary of Defense Donald 
Rumsfeld, in his budget report for 1977, noted that the 'current [US] 
fleet can control the North Atlantic sea-lanes to Europe' but only 
after 'serious losses' to shipping. The 'ability to operate in the eastern 
Mediterranean would be, at best, uncertain'. The Pacific fleet could 
'hold open the sea-lanes to Hawaii and Alaska' but 'would have 
difficulty in protecting our lines of communication into the Western 
Pacific'. In a global war America, he warned, would be hard put to 
protect allies like Japan or Israel, or reinforce nato. 43 This was a 
radical change from the 1950s or even the early 1960s. And waning 
physical power was further undermined by the collapse of leader- 
ship. The 1970s was the nadir of the American presidency. After the 
spring of 1973, the Nixon presidency was rendered totally ineffec- 
tual by the Watergate witch-hunt. His successor, Gerald Ford, had 
only two years in office, lacking the mandate of election. He spent 
the first desperately disentangling the Administration from Water- 
gate, the second in a bid to put together a coalition to get himself 
elected. Behind the orderly facade of the Ford White House there 
were inconclusive battles for power among rival subordinates, which 
Ford lacked the authority and the savagery to end. As a colleague put 
it, 'Good old Gerry was too damned good for his own good.' 44 
Ford's views, on the rare occasions when they emerged, usually 
turned out to be sensible. But he lacked gravitas. In public, he 
developed an unfortunate tendency to fall over. 45 

His successor was far worse. Despite Watergate and all his 
disabilities, Ford nearly got himself elected in 1976 and would 
certainly have done so if he had been allowed to pick his Vice- 
President, Nelson Rockefeller, as running-mate. By this date, as a 
result of media harassment, the presidency was regarded as an 
almost impossible assignment. The competition was meagre and the 
Democratic nomination went to a lacklustre Georgian, Jimmy Car- 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 673 

ter, who was sold as a TV package by a clever Atlanta advertising 
executive, Gerald Rafshoon. 46 He won the presidency by a tiny 
margin against the weakest incumbent in history and became a still 
weaker one. Carter carried on the Nixon-Kissinger policy of detente 
with Soviet Russia long after events had rendered obsolete whatever 
validity it once possessed and its authors had themselves lost faith in 
it. 47 By the mid-Seventies, the first Strategic Arms Limitation 
agreement (known as salt i), signed in May 1972, was having an 
unforeseen impact on American defence policy. It created an arms- 
control lobby within the Washington bureaucracy, especially in the 
State Department, which secured the right to examine new weapons 
programmes at their research and development stage, and seek to 
veto them if they posed special problems of control which would 
upset the salt i arrangements. 48 Carter's policies promoted this 
disturbing development. 

Even more damaging was Carter's ill-considered 'human rights' 
policy, based upon an agreement signed in Helsinki, under which the 
signatories undertook to seek to end violations of human rights 
throughout the world. The idea was to force Soviet Russia to 
liberalize its internal policy. The effect was quite different. Behind 
the Iron Curtain, the Helsinki Accords were ignored and voluntary 
groups set up to monitor observance were arrested. In the West, 
America found itself campaigning against some of its oldest allies. 
Again, a human rights lobby grew up within the Administration, 
including an entire bureau of the State Department, which worked 
actively against American interests. In September 1977 Brazil reacted 
to State Department criticisms by cancelling all its four remaining 
defence agreements with the JJS, two of which went back to 1942. 
Argentina was similarly estranged. The State Department played a 
significant role in the overthrow of the Somoza regime in Nicaragua. 
An Assistant Secretary, Viron Vaky, announced on behalf of the US 
government: 'No negotiation, mediation or compromise can be 
achieved any longer with a Somoza government. The solution can 
only begin with a sharp break from the past.' 49 The 'sharp break' 
took the form, in 1979, of the replacement of Somoza, a faithful if 
distasteful ally of the West, by a Marxist regime whose attitude to 
human rights was equally contemptuous and which immediately 
campaigned against American allies in Guatemala, El Salvador and 
elsewhere in Central America. Again, in 1978, the State Depart- 
ment's Bureau of Human Rights actively undermined the Shah's 
regime in Iran, playing a significant part in its destruction in 1979 
and replacement by a violently anti-Western terrorist regime. 50 
American human rights policy, however worthwhile in theory, was 
naive in practice. 



674 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

Policy under Carter was so confused, however, as to lack salient 
characteristics, other than a propensity to damage friends and allies. 
The internal battles under Ford were as nothing to the triangular tug 
of war under Carter between his Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, his 
Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and his Georgian assistant, 
Hamilton Jordan, much of which was conducted in public - leaving 
aside the freelance activities of Carter's boozy brother, Billy, who 
acted as a paid lobbyist for the anti-American Libyan government. 
The only point on which Carter's men seemed agreed was America's 
inability to control events. Cyrus Vance thought that to 'oppose 
Soviet or Cuban involvement in Africa would be futile'. 'The fact is', 
he added, 'that we can no more stop change than Canute could still 
the waters.' Brzezinski insisted 'the world is changing under the 
influences of forces no government can control'. Carter himself said 
America's power to influence events was 'very limited'. Feeling itself 
impotent, the Administration took refuge in cloudy metaphor, for 
which Brzezinski had a talent. Vietnam had been 'the Waterloo of 
the wasp elite': no such intervention could ever again be undertaken 
by America. 'There are many different axes of conflict in the world,' 
he noted; 'the more they intersect, the more dangerous they become.' 
West Asia was 'the arc of crisis'. But: 'the need is not for acrobatics 
but for architecture.' 51 No foreign policy architecture in fact ap- 
peared, however. When the Iranian terrorist government seized the 
American Embassy staff as hostages, acrobatics were eventually 
resorted to, ending in a charred heap of burnt-out American helicop- 
ters in the desert in May 1980, perhaps the lowest point of America's 
fortunes in this century. 

America's decline in the Seventies seemed even more precipitous in 
contrast with the apparent solidity and self-confidence of the Soviet 
regime. In 1971 Soviet Russia passed America in numbers of 
strategic land-based and submarine-launched nuclear missiles. The 
same year Andrei Gromyko boasted that, all over the world, 'No 
question of any significance . . . can now be decided without the 
Soviet Union or in opposition to it.' 52 He himself was a symbol both 
of internal stability and the external consistency of Soviet policy, 
since he had been Deputy Foreign Minister as long ago as 1946 and, 
since 1957, Foreign Minister, a post he was to hold well into the 
Eighties. 

Not that the internal history of post-Stalin Russia was uneventful. 
Beria, Stalin's last secret police boss, did not long survive his master: 
he knew too much about everybody at the top. His colleagues drew 
up an indictment which, according to Stalin's daughter Svetlana, 
took three hours to read, and half of which was devoted to his sexual 
antics - epitomized by the poet Yevtushenko in his memoirs: 'I saw 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 675 

the vulture face of Beria, half hidden by a muffler, glued to the 
window of his limousine as he drove slowly by the kerb hunting 
down a woman for the night.' 53 Beria was arrested on 26 June 1953 
and officially shot in December, after trial. But Khrushchev, the 
Party Secretary, told an Italian Communist in 1956 that he was in 
fact murdered at the time of his arrest: while reaching for a gun, he 
was seized by Malenkov, Mikoyan, Marshal Konev and Marshal 
Moshkalenko and strangled (another Khrushchev version had him 
shot). 54 In 1955 Khrushchev ousted Malenkov as leader of the 
post-Stalin oligarchy. Two years later he confirmed his power by 
driving from office the 'Anti-Party Group' of such old Stalinists as 
Molotov and Kaganovich, who had made common cause with 
Malenkov and his successor as premier, Bulganin. According to 
Khrushchev's own account, they had a majority against him on the 
Presidium, but with the help of Marshal Zhukov he airlifted to 
Moscow his allies on the Central Committee and had the decision 
reversed. Four months later he turned on Zhukov, whom he accused 
of harbouring 'Bonapartist aspirations' and 'violating Leninist 
norms'. Finally in 1958 he dismissed Bulganin and took over his job. 
Thereafter he was paramount for six years. 

There was, however, no 'de-Stalinization'. The term was never 
used inside Soviet Russia. All that the post-Stalin changes and 
Khrushchev's 'Secret Session' speech at the twentieth Party Congress 
in 1956 involved was the end of mass-terrorism against party 
members, that is those inside the ruling system. 55 The totalitarian 
structure of the Leninist state, giving an absolute monopoly of power 
to the party - meaning in practice the tiny elite which controlled it - 
remained in its entirety, sustained as before by the secret police and 
the army, itself controlled by an internal structure of party officers. 
The autocratic plinth endured; and at any moment a ruthless man 
could build a superstructure of mass terror on it. Khrushchev 
behaved in many ways like an autocrat, and had to be removed like 
one. His colleagues disliked his adventurism. They came to see him 
as a disturbing influence. He tried to introduce more democracy 
within the party, a non-Leninist notion. His idea of 'the state of the 
whole people', implying the end of party power-monopoly, was 
throughly anti-Leninist. In some ways Khrushchev, unlike Lenin, 
was a Marxist: that is, he believed Communism to be attainable. At 
the twenty-second Party Congress in 1961 he laid down as his 
programme the outstripping of American living-standards in the 
1960s, the beginning of Communism (rent-free housing, free public 
transport, etc) in the 1970s, and its completion in the 1980s. He 
might be described as yet another optimist who succumbed to the 
illusions of the Sixties. His Presidium critics thought that such 



676 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

promises, which could not conceivably be fulfilled, would merely 
produce disappointment and anger, as had his Cuban missile venture 
in 1962 and his 'virgin lands' scheme of 1954 to cultivate 100 million 
untilled acres in Soviet Central Asia and Siberia, which in June 1960 
produced the biggest dust-storms in history. While he was on holiday 
in the Crimea in October 1964, the Presidium voted him out of office 
and had their decision confirmed by the Central Committee the next 
day. The plot was designed by the ultra-Leninist chief theoretician of 
the party, Michael Suslov, and executed by the head of the kgb, 
Alexander Shelepin, who was waiting at the airport for Khrushchev 
when he was flown back to Moscow under heavy police guard. 56 The 
object and manner of the coup confirmed the organic connection 
between 'Leninist norms' and secret policemanship. 

Suslov, who preferred to remain behind the scenes, assisted the new 
First Secretary, Leonid Brezhnev, in his ascent to paramountcy. 
Brezhnev was designated Secretary-General in 1966, Head of State 
and Chairman of the Presidium in 1977, and Chairman of the Council 
of Defence, as well as being made Marshal of the Soviet Union in 1 976 
and receiving the Lenin Prize for Peace (1972) and Literature (1979). 
This glittering concentration of offices and honours was the reward 
conferred by Brezhnev's elderly peers in the leadership of the party for 
bringing to the direction of Soviet affairs a new stability, reliability 
and predictability, based upon an absolute determination to concen- 
trate power in the Communist elite. 57 Brezhnev summed up this 
philosophy of government in the code-phrase 'trust in cadres' - that is, 
a consolidation and perpetuation of a privileged ruling class, a 
division of the country into rulers and ruled. There must be no 
argument about where the line was drawn, no question of surrender- 
ing the smallest iota of power to a wider franchise than the party 
leadership. Positions of power, once acquired, were never to be 
relinquished, and the principle applied externally as well as internally. 
As he himself put it to the liberal Czech Communist Dubcek in 1968, 
'Don't talk to me about "Socialism". What we have, we hold.' 58 

Brezhnev's Russia was a fulfilled rather than an expectant society. It 
offered more of the same rather than qualitative change. He admitted 
at the twenty-sixth Party Congress in February 1981 that the 1961 
targets were obsolete: there would be no more specific 'Communist' 
goals. He restored Stalinist priority to armaments, which remained the 
most favoured and by far the most flourishing sector of the economy; 
in the 1960s and 1970s military spending grew in real terms about 3 
per cent a year, meaning that, between the fall of Khrushchev and the 
mid-1970s, Russia spent on arms, in relation to resources, about twice 
the rate of America. 59 The Soviet economy as a whole grew more 
slowly. By 1978, according to one calculation, gnp was $1,253.6 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 677 

billion, against $2,107.6 billion for the USA, giving a per capita 
income of $4,800 for Russia, $9,650 for the USA. 60 The difficulty 
about such figures is that income per head means little in a society 
overwhelmingly dominated by the public sector; and in any case they 
are based on statistics compiled by the Soviet government for which 
no independent check is available. As Khrushchev characteristically 
observed of the officials who run the Soviet Bureau of Statistics, 
'They're the sort who can melt shit into bullets.' 61 During the 1960s 
and 1970s Brezhnev made available for ordinary consumers consid- 
erable quantities of low-quality goods. One estimate was that, by the 
end of the 1970s, the living standard of the Soviet worker was 
approximately that of the American worker at the beginning of the 
1920s. 62 But this comparison was subject to three important qualifi- 
cations. In Soviet Russia urban housing did not keep pace with the 
movement to the cities, which had only 19 per cent of the population 
in 1926 and about 62 per cent fifty years later. As a result, the 
Russians had the poorest living accommodation of any industrialized 
nation, with per capita floor-space only about 72 square feet (1,200 
in America). Secondly, only one Russian in forty-six owned a car 
(though road deaths were higher than in the USA), Thirdly, the food 
situation deteriorated under Brezhnev, particularly in the late 1970s 
and early 1980s. 63 

Yet Russia was prosperous enough for Brezhnev's purposes. He 
wanted no 'revolution of rising expectations'. The regime had no 
other purpose than to perpetuate itself. As Alexander Herzen said of 
the Tsarist regime: 'It wields power in order to wield power.' But the 
comparison does not do justice to the Tsars, who were often 
motivated by a genuine desire to raise up their people. In exile in 
America, Alexander Solzhenitsyn repeatedly and angrily repudiated 
the notion that the Soviet regime was in any sense whatever a 
continuation of the Tsarist autocracy. 64 Politically and morally the 
Soviet regime was a totalitarian society of an altogether different 
kind: more a self-perpetuating conspiracy than a legitimate form of 
government. Though the Chicago-style gangsterism of Stalin had been 
replaced by the low-key Mafia of Brezhnev and his associates, the 
essential criminality remained. The regime rested on a basis not of 
law but of force. In economic terms it was, perhaps, best defined by 
the pseudonymous Fedor Zniakov in his samizdat 'Memorandum' 
circulated in May 1966, as 'super-monopoly capitalism', with all 
significant ownership concentrated in a single centre. 65 Brezhnev's 
political problem was to ensure that the profits of this super- 
monopoly were distributed among the ruling class. This could be 
considered as three-tiered. Of Russia's 260 millions, about 15 
million belonged to the party in 1976. These constituted not the 



678 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

ruling class itself but potential members of it. By the exercise of 
industry and subservience a fraction of them graduated to actual 
membership of the class. Others were eliminated at the rate of 
300,000 a year by the refusal of authority to renew their party cards. 
The true ruling class consisted of 500,000 full-time party and senior 
government officials (plus their families). They were rewarded by 
administrative power, made possible by the enormous size of the 
state machine and the existence of a vast Soviet empire with 
high-sounding jobs throughout the world - 'enough pasture for all 
the sheep', as Sir Robert Walpole used to put it - and by economic 
privileges based upon access to a closed distributive system, includ- 
ing food and other consumer goods shops, housing, foreign travel, 
health-care, resorts and higher education. The Soviet establishment 
thus became a true ruling class, in the old-fashioned feudal (and 
Marxist) sense, in that it was distinguished from the rest of society 
not by comparative wealth alone but by superior, clearly distin- 
guished legal and administrative rights. Under Lenin and Stalin, and 
still more under Brezhnev, Soviet society became stratified through- 
out. At the science settlement at Norosibrisk in the 1970s, for 
instance, housing was allocated as follows. A full Academy member 
had a villa; a Corresponding member half a villa; a Senior Research 
Officer an apartment with a three-metre ceiling height; a Junior 
Research Officer an apartment with 2.25 metre ceiling height and 
only a communal bathroom. 66 The real division, however, came 
between the top half-million and the rest: they were the true elite, 
the 'them' as opposed to the 'us' of the Russian masses. Of this ruling 
class, 426 exercised actual political power as members of the Central 
Committee. About 200 held ministerial rank. What they demanded 
of Brezhnev, and what he gave them, were extensive privileges, safety 
of life and property, and security of employment. In 1976, for 
instance, 83.4 per cent of the cc were re-elected, a typical propor- 
tion. By the end of the 1970s, most of the top 200 were over 
sixty-five, many in their mid-seventies. Because of its isolation from 
the rest of society, its special access to the highest quality of higher 
education, and its tendency to intermarriage, the new ruling class 
was already becoming hereditary, Brezhnev's own family being a 
case in point. 

Under Stalin, as in Germany under Hitler, opposition was conspi- 
ratorial or non-existent. A totalitarian regime does not normally 
become internally vulnerable until it attempts to liberalize itself. 
There were some tentative moves in this direction under Khrushchev. 
Part of the Gulag structure was dismantled, though its core re- 
mained. On 25 December 1958 new 'Fundamental Principles of 
Criminal Law and Procedure' were enacted, giving theoretical rights 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 679 

to the accused and provoking the first legal debate ever held in the 
Soviet press. But this reform from above was bound to produce 
instability, and so reversal, since Soviet Russia was not a society 
under the rule of law. Marxism had never produced a philosophy of 
law. The only true Soviet legal philosopher, Evgeny Pashukanis, 
argued that in the socialist society Law would be replaced by Plan. 67 
This was logical, since the notion of an independent legal process 
was incompatible with the notion of an inevitable historical process 
interpreted by a ruling Marxist elite. Pashukanis's own case proved 
it: law was replaced by plan — Stalin's — and he was murdered in the 
1930s. The 1958 enactment could not be applied in practice because 
it would have given the courts the beginnings of an independent 
status and so allowed them to erode the monopoly of power enjoyed 
by the party. Even under Khrushchev no Soviet court ever returned a 
verdict of 'not guilty' in a political case; nor did a Soviet appeal court 
ever overturn a guilty verdict in a political case — thus preserving an 
unbroken record of entire subservience to the ruling party from 
Lenin's first year of power until the present. 68 

More important was Khrushchev's relaxation of censorship. The 
Presidium refused his request to change the system, so he authorized 
some publications on his own responsibility. 69 Heterodox material 
appeared in the press and in book form. In 1962 Alexander 
Solzhenitsyn was able to publish One Day in the Life of Ivan 
Denisovich, perhaps the most influential book to circulate freely in 
Russia since the Revolution. But the same year there were mass 
protests at Novocherkassk against food price increases. On 2 June 
troops fired on the mob, killing many. Riots were and are a recurrent 
feature of Soviet society, serving as in feudal times the role of strikes 
and politics, to draw attention to grievances. The June riot was on an 
unusually large scale and may have played a part in Khrushchev's 
downfall two years later. Even before he disappeared, however, he 
refused to allow publication of any more books about the camps. 
According to Roy Medvedev, our most valuable informant, the 
dissent movement dated from 1965, the year after Khrushchev's fall, 
and there was something approaching mass protest in 1966—7, when 
the samizdat-type of underground publication was at its peak. 70 The 
repression began at the same time, with the trial of two leading 
dissenters, Sinyavsky and Daniel, in February 1966. This ended any 
pretence of judicial reform or liberalization generally. Shortly after it 
two high-ranking secret police officers were appointed judges of the 
Soviet Supreme Court. The worst phase of the repression was 
1968-70, beginning with the 'trial of the four' (Galanskov, Ginz- 
burg, Dobrovolsky and Lashkova) in January 1968. This, one of the 
best-documented of Soviet trials, was a predetermined political farce, 



680 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

which showed that the Soviet system remained, in essentials, a 
totalitarian tyranny, no more capable of self-reform than of the 
squaring of the circle. 71 

After 1970, there was some relaxation of the new terror. Those in 
the West who, as part of the detente policy, urged acceptance of the 
Soviet demand for the Helsinki Conference on 'European Security 
and Co-operation' (July 1973 - July 1975), argued that the Soviet 
leaders could be forced to respect human rights as part of the 
agreement. This became the official policy of the Ford and Carter 
administrations. Under Principle Seven of the Helsinki Accords, the 
Soviet government undertook to 'respect human rights and fun- 
damental freedoms'. But this was merely another treaty to be broken. 
In fact the Helsinki process led directly to a resumption of wide- 
spread repression, not only in Soviet Russia but elsewhere behind the 
Iron Curtain. For it encouraged dissenters to come out into the open. 
They formed monitoring groups To Promote Observance of the 
Helsinki Accords' in Moscow, the Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia and 
Lithuania. Similar movements sprang up in Czechoslovakia, East 
Germany, Poland and other satellites. Information about violations 
of the Accords was passed to Western journalists. 

A wave of violent persecution followed, beginning in 1975 and 
reaching a climax in the years after 1977. Leaders of the monitoring 
groups were the chief victims. In some cases the kgb followed a new 
policy of issuing dissenters with exit visas and driving them out of 
their own country. But many others got long prison sentences with 
forced labour. Thus the Helsinki Accords radically increased the 
volume and ferocity of human rights violations in Soviet Russia. The 
farce culminated in the follow-up meeting in Belgrade, 1977-8, 
when the Soviet delegation produced elaborate documentation about 
persecution of Catholics in Ulster and blacks in America but flatly 
refused to discuss Soviet practice. Immediately after the meeting 
broke up, two members of the Ukrainian monitoring group got seven 
years' hard labour each, the founder of the Moscow group, already 
held fifteen months in custody without trial, was sentenced to seven 
years in a 'strict' camp, and the most famous of Soviet dissidents, 
Andrei Sakharov, was accused of 'hooliganism', followed by house 
arrest and internal exile. 72 The trials of the Georgian monitoring 
group evoked sinister echoes of the Stalin period, with fabricated 
charges of spying for Western intelligence agencies, and suggestions 
of torture and forced confessions. 73 

In one respect Soviet policy towards opposition elements was 
consistent, from the first phase of Lenin's rule to the early 1980s: 
dissent has always been treated as a mental disease, and dissenters 
have always been liable to suffer 'treatment' in special Soviet 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 681 

psychiatric hospitals. The first known case was in 1919, when Lenin 
had Maria Spiridonova, a leader of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, 
sentenced by the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal to internment in a 
sanatorium. 74 The large-scale, systematic use of psychiatric punish- 
ment began in the late 1930s, when the nkvd built a special 400-bed 
penal establishment in the grounds of the regular mental hospital in 
Kazan. By the late 1940s, the Serbsky Institute, the main Soviet 
centre for teaching and research in criminal psychiatry, had a special 
department for 'political' work. 75 By the early 1950s, at least three 
establishments 'treated' cases of political prisoners, since we know of 
one man, Ilya Yarkov, who suffered in all of them. Psychiatric 
punishment was given chiefly to offenders under the catch-all Article 
58 of the criminal code, dealing with 'anti-Soviet acts': Yarkov's 
fellow-inmates included Christians, surviving Trotskyists, opponents 
of Lysenko, heterodox writers, painters and musicians, Latvians, 
Poles and other nationalists. 76 The system, far from being aban- 
doned, greatly expanded under Khrushchev, who was anxious to 
persuade the world that Soviet Russia no longer imprisoned political 
offenders, merely the unbalanced, and was quoted by Pravda (1959) 
as saying: 'A crime is a deviation from the generally recognized 
standards of behaviour, frequently caused by mental disorder .... 
To those who might start calling for opposition to Communism . . . 
clearly the mental state of such people is not normal.' 77 

The West first became aware of Soviet penal psychiatry in 1965 
with the publication of Valery Tarsis's Ward 7, and thereafter efforts 
were made within the psychiatric profession to obtain documenta- 
tion of specific cases and to raise the issue at meetings of the World 
Psychiatric Association. 78 These efforts were partly frustrated by the 
anxiety of some (chiefly American) psychiatrists to preserve Iron 
Curtain participation in the body at any cost, partly by the skill with 
which the Soviet psychiatric establishment covered its tracks and, in 
1973, arranged a Potemkin-type visit to the Serbsky. 79 Nevertheless 
during the period 1965-75 details of 210 fully authenticated cases 
were obtained. 80 In addition to the first psychiatric punishment 
prison in Kazan, at least thirteen other Special Psychiatric Hospitals 
were opened in the 1960s and 1970s. No Westerner, whether 
psychiatrist or not, was allowed to visit an sph. But it was 
established they were under the control of the Ministry of the 
Interior (mvd) not the Ministry of Health, were headed by military 
officers and run administratively like prisons. Reports from former 
prisoners showed the sphs bore a marked resemblance to the 
experimental prison-clinics run by ss doctors as part of Himmlers 
race-programme, in both the cruelties practised and the type of 
doctor in charge. The most common torture, the wet canvas 'roll-up' 



682 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

method, appears to have been invented by a Dr Elizaveta Lavrit- 
skaya, one of the most hardened of the creatures described by 
Yarkov 81 Details of tortures, beatings and the punitive use of drugs 
were provided at US Senate hearings in 1972. 82 The worst offenders 
were identified as Professor Andrei Snezhnevsky, Director of the 
Institute of Psychiatry at the Academy of Medical Sciences, who led 
the campaign to diagnose dissent as a form of schizophrenia; 
Professor Ruben Nadzharov, his deputy; Dr Georgy Morozov, head 
of the Serbsky; and Professor Daniel Lunts, regarded by the dissen- 
ters as the worst of the practitioners of psycho-terror. As with the ss, 
some of the doctors held military rank: Lunts was variously identi- 
fied as a kgb colonel or a major-general in the mvd. These men were 
allowed to travel abroad to represent Soviet psychiatry, had salaries 
three times as large as other psychiatrists, and enjoyed access to the 
luxuries and privileges of the higher echelons of the Soviet ruling 
class. 83 

Psychiatric punishment expanded greatly under Brezhnev, though 
following the campaign of exposure in the West it was confined 
largely to the humble worker-protester unlikely to attract outside 
attention. For the prominent, there were many increasingly severe 
grades of oppression, none of which need even involve a trial. 
Commenting on the exile of Sakharov to Gorky, Medvedev noted: 
'From Gorky Sakharov could be sent to Irkutsk in Siberia, to 
Tomsk, or to Chita. Worse every time .... The important thing is 
that the victim must always have something to lose, therefore 
something to be afraid of.' 84 At the end of March 1977, Brezhnev 
made it brutally clear that a return to liberalization was out of the 
question: 

In our country it is not forbidden 'to think differently' from the 
majority .... It is quite another matter if a few individuals who have . . . 
actively come out against the socialist system, embark on the road of 
anti-Soviet activity, violate laws and, finding no support inside their own 
country, turn for support abroad, to imperialist subversive centres .... Our 
people demand that such . . . activists be treated as opponents of socialism, 
as persons acting against their own motherland, as accomplices if not actual 
agents of imperialism .... We have taken and will continue to take against 
them measures envisaged by our law. 85 

The identification of political criticism with treason, indeed with 
active treachery, was of course the basis of the Lenin-Stalin terror. 
Brezhnev made it clear it could be resumed at any moment. Provision 
for it was made in the new version of the constitution, ratified by the 
Supreme Soviet on 7 October 1977. Article 6 affirmed the total 
monopoly of political power and state activity of the Communist 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 683 

Party. Article 62 read: 'Citizens of the USSR are obliged to safeguard 
the interests of the Soviet states, and to enhance its power and 
prestige.' The first of these contradicted Article 2, which said all 
power belonged to the people. The second contradicted Article 49, 
which gave the citizen the right to criticize state bodies. Articles 6 
and 62 were thus the totalitarian heart of the constitution, giving the 
ruling class all the authority it needed to subject internal opponents 
to whatever degree of terror was thought necessary. Dissent conti- 
nued even under the Brezhnev repression. In 1977-80, for instance, 
twenty-four samizdat publications appeared regularly. The number 
of individual samizdat items circulating passed the 100,000-mark in 
1980. 86 But any kind of organized political activity, or wide diffu- 
sion of heterodox views, became totally impossible. During the 
1970s, in short, while the legitimate authority of American govern- 
ment was being recklessly eroded, the autocratic power of Soviet 
government was being systematically reinforced. The process 
reached a logical conclusion after the death of Brezhnev in 1982, 
when Yuri Andropov, who had been head of the kgb for fifteen 
years, during which he had institutionalized psychiatric punishment 
of dissidents, became the Soviet ruler. 

Operating from a base of political stability, Soviet global power 
expanded steadily during the Seventies. The most striking and visible 
sign of this expansion was the spectacular growth of the Soviet navy. 
In many ways it was comparable to the German naval programme of 
the 1890s and 1900s: it was not justified by any need to protect 
traditional lines of supply and communications but was deliberately 
aimed to change the existing balance of maritime power. 87 Like the 
British navy in the nineteenth century, American sea-air power was 
the great stabilizing fact in the post-war world. In 1945 America had 
5,718 ships in active service, including ninety-eight aircraft carriers, 
twenty-three battleships, seventy-two cruisers and over 700 destroy- 
ers and escorts. As late as June 1968, the USA had 976 ships in 
commission. 88 But in the 1970s the American fleet shrank rapidly, to 
thirteen carriers and their escorts. Meanwhile the Soviet navy 
expanded. At the end of 1951 it was still possible for Admiral 
Carney, commander of nato forces in Southern Europe, to dismiss 
Soviet naval power in the Mediterranean: 'He said it was possible 
there were a few "maverick" Soviet submarines in the Mediterranean 
and they might be able to push in some others in preparation for a 
war. But they couldn't support them long.' 89 The big change came 
after 1962, when the Cuban missile crisis persuaded the Soviet 
leadership that, if they wished to expand Communism outside the 
Eurasian land-mass, they would have to build a big surface navy. 

The new strategy was the work of Admiral Gorshkov, whose 



684 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

writings constituted a body of doctrine comparable to Admiral 
Mahan's, and whose advocacy of a huge submarine fleet plus a 
global surface force became established policy in the early 1960s. 90 
In the fourteen-year period following the missile crisis, Soviet Russia 
built a total of 1,323 ships of all classes (compared to 302 Ameri- 
can), including 120 major surface combat ships, eighty-three am- 
phibious and fifty-three auxiliaries. By the same date (1976), Gorsh- 
kov had accumulated a fleet of 188 nuclear submarines, forty-six of 
them carrying strategic missiles. 91 In the late 1970s, the first genuine 
Soviet carriers appeared. The impact of the new Soviet navy on 
geopolitics became undeniable in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, when a 
large Soviet naval presence in the Eastern Mediterranean was 
established on a permanent basis. By 1973, during the Yom Kippur 
war, the position of the American fleet in this theatre was described 
by one of its commanders as 'very uncomfortable' for the first time 
since the destruction of Japanese naval power. 92 By this point the 
Soviet navy, already predominant in the North-East Atlantic and 
North-West Pacific, was ready to move into the South Atlantic and 
the Indian Ocean. 

Naval power was one element in the Soviet descent on black Africa 
which was a major feature of the later 1970s. The other was the use 
of Cuba as a satellite-mercenary. In the 1960s Soviet Russia bought 
Cuban allegiance comparatively cheaply: less than half a billion 
dollars a year. In return it got verbal support: Castro loudly defended 
the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. By the early 1970s 
the Cuban economy was degenerating fast and in 1972 there was an 
agonizing reappraisal of Soviet— Cuban relations. The Cuban debt to 
Russia now stood at nearly $4 billion, and Brezhnev saw no 
alternative but to defer all interest and principal payments to 1986 
and in the meantime bail Cuba out. 93 The cost to Russia rose first to 
$8 million, then $10 million and (by the early 1980s) $12 million a 
day: nearly $4.5 billion a year. In return, however, Brezhnev 
acquired a valuable instrument for the penetration of sub-Saharan 
Africa. Soviet Russia had of course been active in Arab Africa since 
the Nasser deal in 1955. But Soviet military and economic missions 
had often made themselves unpopular; and, being white, were easily 
accused of 'imperialism'. As one of the Arab premiers, Mahgoub of 
the Sudan, put it, Arab states got 'obsolete machinery' from Soviet 
Russia in return for primary products, 'a form of barter'; and the 
Soviet bloc 'often resold the raw materials obtained from us to the 
capitalist West' at below-market prices, with 'disastrous effects on 
our countries producing the raw materials'. 94 One of the many 
advantages of using Cuban surrogates was that, by an inexplicable 
paradox, Cuba was a member of the 'non-aligned bloc', though in 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 685 

fact the most vociferously faithful of the Soviet client-states. Cuban 
soldiers, being non-white (in many cases black), were not easily 
presented as imperialists. Castro had already earned his keep by 
defending Soviet Russia from the charge of imperialism at the 1973 
Algiers Conference of the non-aligned. Where, he asked, were Russia's 
'monopoly corporations'? Where its 'participation in the multina- 
tional companies'? 'What factories, what mines, what oilfields does it 
own in the underdeveloped world? What worker is exploited in any 
country of Asia, Africa or Latin America by Soviet capital?' 95 Now he 
was asked to go further and provide non-imperialist invasion forces. 
In December 1975, under Soviet naval escort, the first Cuban troops 
landed, in Angola. In 1976 they moved into Abyssinia, now in the 
Soviet camp, and into Central and East Africa. As far back as 1963, 
the old colony of French Congo proclaimed itself the People's 
Republic of the Congo, the first Marxist-Leninist state in Africa. It did 
not always behave like one. European political categories did not 
always translate into African realities. 96 But by the end of the 1970s 
there were ten such African states, providing Soviet Russia, in varying 
degrees, with diplomatic and propaganda support, economic advan- 
tages and military bases. And in 1979, in Nicaragua, Cuba acquired 
the first satellite of its own, in Central America. 

The extension of the Cold War, during the Seventies, to virtually 
every part of the globe, gave the decade the air of chronic insecurity so 
characteristic of the Thirties - the same syndrome of unemployment, 
economic decay, armaments and aggression. Soviet policy was by no 
means the only factor. America was in part responsible for the drift to 
violence. To offset the drop in arms purchases with the end of the 
Vietnam war, American industry moved into international arms sales 
on an unprecedented scale. In 1970 America sold $952 millions worth 
of arms abroad. The figure had jumped to over $10 billion by 1977-8. 
But others were in the race. In the 1960s and 1970s, French arms sales 
multiplied over thirty times. Soviet arms-exports increased even faster 
than America's. In 1979-81 America ceased to be the leading 
arms-exporter, falling into third place behind Soviet Russia and 
France (with Britain a poor fourth). By the early 1980s, international 
arms sales were approaching an annual value of about $70 billion, 
nearly all of them negotiated at a state-to-state level. One Soviet tank 
factory alone covered twenty square miles and exported to thirty 
countries, most of them poor. The old free enterprise Merchants of 
Death looked innocent by comparison with modern states, competing 
to sell destruction by the megaton. 

It is true that none of the great powers sold nuclear weapons. But 
they failed to prevent their proliferation. In the 1950s, well-meaning 
scientists spread the notion that plutonium for 'peace' reactors was 



686 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

not normally suitable for bombs. On this quite fallacious assump- 
tion, America launched 'operation candour' in December 1953 with 
the 'Atoms for Peace' programme. It released over 11,000 classified 
papers, including details of the Purex method of producing the pure 
plutonium vital for big explosions. 97 Some of the details of the 
assistance programmes were sloppily drafted, so that when a clear 
breach took place - for instance when India exploded a bomb in 
1974 — American officials could pretend that it had not. The 
Non-Proliferation Treaty negotiated by America, Russia and Britain 
in July 1968, quickly ratified by forty other powers, really made little 
difference since even countries which signed it could, under its rules, 
get very close to a nuclear capability and attain it rapidly after the 
three-month notice of withdrawal under Article Eleven. 

In fact nuclear powers did not multiply as fast as pessimists 
predicted. In 1960 it was calculated twelve new countries would go 
nuclear by 1966. 98 But nuclear umbrella alliances, such as nato, 
seato and cento, tended to discourage states from independent 
ventures. Proliferation occurred as a result of antagonistic 'pairing'. 
China's bomb in 1964 was a function of her quarrel with Russia; 
India's 1974 bomb was the direct result of China's: Pakistan's 
putative bomb was the offspring of India's. Both Israel and South 
Africa became covert nuclear powers in the 1970s, largely because 
they were not members of reliable military pacts which included 
nuclear coverage. Israel's bomb provoked an Iraqi nuclear-weapons 
programme, frustrated in 1981 when Israeli aircraft destroyed Iraq's 
French-built 'peaceful' reactor. 

There was also a tendency for advanced powers to drift into 
nuclear weapons programmes. This was what happened in France 
under the Fourth Republic, long before de Gaulle took the decision 
to make bombs. As one official put it, 'the manufacture of an atomic 
bomb . . . welded itself into our public life as a sort of by-product of 
an officially peaceful effort'. 99 That was the most likely route West 
Germany and Japan, hitherto encouraged to remain non-nuclear by 
American guarantees, would pursue towards the bomb. By the end of 
the 1970s, Japan had developed a large and innovatory space 
industry and was in a position not merely to produce nuclear 
warheads very fast but to develop an advanced delivery system on 
the lines of the American Trident. But to become a first-class nuclear 
power involved by this stage developing protection, counter- 
detection and second-strike capabilities, all dauntingly expensive. 100 
Barring a retreat by America into isolation, Germany and Japan 
looked unlikely to join the club. The danger lay, rather, in a ragged 
development of marginal nuclear capacity by unstable Arab powers 
or states which, for one reason or another, felt themselves insecure 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 687 

and inadequately protected by alliances, such as Brazil, Argentina, 
South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia. By the early 1980s, twenty-two 
powers (in addition to Israel and South Africa) were in a position to 
develop nuclear weapons at comparatively low cost and over a one- 
to four-year time span. 101 

In practice, however, the world was less disturbed during the 
1970s by the possibility of nuclear war than by the growing reality of 
other forms of violence. More than thirty conventional wars were 
fought in the decade, most of them in Africa. Less costly in human 
life, but politically and psychologically far more disturbing for the 
world, was the growth of international terrorism. Many historical 
strands went into this new phenomenon. There was the Muslim 
tradition of politico-religious terrorism, going back to the Persian— 
Sunni sect of the Assassins in the Middle Ages. It was born again in 
the Arab— Israeli struggle in inter-war Palestine, taking final shape in 
the Palestine Liberation Organization, which in the Sixties and 
Seventies was the largest, richest, best-armed and most active of all 
terrorist groups, with its own training camps of which many other, 
quite unrelated terrorist movements took advantage. 

Secondly there was the Russian tradition, transmuted by Lenin 
(who repudiated individual terrorism as a form of 'infantile Leftism') 
into state-terrorism, both for internal use and for export. Through- 
out this period Soviet Russia maintained a terrorist training scheme, 
directed from the military academy at Simteropol in the Crimea, 
from which foreign 'guerrillas' and 'saboteurs' graduated for service 
in the Middle East, Latin America and Africa. Most plo experts and 
instructors benefited from this course. 102 

Thirdly there was the European, chiefly German, tradition of 
intellectualizing violence as a moral necessity. The first large-scale 
modern phase of political terrorism took place, as we have seen, in 
Germany 1919—22, when right-wing killers murdered 354 people. It 
was the failure of society to bring these people to book which 
prepared the way for the state terror of Hitler. This took many 
forms, including kidnapping, practised by the Brown Sisters of the 
ss, who scoured concentration camps for blond, blue-eyed children 
under six. The German terrorist tradition found philosophical ex- 
pression in Existentialism, popularized in the post-war period by 
Sartre, who remained fascinated by violence throughout his life and 
whose pupil, Franz Fanon, published in 1961 the most influential of 
all terrorist handbooks, Les damnes de la terre. 

Fourthly, there was the non-political tradition of Mediterranean 
piracy, going back to the second millennium before Christ. Pompey 
had ended piracy in the first century bc, and it was a sinister sign of 
Rome's fading power when the pirates returned in force in the 



688 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

middle of the third century ad. In the eighteenth century the British 
navy eliminated piracy on the oceans, but the Barbary menace 
remained until 1830, when the French occupied Algiers. For the next 
130 years, the age of colonialism, large-scale piracy and kidnapping 
virtually ceased to exist. It rapidly returned as the imperialist tide 
receded, especially in its traditional centres, Algiers and Tripoli, with 
the end of the Algerian war and Gadafy's 1969 coup. But it now had 
a distinct political coloration, with the Algerian leaders in the 
1960s, and Gadafy in the 1970s, providing money, arms, training 
facilities, refuges and orchestration. These four strands, coming 
together in the 1970s, made the problem of terrorism immensely 
complex and difficult to define. It could not be seen as a simple 
Soviet conspiracy to destabilize legitimate states. In fact the democra- 
tic state most seriously damaged by terrorism in the 1970s, Italy, was 
the victim more of commercial violence, especially kidnappings 
which netted $100 million in the years 1975-80, than of purely 
political terror. 103 

Yet there was no doubt that individual terrorist movements, such 
as the Baader-Meinhof gang in West Germany, the ira in Ulster, the 
Red Brigades in Italy, Basque separatists in Spain, the plo and 
perhaps a score of other Arab, Latin-American and black African 
terror groups, benefited from an international radical network, 
whose moving spirits, such as the Venezuelan assassin known as 
'Carlos', were all Communists. 104 Two incidents, selected from 
scores, illustrate the international and Marxist character of the 
movement. The massacre of twenty-six pilgrims, mostly Puerto 
Ricans, at Israel's Lod airport in 1972, was carried out by Japanese 
Marxists, trained by the plo in Lebanon, armed with Japanese 
weapons delivered to them in Rome by Carlos himself. Again, the 
Basque killers who murdered a Spanish admiral in 1974 had been 
trained in Cuba and the South Yemen by East Germans, Palestinians 
and Cubans, and used explosives acquired from ira gangsters who 
first met the Basques in Algiers, under the auspices of the kgb. 105 

It is significant that, during the Seventies, as relative American 
power declined, and Soviet power rose, international terrorist in- 
cidents (explosions, bombings, assassinations, hostage-taking, 
kidnapping, etc) increased steadily, from 279 in 1971 to 1,709 in 
1980, The number of assassinations, in which the kgb and its 
antecedents had always specialized, increased spectacularly, from 
seventeen in 1971 to 1,169 in 1980. 106 Totalitarian societies, with 
all-pervasive secret police permitted to arrest and imprison without 
trial, to torture and to practise judicial murder and assassination 
themselves, had little to fear from terrorism. Liberal-democratic 
societies had a great deal. The lesson of the Seventies was that 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 689 

terrorism actively, systematically and necessarily assisted the spread 
of the totalitarian state; that it distinguished between lawful and 
totalitarian states in favour of the latter; that it exploited the 
apparatus of freedom in liberal societies and thereby endangered it; 
and that it sapped the will of a civilized society to defend itself. 107 

In a more fundamental sense, the political terrorism of the 
Seventies was a product of moral relativism. In particular, the 
unspeakable cruelties it practised were made possible only by the 
Marxist habit of thinking in terms of classes instead of individuals. 
Young radical ideologues who kept their victims, usually diplomats 
or businessmen chosen solely by occupation, chained in tiny, under- 
ground concrete dungeons, blindfolded, their ears sealed with wax, 
for weeks or months, then dispatched them without pity or 
hesitation, did not see those they tortured and murdered as human 
beings but as pieces of political furniture. In the process they 
dehumanized themselves as well as those they destroyed and became 
lost souls, like the debased creatures Dostoevsky described in his 
great anti-terrorist novel, The Devils. 

As a threat to the stability of all societies under the rule of law, 
international terrorism should have been the primary concern of the 
United Nations. But by the 1970s, the un was a corrupt and 
demoralized body, and its ill-considered interventions were more 
inclined to promote violence than to prevent it. Truman's fatal 
mistake in allowing executive power to slip towards the General 
Assembly in 1950, compounded by Eisenhower's error in 1956, 
when he allowed Hammarskjold to hound Britain and France as 
aggressors, now yielded a bitter and abundant harvest. The UN was 
founded by fifty-one states, the great majority of them democracies. 
By 1975 there were 144 members, with plans for 165, all but 
twenty-five of them totalitarian or one-party states, mainly of the 
Left. The Soviet, Arab-Muslim and African states together consti- 
tuted a working majority. There was thus no question of taking 
action against terrorism. On the contrary. As we have already noted, 
Idi Amin, a terrorist himself and a patron and beneficiary of 
terrorism, was given a standing ovation in 1975 when he advocated 
genocide. Yasser Arafat, head of the plo, the world's largest terrorist 
organization, was actually given a seat in the Assembly. The un 
Secretariat had long since ceased to apply the principles of the 
Charter. The Secretary-General functioned as a mere post-office. 
Communist members of the Secretariat lived in their national 
compounds and handed in their hard-currency salary cheques to 
their embassy finance officers. Their senior member, the Under- 
Secretary-General for the Security Council, Arkady Shevchenko, had 
a kgb 'minder' all to himself. 108 



690 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

Broadly speaking, during the 1970s the UN majority concentrated 
on three issues: organizing the destruction of South Africa and Israel, 
and condemning 'imperialism' as personified by America. In 1974, 
the credentials of South Africa, a founder-member, were rejected, as 
a substitute for expulsion. At the un meeting of non-aligned states 
held at Havana, a Soviet satellite capital, in March 1975, a plan was 
outlined to expel Israel, but dropped when the US threatened to leave 
the Assembly and discontinue its financial contribution. Instead, the 
UN Third Committee passed an anti-Semitic resolution, condemning 
Israel as 'racist', by 70 votes to 29 with 27 abstentions. The 
resolution was produced by Cuba, Libya and Somalia, all then Soviet 
satellites. As the American delegate Leonard Garment pointed out, 
the resolution was 'ominous' because it used 'racism' not as the word 
'for a very real and concrete set of injustices but merely as an epithet 
to be flung at whoever happens to be one's adversary'. It turned 'an 
idea with a vivid and obnoxious meaning' into 'nothing more than 
an ideological tool'. 109 Some of the speeches in favour of the motion 
were openly anti-Semitic and would have evoked roars of applause at 
Nuremberg. Of the seventy states which voted for it, only eight had 
the most remote claims to be considered democracies and more than 
two-thirds of them practised varieties of official racism. In Moscow 
Andrei Sakharov, who had not yet been arrested, remarked that the 
resolution 'can only contribute to anti-Semitic tendencies in many 
countries by giving them the appearance of international legality'. 
Even more serious was the fear that the vote might subsequently be 
used as justification, in morality and international law, for a 
concerted attempt by Arab states to exterminate the Israeli people, 
who had founded the state precisely as a refuge from racism and 
race-murder. The American Ambassador to the un angrily an- 
nounced, when the General Assembly ratified the vote 67-55: 'The 
United States rises to declare before the General Assembly of the 
United Nations and before the world, that it does not acknowledge, 
it will not abide by and it will never acquiesce in this infamous 
act.' 110 It was true that the vote was merely on paper. But the . real 
danger of the un was that paper majorities tended to grow into real 
policies: the corrupt arithmetic of the Assembly, where in the 
Seventies votes could be bought by arms or even by personal bribes 
to delegates, tended to become imperceptibly the conventional 
wisdom of international society. 

This was particularly true of the attacks on America, now increas- 
ingly isolated and, as the economic crisis of the 1970s deepened, 
blamed as the source of the world's ills. It was a striking consequence 
of un arithmetic that the Arab oil states, whose price-increases added 
$70 billion a year to their incomes in the year 1974-5, all of it at the 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 691 

expense of the industrial nations and underdeveloped countries, were 
never once criticized in any resolution by the Assembly or a UN 
committee. Nor was any attempt made by the un majority to get 
them to disgorge these excess profits in the form of mandatory aid. 
The synthetic anger of the UN was concentrated wholly on America, 
one of the chief victims, and by extension to the West as a whole. It is 
illuminating to trace the genesis of this assault. The original Marxist 
thesis was that capitalism would collapse. That had not happened. 
The first fall-back position (Khrushchev's) was that the 'socialist 
bloc' would overtake the West in living standards. That had not 
happened either. The second fall-back position, used from the early 
1970s onwards, which was sold to the Third World and became the 
un orthodoxy, was that high Western living standards, far from 
being the consequence of a more efficient economic system, were the 
immoral wages of the deliberate and systematic impoverishment of 
the rest of the world. Thus in 1974 the un adopted a 'Charter of 
Economic Rights and Duties of States' which condemned the work- 
ings of Western economies. The 1974 un World Population Confer- 
ence was a prolonged attack on US selfishness. The 1974 un World 
Food Conference denounced America and other states, the only ones 
actually to produce food surpluses. The Indian Food Minister 
thought it 'obvious' they were 'responsible for the present plight' of 
the poor nations, and had a 'duty' to help them. Such help was not 
'charity' but 'deferred compensation for what has been done to them 
in the past by the developed nations'. Next February the 'non- 
aligned' countries castigated 'the obstinacy of the imperialist powers 
in preserving the structures of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation 
which nurture their luxurious and superfluous consumer societies 
while they keep a large part of humanity in misery and hunger.' 

The attack was particularly unreasonable since during the previ- 
ous fourteen years alone (1960-73), official development aid from 
the advanced nations direct to the poorer countries, or through 
agencies, amounted to $91.8 billion, the largest voluntary transfer of 
resources in history. 111 Whether the money was effectively used, of 
course, was another matter. Much of it served merely to keep in 
power inefficient and tyrannical regimes practising various forms of 
'socialism', such as Julius Nyerere's in Tanzania, and so to perpetu- 
ate backwardness. The argument that the West was somehow to 
blame for world poverty was itself a Western invention. Like 
decolonization, it was a product of guilt, that prime dissolvent of 
order and justice. It reflected the same tendency to categorize people 
morally not as individuals but as members of classes which was the 
fundamental fallacy of Marxism. The nation-structure was analog- 
ous to the class-structure. We have already noted the effect of the 



692 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

'Third World' concept on the Bandung generation. Like many clever 
but misleading ideas, it came from France. In 1952 the demographer 
Alfred Sauvy had written a famous article, 'Three Worlds, One 
Planet', in which he quoted Sieyes's famous remarks in 1789: 'What 
is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been hitherto in the 
political order? Nothing. What does it ask? To become something.' 
The Cold War, he argued, was essentially a struggle between the 
capitalist world and the Communist world for the Third World. That 
'Third World', ignored, exploited, despised, like the Third Estate, it 
too wants to be something. 112 Gradually the term 'Third World' 
became one of the great cant phrases of the post-war period. 113 It 
was never defined, for the good and simple reason that, the moment 
anyone attempted to do so, the concept was seen to be meaningless 
and collapsed. But it was immensely influential. It satisfied the 
human longing for simple moral distinctions. There were 'good' 
nations (the poor ones) and 'bad' nations (the rich ones). Nations 
were rich precisely because they were bad, and poor because they 
were innocent. It became the dynamic of the UN General Assembly. It 
led to the creation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development 
(unctad) in 1962, which popularized the fallacy. It inspired the 
guilt-ridden Pearson Report of 1969, which surveyed the whole aid 
programme 1950—67 and blamed its failures on the people who had 
supplied the money. 

In due course the term 'Third World' began to seem a little 
threadbare from overuse. The Paris intellectual fashion-factory 
promptly supplied a new one: 'North-South'. It was coined in 1974, 
when the French President, Giscard d'Estaing, called a conference of 
'oil-importing, oil-exporting and non-oil developing nations'. The 
idea was to link guilt to 'the North' and innocence to 'the South'. 
This involved a good deal of violence to simple geography, as well as 
to economic facts. The so-called 'South' was represented by Algeria, 
Argentina, Brazil, Cameroon, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Iran, 
Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, 
Yugoslavia, Zaire and Zambia. The 'North' consisted of Canada, the 
EEC powers, Japan, Spain, Australia, Sweden, Switzerland and the 
USA. Eleven of the 'South' states were actually north of the equator, 
and one of them, Saudi Arabia, had the world's highest per capita 
income. Australia, the only continent entirely south of the equator, 
had to be classified as 'North', presumably because it was predomi- 
nantly white and capitalist. The Soviet bloc was omitted altogether, 
though entirely in the North. In short the concept was meaningless, 
except for purposes of political abuse. But for this it served very well. 
It led to an elaborate gathering in Paris in May-June 1977. 114 In due 
course it inspired a document called the Brandt Report (1980), which 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 693 

like the Pearson Report blamed the West, now termed 'the North', 
and proposed an international system of taxation, under which the 
North should subsidize the South, on the analogy of national welfare 
states. 115 

Inevitably America was presented as the primary villain in the 
North-South melodrama. It was also the target of another term of 
Seventies abuse: the 'multinational'. This too came from France. In 
1967 the French publicist Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber produced a 
sensational book, Le Deft Americain, drawing attention to expan- 
sion of American firms abroad. By the 1980s, he predicted, the 'third 
industrial power in the world' would not be Europe but 'American 
investments in Europe'. The 'multinational' was 'the American 
challenge' to the world. The notion was eagerly taken up by European 
intellectuals of the Left, and translated into 'Third World' terms, 
with the multinational, overriding the sovereignty of states, as the 
spearhead of 'American imperialism'. At the un General Assembly of 
April-May 1974, the multinational was held up to global obloquy, 
almost on a level with South Africa and Israel. Like most intellectual 
fashions, it was misconceived and already out of date. Multi- 
nationals were simply businesses operating in many countries. They 
dated from the 1900s, when Gillette, Kodak and other firms set up in 
Europe, and they included banks and oil companies and others 
whose business was essentially international. They were by far the 
most cost-efficient means for the export of capital, technology and 
skills from richer to poorer countries. Equally important, in the 
post-war period they learnt much faster than governments how to 
merge into the local landscape and adjust to national prejudices. 
Studies of American multinationals in Chile and Peru, for instance, 
showed that their political influence, considerable up to 1939, had 
long been declining rapidly by the time the term became fashion- 
able. 116 Within America, the power of international companies was 
more than balanced by labour and ethnic lobbies. The 'multinational 
explosion' was really a phenomenon of the 1950s and early 1960s, 
and was near its climax when Servan-Schreiber wrote. In 1959 
America had 1 1 1 or 71 per cent of the world's largest firms. By 1976, 
the number had dropped to sixty-eight and the percentage to 
forty-four. The peak year for US multinationals was 1968, as it was 
the apogee of the American paramountcy as a whole, when 540 US 
overseas subsidiaries were established or acquired. By 1974-5, 
however, the 187 largest American multinationals were breeding 
only 200 a year. 117 It is true that, over the decade 1967-77, US 
investment in Europe rose from $16 billion to $55 billion. 118 But 
Servan-Schreiber's apocalyptic vision seemed absurd by the 
mid-1970s, when West German and Japanese firms were expanding 



694 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

overseas much faster than their American competitors. In 1970 the 
ten biggest banks were all American. By 1980 only two were, the rest 
being French (four), German (two), Japanese and British (one each). 
The Japanese held six places out of the top twenty, and another was 
held by Brazil. 119 All the evidence shows that during the 1970s 
international economic power was becoming far more widely dif- 
fused. Yet the multinational scare was immensely damaging to 
America, just at the time when its relative influence was declining 
fast. Far from wielding excessive power, American companies were 
increasingly discriminated against. 'I can tell you', complained an 
official of Chase Manhattan, 'that as a US bank in Mexico we get 
treated like dirt by the Mexican authorities.' 120 This was despite the 
fact that Mexico, together with Brazil, owed $69 billion of floating 
interest-rate debt, much of it to Chase. 121 The artificially created 
hostility to US multinationals even penetrated back into America 
itself, where an attempt was made to pass the Foreign Trade and 
Investment Act (1971), calling for control over export of US capital 
and technology and heavier taxation of multinational profits. The 
ensuing struggle was highly damaging to American economic inter- 
ests. 122 

The attacks on America during the 1970s were so venomous and 
for the most part so irrational as to merit the description of an 
international witch-hunt. One might say that the most ubiquitous 
form of racism during this decade was anti-Americanism. The adage, 
'to know all is to forgive all', does not work in international affairs. 
One reason why America was attacked so much was because so 
much was known about her, chiefly thanks to the American media 
and academia, which poured forth a ceaseless torrent of self-critical 
material. 123 But a more fundamental reason was that America as a 
great power and still more Americanism as a concept stood for the 
principle of individualism as opposed to collectivism, for free will as 
opposed to determinism. The spirit of the late Sixties, and still more 
of the early and mid-Seventies, was strongly collectivist and deter- 
ministic. 

Much of this was again due to intellectual trends in Paris, which 
France's new-found economic dynamism helped to project forcefully 
onto the world stage. In the Forties and Fifties, Sartre had at least 
believed in free will. It was indeed the essence of his philosojphy, 
which made it fundamentally incompatible with Marxism, however 
much he might league himself with Marxists at a purely political 
level. Sartre lived on until 1980, but he was already an intellectual 
antique by the time of the student revolt of 1968. The mandarins 
who took his place were all, in varying degrees, influenced by 
Marxist determinism, which denies any importance to the individual 



THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 695 

or to free will or to moral conscience in shaping the world. Unlike the 
orthodox Marxists, they did not see economic forces, operating 
through classes, as the sole dynamic of human history. Each ad- 
vanced alternative or complementary explanations. But all accepted 
Marx's starting-point that events were determined not by human 
will, as had been traditionally supposed, but by the hidden structures 
of society. As Marx put it: 'the final pattern of economic relatives as 
seen on the surface ... is very much different from, and indeed quite 
the reverse of, their inner but concealed essential pattern and the 
conception corresponding to it.' 124 Man was imprisoned in struc- 
tures: twentieth-century man in bourgeois structures. In Structural 
Anthropology ', first widely read and translated in 1963, Claude 
Levi-Strauss insisted that, though social structures were not visible to 
the eye or even detectable by empirical observations, they were 
present, just as molecular structures existed though undiscoverable 
by all but the electron microscope. These structures determined the 
cast of mind, so what appeared to be acts of human will were merely 
concordance with the structure. For Levi-Strauss, as for Marx, 
history was not a succession of events but a discernible pattern 
working according to discoverable laws. A variation of this ar- 
gument was provided by the French historians of the Annates school, 
especially by Fernand Braudel, whose Mediterranean and the Medit- 
erranean World in the Age of Philip II (1949) proved by far the most 
influential historical work published since the Second World War. 
They dismissed narrative as superficial and individuals as unimpor- 
tant and preached a doctrine of geographical and economic deter- 
minism in history, whose long-term course was decided wholly by 
such structures. In psychology, Jacques Lacan reinterpreted Freud 
(hitherto largely ignored in France) to provide a new determinism of 
human behaviour, based on signs, signals, codes and conventions 
which, when analysed, left little room for human choice. In literature 
Roland Barthes argued that a novelist did not create by an act of 
imaginative will so much as in response to the social structures from 
which he derived his impulses, expressed in the symbols he used, 
which could be codified by the new science of semiology. In 
linguistics, the American scholar Noam Chomsky dismissed the 
physical characteristics of speech and language as superficial, deter- 
mined by the so-called deep structures of linguistic rules. 

What all the structuralists had in common was the Marxist 
assumption that human attributes and activities were governed by 
laws in a way analogous to the way scientific laws governed 
inanimate nature. Hence it was the function of the social sciences to 
discover such laws, and then for society to act upon their discoveries. 
The emergence of this new form of intellectual Utopianism, with its 



696 THE COLLECTIVIST SEVENTIES 

strong suggestion of compulsory social engineering at the end of the 
road, coincided exactly with the rapid expansion of higher educa- 
tion, especially of the social science disciplines, in the late Fifties and 
throughout the Sixties. Between the mid-1950s and the late 1960s, 
the average annual increase in expenditure on higher education was 
nearly 10 per cent in Britain, over 11 per cent in America, Spain and 
Japan, 13.3 per cent in France, over 15 per cent in Italy, Belgium, the 
Netherlands and Denmark, and over 16 per cent in Canada and West 
Germany. University enrolments rose by an annual average of over 
12 per cent in this period. 125 By a historical accident, which had 
nothing to do with structures, deep or otherwise, the Structuralists 
thus had an influence quite disproportionate to the intrinsic plausi- 
bility of their theories, and they attained their maximum impact on 
society during the Seventies, when millions of new graduates poured 
out of the universities. 

The heyday of Structuralism coincided with the demoralization of 
America and with the steady expansion of Soviet power and in- 
fluence. It reinforced both tendencies, for Structuralism, like the 
Marxism from which it sprang, was anti-empirical, denying the real 
world in favour of the theoretical world, discounting facts in favour 
of 'explanations'. Communists had always been infuriated by the 
tendency of facts to get in the way of Marxist theses. One might say 
that the whole of Stalin's dictatorship had been a campaign against 
facts, or rather a superhuman attempt to transform the awkward 
facts of humanity into new 'deep structures', under six feet of earth. 
To Structuralists, facts were by definition on the surface, and 
therefore misleading. To attempt to marshal them in the form of 
argument was, obviously, nothing more than a shameless defence of 
the status quo. 126 Structuralism fitted well into the Potemkin world 
of the United Nations, where facts were unimportant, where North 
was South, and vice-versa, where wealth created poverty, where 
Zionism was racism and sin was the White Man's monopoly. The 
multinational, that sinister infrastructure of international injustice, 
was a quintessentially structuralist concept. Structuralism, like 
Marxism, was a form of gnosticism, that is an arcane system of 
knowledge, revealed to the elite. Both expanded rapidly in the Sixties 
and, in conjunction, were intellectually predominant in the Seventies. 
But reality cannot for long be banished from history. Facts have a 
way of making their presence felt. The pattern of the Seventies, so 
dismaying to the few democratic societies which remained under the 
rule of law, was beginning to break up before the decade ended. 



TWENTY 

The Recovery of Freedom 



From the initial tragedy of the First World War, 1914-18, the twen- 
tieth century had appeared to many a relentless succession of moral 
and physical disasters. These had occurred despite the rapid 
increase in wealth, notably in the advanced countries, and the 
steady forward march of scientific discovery. As early as 1945 H. G. 
Wells, once the prophet of ever-accelerating human progress, had 
given up in despair, publishing his gloomy testament, Mind at the 
End of Its Tether. 1 Thereafter a further declension appeared to have 
taken place, the 1970s being a decade of exceptional anxiety and 
disillusionment when concern about the environment and the 
exhaustion of raw materials were added to the spread of Cold War 
competition throughout the world and the ravages of collectivism in 
Eastern Europe, most of Africa and large parts of Asia and Latin 
America. Everywhere, democracy and the rule of law that gave it 
meaning appeared on the defensive, even in its heartlands. In 1979 
President Carter referred publicly to the 'crisis that strikes at the 
very heart and soul and spirit of our national will . . . The erosion 
of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social 
and political fabric of America.' 2 

Yet, with the 1980s, there came a great wind of change in the 
affairs of mankind which, gathering momentum throughout the 
decade and beyond into the 1990s, swept all before it and left the 
global landscape transformed beyond recognition. The 1980s 
formed one of the watersheds of modern history. The spirit of 
democracy recovered its self-confidence and spread. The rule of law 
was re-established in large parts of the globe and international pre- 
dation checked and punished. The United Nations, and especially 
its Security Council, began for the first time to function as its 
founders intended. Capitalist economies flourished mightily and, 
almost everywhere, there was growing recognition that the market 

697 



698 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

system was not merely the surest but the only way to increase 
wealth and raise living standards. As an intellectual creed, collec- 
tivism collapsed and the process of abandoning it got under way 
even in its strongholds. Stalin's empire, the last of the colonial con- 
glomerates, disintegrated. The Soviet system itself came under 
increasing strain, and Russia's multiplying problems undermined 
both its status as a superpower and its rulers' will to continue the 
Cold War. By the early 1990s, the nightmare vision of thermo- 
nuclear conflict faded and the world seemed safer, more stable and, 
above all, more hopeful. How did this dramatic counter-revolution 
come about? 

It was essentially the work of outstanding popular leaders, who 
mirrored the thoughts, desires and faith of ordinary men and 
women. It was certainly not the work of the intelligentsia, of philo- 
sophers, economists and political theorists, or of academics general- 
ly. The universities had little or nothing to do with it, just as they 
had played virtually no part in the first Industrial Revolution of the 
late eighteenth century. 3 Indeed while Marxism was being progres- 
sively abandoned by the governments which had once ardently 
propagated it, it continued to be upheld and taught only in that tra- 
ditional home of lost causes, the university campus. 

It is important to look in a little detail at the failure of intellectual 
leadership in the twentieth century, or rather at its apparent inabil- 
ity to offer clear and firm guidance to a perplexed humanity, 
because this failure or inability lay at the root of the tragedies of the 
age. In the seven decades which followed the First World War, 
knowledge itself expanded more rapidly than ever. Yet in many 
ways an educated man in the 1990s was less equipped with certi- 
tudes than an ancient Egyptian in 2500 bc. At least the Egyptian of 
the Old Kingdom had a clear cosmology. In 1915 Einstein had 
undermined the Newtonian universe, and the cosmology substituted 
for it was merely speculative, since the General Theory of Relativity 
was a classical explanation and could not be used to describe a sin- 
gularity such as the conditions at the moment of creation. The 
mathematical model of the Big Bang, in which matter expanded 
from zero some 6,000-10,000 million years ago, with everything 
essential occurring in the first twenty minutes, was no more demon- 
strable than the Judeo-Christian hypothesis first crudely described 
in Chapter One of the Book of Genesis, which it strikingly resem- 
bled. During the next three-quarters of the century, empirical 
knowledge of the universe accumulated at impressive speed, above 
all in the 1970s and 1980s, when data from space probes began to 
reach the earth in prodigious quantities. The measurement of 
microwave background radiation which fills the universe indicated 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 699 

the near-certainty of a Big Bang. 4 But one cosmologist laconically 
observed: 'Our universe is simply one of thousands which happen 
from time to time.' 5 A clear picture of primal events was as elusive 
as ever. 

Indeed the historian of the modern world is sometimes tempted 
to reach the depressing conclusion that progress is destructive of 
certitude. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the Western 
elites were confident that men and progress were governed by rea- 
son. A prime discovery of modern times is that reason plays little 
part in our affairs. Even scientists are not moved by it. As Max 
Planck sorrowfully observed: 'A new scientific truth is not usually 
presented in a way to convince its opponents. Rather, they die off, 
and a rising generation is familiarized with the truth from the 
start.' 6 Three years after Einstein's General Theory of Relativity was 
verified by Eddington, ending belief in fixed space and time, Ludwig 
Wittgenstein, one of the key figures of our period, published his 
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which cumulatively over the 
decades tended to destroy confidence in philosophy as a guide to 
human reason. For half a century Wittgenstein's influence on aca- 
demic philosophy was immense. By the early 1990s doubts were 
raised about his sanity: was he a genius, or simply a madman? 7 But 
by then much damage had been done. A leading Logical Positivist 
like Sir A.J.Ayer, who at the time of his death in 1989 was widely 
regarded as the world's leading philosopher, remarked with some 
complacency that philosophy demonstrated that man was ignorant 
rather than knowledgeable: '[It] tends to show that we can't really 
know lots of things which we think we know.' Empirical popular 
knowledge, usually termed 'common sense', had been dismissed 
contemptuously by Bertrand Russell as 'the metaphysics of sav- 
ages'. 8 But if academic philosophers thought the world was peopled 
by fools, most made little or no attempt to enlighten them on the 
great issues of the day, and even Russell, who wrote on such mat- 
ters, drew an absolute distinction between his popular journalism 
and his 'serious' work. 9 The negative and destructive nature of 
twentieth-century philosophy, its obsession with the inadequacies 
and failures of language, above all its failure to address itself to the 
immense problems confronting humanity, was a source of shame to 
the few who tried to grapple with them, notably Karl Popper: 'I 
cannot say that I am proud of being called a philosopher,' he 
wrote. 10 

Moreover, growing uncertainty surrounded even the one tool 
which the academic philosophers felt they could trust: logic. Two 
centuries before, Kant had asserted in his Logik (1800): 'There are 
but few sciences that can come into a permanent state, which 



700 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

admits of no further alteration. To these belong Logic . . . We do 
not require any further discoveries in Logic, since it contains merely 
the form of thought.' As late as 1939, a British philosopher assert- 
ed: 'Dictators may be powerful today, but they cannot alter the laws 
of logic, nor indeed can even God do so.' 11 Thirteen years later the 
American philosopher Willard Quine calmly accepted that the 
definition of logic was undergoing fundamental change: 'What dif- 
ference is there in principle between such a shift and the shift 
whereby Kepler succeeded Ptolemy, or Einstein Newton, or Darwin 
Aristotle?' 12 In the decades that followed, many rival systems to 
classical logic emerged: Bochvar's many-valued logic, new systems 
by Birkhoff and Destouches-Fevrier and Reichenbach, minimal 
logic, deontic logics, tense logics. It became possible to speak of 
empirical proof or disproof of logic. 13 What would be the conse- 
quences for the theory of truth, asked one worried logician, '. . . of 
the adoption of a non-standard system'? 14 Another, observing sys- 
tems of modal logic, observed: 'One gets an uneasy feeling as one 
discerns and studies more of the systems belonging to this family 
that it is literally a family, and has the power of reproducing and 
multiplying, proliferating new systems [of logic] without limit.' 15 

In a world in which even the rules of logic shifted and disinte- 
grated, it is not surprising that modern times did not develop in 
ways the generation of 1920 would have considered 'logical'. What 
is important in history is not only the events that occur but the 
events that obstinately do not occur. The outstanding event of mod- 
ern times was the failure of religious belief to disappear. For many 
millions, especially in the advanced nations, religion ceased to play 
much or any part in their lives, and the ways in which the vacuum 
thus lost was filled, by fascism, Nazism and Communism, by 
attempts at humanist utopianism, by eugenics or health politics, by 
the ideologies of sexual liberation, race politics and environmental 
politics, form much of the substance of the history of our century. 
But for many more millions - for the overwhelming majority of the 
human race, in fact - religion continued to be a huge dimension in 
their lives. Nietzsche, who had so accurately predicted the transmu- 
tation of faith into political zealotry and the totalitarian will to 
power, failed to see that the religious spirit could, quite illogically, 
coexist with secularization, and so resuscitate his dying God. What 
looked antiquated, even risible, in the 1990s was not religious belief 
but the confident prediction of its demise once provided by 
Feuerbach and Marx, Durkheim and Frazer, Lenin, Wells, Shaw, 
Gide, Sartre and many others. By the end of our period, even the 
term 'secularization' was in dispute. 'The whole concept appears a 
tool of counter-religious ideologies,' wrote one professor of sociology 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 701 

angrily, 'which identify the "real" element in religion for polemical 
purposes, and then arbitrarily relate it to the notion of a unitary 
and irreversible process . . . [It] should be erased from the sociologi- 
cal vocabulary.' 16 The secularist movement, that is militant atheism, 
appears to have peaked in the West in the 1880s at exactly the same 
time as its great rival, Protestant Nonconformity, so that Lenin was 
a survivor rather than a precursor, and his secularization pro- 
gramme was put through by force, not established by argument. 17 
By the 1990s, the Museums of Anti-God and Chairs of Scientific 
Atheism he had established were merely historical curiosities, or 
had been dismantled and scrapped. The once-influential alternatives 
to religion, such as Positivism, had vanished almost without trace, 
confirming John Henry Newman's observation: 'True religion is 
slow in growth and, when once planted, is difficult of dislodgement; 
but its intellectual counterfeit has no root in itself; it springs up sud- 
denly, it suddenly withers.' 18 Perhaps the most spectacular testimo- 
ny to this truth was to be found in Russia, where the collapse of 
belief in the Communist ideology Lenin had implanted revealed, in 
the growing climate of freedom of 1989-91, that both Orthodox 
and Catholic Christianity had survived all the assaults made upon 
them by the regime, and were strong and spreading. 19 Throughout 
the world, while spiritual bewilderment, neatly classified as 'agnos- 
ticism', was widespread, it is likely that there were fewer real athe- 
ists in 1990 than in 1890. 

Yet organized religion was full of paradoxes. Many of these were 
personified in Karol Wojtyla, who on 16 October 1978 became the 
263rd Roman pontiff, with the title of Pope John Paul II. He was 
the first non-Italian to be elected pope since 1522, the youngest 
since 1846, the first from the Slavic East. Wojtyla had been 
Cardinal-Archbishop of Cracow. The choice was now highly appro- 
priate for Poland had become the heartland of Catholicism. First 
Hitler, then Stalin and his successors had done everything in their 
power to destroy the Polish Church. Hitler had closed its schools, 
universities and seminaries, and murdered a third of its clergy. 
When the Red Army imposed the Lublin government in 1945, they 
were confident that the Church would disappear within a genera- 
tion. Yet pre-war Poland, where the Church enjoyed special status, 
proved a less favourable environment for Catholicism than the post- 
war People's Republic, where it was actively persecuted. The new 
frontiers turned Poland into one of the most homogeneous states on 
earth: more than 95 per cent of the population were now ethnic 
Poles, virtually all of them baptized Catholics. Catholicism became 
the focus of resistance to the alien Communist regime. By the 
1960s, the Catholic priesthood was back to its pre-war strength 



702 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

of 18,000. The number of religious - i.e. priests, nuns and monks - 
22,000 in 1939, had grown to 36,500. There were 50 per cent more 
monastic foundations, priories and convents than before the war. 
Some 92-95 per cent of children received Holy Communion after 
instruction at 18,000 catechetical centres. Over 90 per cent of Poles 
were buried according to Catholic rites. The movement of peasants 
into the towns re-evangelized the urban population. Up to three- 
quarters of town-dwellers were married in church. Sunday Mass 
attendance was over 50 per cent even in the cities. These figures 
could not be matched anywhere in the world. 20 Moreover, Catho- 
licism was the driving force behind the new Polish independent 
trade union, baptized Solidarity, which began to function in the 
Gdansk shipyard in June 1980, achieved reluctant legal recognition 
from the regime two months later, and, under its fervent Catholic 
leader, Lech Walesa, gradually undermined the regime during the 
decade. A further eight-year legal ban, imposed in 1981, was finally 
ended in April 1989, when Communist authority began to collapse. 
Four months later, on 24 August, Poland became the first country in 
the Soviet bloc to appoint a non-Communist government, with 
Walesa's colleague, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, editor of a Catholic news- 
paper, as Prime Minister. The destruction of Communism was com- 
pleted in 1990-91, when Walesa himself became President, and all 
remaining religious restraints were removed. This largely peaceful 
change of regime showed how powerful the alliance between the 
human longing for personal freedom and the force of religious 
belief could be. 

The new Pope personified the paradoxical vigour of this ebullient 
Polish religious spirit springing from within the framework of an 
atheist state. He was a paradox in himself: an intellectual, a poet, a 
playwright, a professional philosopher trained in the 
Phenomenologist tradition which sought to Christianize Existentia- 
lism; yet also a passionate devotee of the culture of populist Catho- 
licism: shrines, miracles, pilgrimages, saints, the rosary and the 
Virgin. He had been one of the most active members of the Second 
Vatican Council, summoned by the reforming Pope John xxm in 
1962 to bring about what he called the aggiornamento (updating) 
of the Church, and which for four years modernized every aspect of 
its activities, introducing a new, vernacular liturgy and forms of 
consultative democracy. The Council reflected the optimism and 
illusions of the 1960s. The mood did not survive 1968, a climactic 
year for Catholicism as well as for secular society, when a new 
Pope, Paul VI, refused to lift the Church's ban on artificial contra- 
ception, condemning it once again in his encyclical Hwnanae Vitae. 
For much of the Church, as for the world outside it, the 1970s were 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 703 

a period of disillusionment, of falling attendances, of declining 
authority, bitter internal divisions and fading faith, with thousands 
of priests renouncing their vocations. The Jesuits, the largest and 
most influential of the Church's orders, were one example. When 
the Council opened, there were 36,000 of them, twice as many as 
there had been in the 1920s. This expansion was reversed in the 
second half of the 1960s, and in the 1970s the Jesuits declined by a 
third; the number of students and novices dropped from 16,000 to 
a mere 3,000. 21 

Pope John Paul n, reflecting the new spirit of realism, conser- 
vatism and the return to authority which characterized the transi- 
tion from the 1970s to the 1980s, carried through a restoration of 
traditional Catholicism. Just as the railway age of the nineteenth 
century, taking pilgrims to Rome, Lourdes and other devotional 
centres, had reinvigorated Catholicism under papal leadership, so 
now John Paul used the jet and the helicopter to make global travel 
a routine part of his pontificate, and drove in a specially constructed 
glass-topped vehicle, known as the Popemobile, to show himself to 
the largest possible number. Throughout the 1980s and even, 
despite his age, into the 1990s, he visited virtually all parts of the 
world, often several times, and attracted some of the largest crowds 
in history. By the end of 1990 over 200 million had attended his 
services. In May 1981 he survived an assassination attempt and 
resumed his foreign tours as soon as he had recovered. In Africa 
and Latin America, congregations of a million or more assembled 
for his open-air services. In Ireland half the entire population turned 
out to hear him. In Poland at Czestochowa, a notable shrine of the 
Virgin, there was a congregation of 3.5 million, the largest crowd 
ever recorded. 22 

These gatherings showed both the reach of Christianity and how 
much it was changing demographically. When John Paul II took 
office in 1978, there were 739,126,000 Roman Catholics - about 
18 per cent of a total world population of 4,094,110,000. This 
body was a powerful educational and cultural force, since it ran 
79,207 primary and over 28,000 secondary schools and provided 
nearly a million university places. In the early 1960s, Catholics 
from the traditional European heartlands (plus North America) still 
made up 51.5 per cent of the whole. But by John Paul n's accession, 
Catholicism had become essentially a Third World religion. Of the 
sixteen countries with Catholic populations of over 10 million, 
eight were Third World, the order being Brazil (with over 100 mil- 
lion Catholics and by far the largest contingent of bishops, 330, in 
the Church), Mexico, Italy, Argentina, Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, 
France, Spain, Poland, West Germany, Czechoslovakia, the United 



704 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

States, Zaire and the Philippines. 23 By the year 1990 well over 60 
per cent of Catholics lived in developing countries, chiefly in Latin 
America and Africa, and it was calculated that, by the end of the 
1990s, the figure would rise to 70 per cent. Catholicism was not 
only ceasing to be predominantly European: it was becoming urban, 
indeed megapolitan. By 2000 AD a high proportion of Catholics 
would live in giant cities of over 5 million, many in the two largest 
cities of all, Mexico City, with a projected population of 31 million, 
and Sao Paulo with 26 million. 24 While the highest numbers of 
Catholics were in Latin America, as a result of high birth-rates 
which had more than doubled the population since 1945, Catho- 
licism was actually growing through conversion fastest in black 
Africa. A mid-1970s survey showed that Catholicism, which had 
doubled the number of its missionaries since 1950, had spread most 
in the general expansion of Christianity in Africa, from about 25 
million in 1950 to some 100 million in 1975. 25 By the early 1990s 
the number of Catholics in Southern, Central and East Africa was 
believed to be about 125 million. 

Yet in the advanced countries, even Catholicism - despite all the 
efforts of Pope John Paul II - was not immune to erosion. In the 
United States, the figures suggest that regular church and chapel 
attendance on Sunday, per capita, peaked in the 1950s (as against 
the late 1880s in Europe). Attendance among Catholics, as opposed 
to most other mainstream Christian churches, continued to rise 
until the mid-1970s, when it reached a plateau; during the late 
1980s there was evidence of an aggregate decline, prompted by seri- 
ous disagreements within the Church in North America over con- 
traception, annulment of marriages (which became markedly more 
difficult to obtain under John Paul n), the treatment of homosexu- 
als, the role of women in the clergy and other contentious issues, on 
all of which the Pope took conservative positions. Similar patterns 
were reported in France, Italy and Spain, though not in Poland and 
Germany. In Britain, where total Christian regular church atten- 
dance on Sunday fell below the 10-per-cent mark in the 1980s, an 
authoritative survey, the English Church Census, published in 
March 1991, concluded that during the ten years 1981-90, the 
English churches as a whole had lost 500,000 regular Sunday wor- 
shippers. Apart from Baptists, attendance at all the mainstream 
churches had fallen. The Church of England, the third largest 
group, had forfeited 9 per cent of its faithful; but the Roman 
Catholic Church, though still the largest, had lost an alarming 14 
per cent. The chief gainers had been the charismatic and fundamen- 
talist sects on the fringes of Nonconformity. 26 

What the world witnessed, during the late 1970s, throughout the 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 705 

1980s and into the 1990s, was a widespread retreat from the 
churches and established religious bodies which had sought to 
rationalize their beliefs and come to terms with societies which in 
general were non-religious; and simultaneously, the growth of fun- 
damentalism, which bypassed rationalism, stressed the overwhelm- 
ing importance of faith and miraculous revelation and rejected the 
idea of compromise with institutions based on non-belief. The out- 
standing symbol of 'rationalizing' religion was the World Council of 
Churches, which throughout the 1980s had stressed ecumenicalism, 
minimalist beliefs and the need to reach agreement with Marxism 
and other anti-religious creeds. It lost support throughout the 
decade, and came close to discrediting itself finally in February 
1991 during its meeting in Canberra. Some delegates were shocked 
to find in the foyer a stall advocating more women clergy, which 
'displayed pornographic cartoons including a couple performing an 
unnatural act'; one well-known religious leader attending the meet- 
ing 'asked a female delegate to perform a sexual act on him' and 
then 'beat her over the head until she surrendered to his demand'. 27 
Another form of rationalizing Christianity was the so-called 'libera- 
tion theology', ultimately derived from Germany, which sought to 
transform Catholic activism into a radical political force, operating 
from 'basic communities' organized on the Communist cell princi- 
ple, and even advocating violence for the overthrow of oppressive 
governments of the Right. During the 1970s and 1980s it attracted 
much attention in the media and was said to be flourishing in Brazil 
and Central America. In Castro's Communist satellite, Nicaragua, 
four Catholic priests professing this radicalized form of Christi- 
anity held ministerial office in 1979, and two years later refused to 
obey orders from their bishops to return to their pastoral duties. A 
section of the Latin American clergy, which hitherto had usually 
underwritten established authority, had become strongly antino- 
mian during the years 1965-80. 28 Yet this politicization of Catholi- 
cism, though a source of fascination to the media, was confined to a 
small portion of the elites. Most priests and bishops remained 
strongly traditionalist; the laity still more so. When liberation theol- 
ogy was put to any kind of popular test, it failed to make much 
impact. Nicaragua's Sandinista government, led by the Marxist 
Daniel Ortega and including the supporters of liberation theology 
who backed and worked with him, was decisively defeated the first 
time it was subjected to free elections in 1990. 

Indeed, the two outstanding religious phenomena in Latin 
America during the 1970s, and still more in the 1980s, both attract- 
ing wide popular support almost everywhere, were fundamentalist. 
The first was evangelical Protestantism, hitherto banned from 



706 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

proselytizing in Latin America as a result of concordats between 
states and the Catholic Church, or laws granting Catholicism privi- 
leged status. The lifting of these prohibitions led to a large-scale 
missionary effort by Protestant groups, mainly directed and 
financed from the United States, where evangelicalism, making full 
use of television, radio and cable, made huge advances in the 1960s, 
1970s and 1980s, constituting what was popularly known as 'the 
Moral Majority'. Its efforts in Latin America, especially in Mexico, 
Central America, Colombia, Brazil and Venezuela, met with 
remarkable success, and by the late 1980s a new generation of 
trained Latin American evangelists were at work. The Catholic 
response was the growth, which seems to have been quite spon- 
taneous in origin, of a form of religious observance not essentially 
different from Protestant evangelicalism, and known as religiosidad 
popular, anti-political, anti-intellectual, spontaneous, devotional, 
fervent and with a strong mass appeal among the poor. But whereas 
Protestant fundamentalism stressed the Bible, Catholic 
fundamentalism was characterized by the cult of saints (often 
unofficial local ones), relics and shrines. 

John Paul II gave the movement the stamp of his approval in 
January 1979, when he insisted on visiting the shrine of the Virgin 
of Guadalupe and placed the people of Mexico under the protection 
of that Indian-style Madonna. But of course these popular cults 
were often heterodox, mixtures of paganism and Christianity, nur- 
tured in villages and then brought by migrating peasants into the 
sprawling cities to protect themselves from urban alienation. These 
syncretistic forms of Christianity have always tended to appear in 
periods of rapid population growth, racial and cultural mingling, 
movement and change. They were particularly marked in Brazil, 
where the large black population whose forebears had been slaves 
retained modes of belief and worship ultimately drawn from 
Africa. 29 They were a still more important feature in Africa itself, a 
boiling maelstrom of expansion, revivalism, strange sects, gnosti- 
cism, evangelism, Christian Zionism, fervent orthodoxy and fanatic 
zeal, rather as primitive Christianity had been in Asia Minor and 
the Balkans in the third century AD. 30 While theologians at the 
Universities of Tubingen and Utrecht were diminishing the total of 
Christian belief, strange charismatics in the slums of Mexico City 
and Sao Paulo, of Recife and Rio, of Cape Town, Johannesburg, 
Lagos and Nairobi, were adding to it. The first group spoke for 
thousands; the second for scores of millions. 

The fundamentalist spirit of Islam, gathering force in the third 
quarter of the twentieth century, became a powerful, popular and, 
to many, frightening phenomenon in the 1980s. It affected all the 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 707 

great religions, often in response to fundamentalist outbreaks in 
their traditional rivals. Thus the revival of Islamic extremism, which 
began in the 1950s and by the early 1990s had spread to most of 
the Muslim world, provoked violent reactions. In India, for in- 
stance, the Hindu-based Janata Dal Party had, by the end of the 
1980s, been goaded into forms of religious extremism by Islamic 
pressure, and early in 1991 there was widespread violence in north- 
ern India as Hindus fought to reclaim the shrines of their gods 
where mosques had been built. Islamic fundamentalism also helped 
along the revival of Jewish ultra-Orthodoxy, started in New York 
under the Rabbi Meir Kahane, then transferring itself to Israel to 
promote both the expanding 'historical' frontiers of the Kingdom of 
David, and the transformation of Israel into a Jewish theocracy. 
This led to running legal battles and street fights with the Israeli 
authorities, and more serious violence between fundamentalist 
Jewish settlers and Arabs in the West Bank. 31 

Islamic militancy was the most important of the new fundamen- 
talist forces because of the vast numbers involved and the huge 
geographical spread, curving in a long crescent from West Africa, 
through the southern Mediterranean, the Balkans, Asia Minor and 
the Middle East, across the interior of Southwest Asia, the Indian 
subcontinent and down into Malaysia and the Philippines. Its politi- 
cal, military and indeed cultural impact was felt over three conti- 
nents. It was advancing in black Africa, often with the aid of Arab 
money, arms and indeed force. In the 1960s the ruling northern elite 
in the Sudan sought to impose Islam on the Christian south. In the 
1970s and 1980s Gadafy tried to convert all of Chad by fire and 
sword, or rather by napalm and helicopter, just as Amin tried to 
Islamize Uganda by mass-murder. But Islam enjoyed natural growth 
as well and a new dynamism fuelled by its own internal revival. 
One reason for this was the increase of Muslim self-confidence, 
indeed stridency, as a result of the new wealth from oil. By filtering 
down to the masses it also made possible an unprecedented expan- 
sion in the number of Mecca pilgrims, flown by chartered jet to kiss 
the Kaaba and returning full of zeal for Islam, which is a far more 
political and this-worldly faith than Christianity. The prime benefi- 
ciaries of the new Islamic zealotry were not the orthodox Sunni 
Muslims, who constituted the majority, especially among Arabs, 
and represented the right-thinking, conservative, static establish- 
ment of Islam, including the two chief ruling families, the 
Hashemites and the Saudis. The effect of the revival was to reani- 
mate the dramatic bifurcation of Islam in the seventh and eighth 
centuries, when Islamic nonconformity, in the shape of the Shi'ites 
and the many heterodox sects they spawned, such as the Druzes, the 



708 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

Ismailis and the Alawites, made their appearance. Shi'ia Islam, with 
its messianic belief in the 'hidden Imam' and its consequent millen- 
narianism, its cult of martyrs and suffering, its puritanism and not 
least its addiction to violence (the Assassins were Shi'ia Ismailis), 
has always been a source of disorder in the Muslim world, especial- 
ly in Syria, the Lebanon and Iraq, where they are numerous, and 
Iran, where they form the majority. They claimed that the Sunnis 
always, when possible, treated them like second-class citizens. The 
Islamic revival led them to demand a new deal for themselves as 
well as producing a new assertiveness by Islam towards the infidel 
world. They created a belt of crisis which cut across the familiar 
Cold War patterns. 

The first consequence was the destruction of the Lebanon, a 
small but highly civilized country, the sole Arab democracy, whose 
survival was made possible only by a series of gentleman's agree- 
ments among the elites of the main religious groups: Maronites 
(Eastern Christians in communion with Rome), Orthodox 
Christians, Sunni and Shi'ia Muslims and Druzes. Such agreements 
were made workable only by self-denying ordinances among all the 
religions and sects to forswear fanaticism. The Arab-Israeli dispute 
made such restraint increasingly difficult. In 1949 Lebanon had 
been obliged to accommodate 300,000 Palestine refugees, 100,000 
of them in fifteen major camps, five of them ringing the capital, 
Beirut, and controlling all routes in and out of it. Each successive 
Arab-Israeli crisis dealt massive blows to Lebanon's fragile unity. In 
1958, following the Suez invasion, there was the first hint of civil 
war, which produced an American intervention at the request of the 
dominant Maronites. The 1967 war doubled the number of 
refugees in Jordan, and when King Hussein threw the militant 
Palestinians out of his kingdom by force in 1970-1, they moved 
into Lebanon, defying the legitimate authorities and forming 
militant enclaves ruled by the terrorists of the PLO. In 1975, follow- 
ing the Yom Kippur War, President Sadat of Egypt, with the encour- 
agement of the United States, took the historic step of opening 
peace negotiations with Israel. The 'Camp David process', named 
after the presidential mountain retreat in Maryland where President 
Carter first brought Sadat and Prime Minister Begin of Israel 
together, ended in a peace treaty of immense benefit to both parties: 
the one potentially mortal threat to Israel was removed, and Egypt 
was released from the burden of a vendetta which had nothing to 
do with her and which was wrecking all her economic aspirations. 
The Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty was one of the few creative acts of a 
dismal decade, and made peace between Israel and all her 
neighbours not only possible but, in the long run, inevitable. 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 709 

The word 'inevitable 5 is justified because whereas, up to the 
1980s, Arab confidence in the eventual failure of Israel (indeed the 
extermination of Zionism, frequently stated as an object of Arab 
policy in Arabic broadcasts) had been buoyed up by demographic 
trends, both within Israel and the 'occupied territories', and in the 
Middle East as a whole, at the end of the 1980s the trend was re- 
versed. On 3 January 1985 it was revealed that a secret airlift, oper- 
ated with the consent of Sudan, had enabled 25,000 Falashas, black 
Jews of a tribe which for centuries had lived in Ethiopia, to be 
brought to Israel as settlers (a further 10,000 were flown to Israel in 
1991). This was only a foretaste of a mass emigration by Russian 
Jews, allowed to leave the Soviet Union as a result of political 
changes there, which reached 100,000 in 1989, rose to over 
200,000 in 1990, and continued to accelerate. Israeli authorities 
had always assumed that no more than 1.5 million Jews lived in 
Russia. By the end of 1990 it was clear that the total was very much 
larger, and might be as high as 4 million, almost all of whom 
wished to leave. By a decision of the Soviet government such emi- 
grants were obliged to proceed straight to Israel. This mass immi- 
gration into Israel, actual and potential, had the effect of altering 
the demographic prospect completely, and strengthened the likeli- 
hood that other states, notably Syria, would eventually want to 
follow Egypt's example and make peace. 

But in the meantime the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty, signed finally 
on 26 March 1979, led directly to Lebanese civil war, started by the 
plo and broadened by the intervention of Syria, whose ruling Awali 
sect wished to capture from Egypt the leadership of the Arab world. 
The precarious balance of communal power in Lebanon was thus 
destroyed. It had been preserved hitherto by the conciliatory atti- 
tude of the local Higher Muslim Council, which spoke for all 
Muslim sects including the Druzes, and was dominated by an old- 
fashioned Sunni establishment. This was overthrown when the 
Shi'ites, led by a Persian fundamentalist of Lebanese origin called 
the Imam Moussa Sadr, called for a separate Shi'ia Muslim Higher 
Council. The Shi'ites formed a destructive alliance with the secular 
Left of the plo. All the sects, Christian and Muslim, produced pri- 
vate armies. In the ensuing fighting, which raged fiercely in 1975-6, 
1982, 1988-90 and sporadically in the intervals, Israel as well as 
Syria was forced to intervene, back-street gangsters flourished as 
respectable guerrilla and political leaders, 40,000 people were 
killed, Beirut was destroyed as a commercial centre, Lebanon ceased 
to exist as an independent country, the ancient Christian commu- 
nity lost its paramountcy, though it held on to its main settlement 
areas, and a light of reason in the Arab world was extinguished. 32 



710 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

In 1982 Israel felt obliged to conduct a full-scale invasion. This led 
to the expulsion and dispersal of the PLO, first to Tunisia, then also 
to Iraq. But Israel quickly found herself blamed for a massacre of 
Palestinian refugees, carried out by Christian militiamen at the 
Sabra and Chatila camps in West Beirut, and as early as spring 
1983 she was beginning to withdraw her forces, keeping only a 
security zone in the south of the country. Gradually, Syrian forces 
filled the vacuum of power in Lebanon, though they found it no 
easier to establish a secure presence there than did the Israelis. By 
the early 1990s, Lebanon, once the richest and most civilized Arab 
state, found itself fragmented and almost destitute, with no focus of 
unity. 

The Islamic fundamentalists, mainly but not exclusively Shi'ites, 
struck again and again at the forces of stability in the Middle East. 
They tried hard to overthrow the regime in Egypt and finally suc- 
ceeded in murdering Sadat in 1981.. In 1979 they seized the shrine 
of Mecca by force, in an attempt to destroy the Saudi royal family, 
and were ejected from its underground labyrinth of tunnels only 
after a week of bitter fighting. There was another gruesome incident 
on 30 July 1987 when 155,000 Iranian Shi'ite pilgrims rioted, tried 
to seize Mecca, and were slaughtered in their hundreds by Saudi 
police. But their most resounding success came in 1978-9 when 
they toppled the Shah of Iran from his Peacock Throne. This cata- 
clysmic event, much misunderstood, casts a searchlight on the 
forces at work in modern times. The regime should have been 
immensely strong. It had been armed to the teeth by the Americans 
and British, as the residual 'stabilizing force' in the Gulf after the 
Western military withdrawal. The monarchy, immensely ancient 
and respected as an institution, was the one unifying force in a 
country which was essentially a collection of racial, religious, cul- 
tural, linguistic and geographical minorities, most of whom hated 
each other and many of whom looked to the throne for protection. 
By contrast, the Shi'ite fundamentalists of Qum and Meshed spoke 
only for a section of the Muslims, and their leader, the Ayatollah 
Khomeini, was much hated as well as loved and feared. The Shah 
was not overthrown because he was pro-West, or a capitalist, or 
corrupt, or cruel - most Middle Eastern rulers were cruel and by 
their standards he was a liberal - and least of all because he was 
king. The truth is he destroyed himself by succumbing to the fatal 
temptation of modern times: the lure of social engineering. He fell 
because he tried to be a Persian Stalin. 

It was in the blood. His father was a Persian Cossack officer who 
seized power in 1925 and modelled himself on Ataturk, the great 
secularizer; later he came to admire and envy the ruthlessness with 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 71 1 

which Stalin collectivized the peasants. He said grimly: 'I have made 
the Iranians realize that when they get up in the morning they must 
go to work, and work hard all day long.' 33 He personally defenes- 
trated an idle minister. His son came to the throne as a child in 
1944, ruled from the age of twenty-one but entered on his gran- 
diose visions only in the 1960s with the rapid increase in oil rev- 
enues. He began by giving away the royal lands to the peasants, 
then changed his mind and decided, like Stalin, to modernize the 
country in his own lifetime. There was no more popular demand for 
this than in Soviet Russia: it was revolution from above, what the 
Shah called the 'White Revolution'. His schemes changed from sim- 
ple investment planning to megalomaniac social engineering in a 
series of leaps. Planning was first introduced in the late 1940s: the 
first Seven Year Plan involved a modest investment of $58 million 
mainly in agriculture, primary products, roads and cement. The sec- 
ond Seven Year Plan, 1955-62, jumped to a billion dollars, on 
roads, railways and dams for power and irrigation. A third, Five 
Year Plan spent $2.7 billion, 1963-8, on pipelines, steel and petro- 
chemical industries and, moving into the social field, began to shove 
people around for the first time. The Fourth Plan, 1968-72, spent 
$10 billion on roads, ports, airports, dams, natural gas, water, 
housing, heavy metallurgy and agro-business. The Stalinist phase 
began with the Fifth Plan, 1973-8, which started with a spending 
target of $36 billion, quickly jacked up to $70 billion when oil 
prices quadrupled. 34 For the financial year 1978-9, the Shah's last, 
some $17.2 billion went on development alone, three hundred times 
the cost of the entire first plan, plus a further $8.5 billion on health, 
education and welfare, as well as $10 billion on military spending. 35 
The planners, educated abroad and known as massacbuseti (after 
the famous Institute of Technology, MIT), had the arrogance of party 
apparatchiks and a Stalinist faith in centralized planning, the virtues 
of growth and bigness. Above all, they lusted for change. There was 
an inferno of extractive expansion: gold, salt, lime, phosphorus, 
gypsum, marble, alabaster, precious stones, coal, lead, zinc, 
chromite, iron, and the sixth-largest copper industry in the world, 
newly built in Central Iran with 25,000 miners living in brick bar- 
racks. Four nuclear reactors were started, plus a nationwide rash of 
factories producing cars, diesel engines, elevators, bicycles, water- 
meters, asbestos, foundry-sand, glucose, aluminium, clothes, trac- 
tors, machine-tools and arms. The Shah boasted that his White 
Revolution combined 'the principles of capitalism . . . with social- 
ism, even communism .... There's never been so much change in 
3,000 years. The whole structure is [being turned] upside down.' 36 
By trying to spend too much too fast he bought himself inflation. To 



712 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

put the brake on inflation, he organized student-gangs to arrest 
'profiteering' merchants and small businessmen. This merely gave 
youth a taste for violence and cost the throne the bazaar. 

That might not have mattered for the Shahs had hitherto always 
been able to invoke the conservative countryside to tame urban rad- 
icalism. But the Shah's gravest error was to alienate the countryside, 
whose peasant sons formed his army. Having given the royal lands 
and the confiscated estates of the clergy to the peasants, he found, 
predictably, that output declined. In 1975, having thus turned Iran 
from a food-exporting to a food-importing nation, he changed the 
policy and embarked on collectivization. The model was the 
1972-5 Dez irrigation project in northern Khuzestan, which had 
taken back 100,000 hectares of prime farmland, given to the peas- 
ants only five years before, and turned everything and everybody 
over to what was called 'consolidated agricultural management'. 
Thus yeoman farmers were turned into a rural proletariat, earning a 
dollar a day and living in cinder-block two-room houses, back-to- 
back in new 'model towns' called shabraks? 1 The law of June 1975 
in effect extended this model to the whole country, forcing the inde- 
pendent peasants into several hundred 'agro-business units' or vast 
'farm corporations' or into 2,800 co-operatives. It is true that the 
peasants, while relinquishing their freeholds, got shares in the new 
companies. But in essentials it was not very different from forced 
collectivization. 38 The scheme involved knocking 67,000 small vil- 
lages into 30,000 larger ones, each big enough to justify clinics, 
schools, piped water and roads. Large families were broken up. 
Menacing convoys of bulldozers and earth-moving equipment, 
often of stupendous size, would descend, without warning or expla- 
nation, upon 2,000-year-old village communities, and literally 
uproot them. The place-names of tiny hamlets, even orchards, were 
changed. The agricultural planners and the 'justice corpsmen', as 
they were called, behaved with all the arrogance of the party 
activists Stalin used to push through his programme, though there 
was no resistance and no actual brutality. 39 The programme as a 
whole was a deliberate assault on tribal diversity, local patriarchs, 
family cohesion, provincial accents and tongues, regional dress, cus- 
toms and interest groups, anything in fact which offered alternative 
centres of influence to the all-powerful central state. It was funda- 
mental to the White Revolution that the ultimate freehold of all 
land and property resided in the crown, that is the state. Thus the 
Shah, despite his liberalism and his public posture as a pillar of the 
West, was pursuing a policy of radical totalitarianism. He argued: 
'It shows that if you think that it is only through bloodshed that 
you can make a revolution, you are wrong.' 40 But it was the Shah 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 713 

who was wrong. The elders were pushed into the shahraks but their 
grown sons went into the cities and formed the Ayatollah's mob; 
and their brothers in the army were reluctant to shoot them when 
the time came. The Shah was reluctant too. Collectivization is im- 
possible without terror; and he had not the heart for it. When it 
came to the point, at the close of 1978, he felt he had been betrayed 
by his ally, President Carter. 41 But he also betrayed himself. In the 
end he lacked the will to power. 

Both Shah and President betrayed the Iranians. They handed over 
a nation, including many defenceless minorities, to a priesthood 
which had no tradition or training for the exercise of political 
power. 42 The result was a barbarous terror exercised by a small 
group of fundamentalist despots, acting in the name of an 'Islamic 
Republic' established in February 1979. In the first two years of its 
existence it executed over 8,000 people, convicted in Islamic courts 
of being 'enemies of Allah'. 43 The Khomeini terror moved first 
against the former regime, slaughtering twenty-three generals, 400 
other army and police officers and 800 civilian officials; then 
against supporters of rival Ayatollahs, 700 of whom were executed; 
then against its former liberal-secular allies (500) and the Left 
(100). From the start it organized the execution or murder of lead- 
ers of ethnic and religious minorities, killing over 1,000 Kurds, 200 
Turkomans, and many Jews, Christians, Shaikhis, Sabeans and 
members of dissident Shi'ia sects as well as orthodox Sunnis. 44 Its 
persecution of the Bahais was particularly ferocious. 45 Churches 
and synagogues were wrecked, cemeteries desecrated, shrines van- 
dalized or demolished. The judicially murdered ranged from the 
Kurdish poet Allameh Vahidi, aged 102, to a nine-year-old girl, con- 
victed of 'attacking revolutionary guards'. 

Khomeini's harassment of Iran's Sunni minority (many of them 
Iraqis), and reciprocal measures against Persian Shi'ites in Iraq, res- 
urrected Iran-Iraq border disputes, which have poisoned their rela- 
tions ever since the creation of Iraq by Britain in 1920-2. In 
September 1980, reports that most of Iran's senior officers had been 
murdered or fled, and that its armed forces, especially its once 
formidable air force, were in disarray, tempted Iraq's Baathist dicta- 
tor, Saddam Hussein, to launch a full-scale invasion of Iran, begin- 
ning with air attacks on the world's largest oil refinery at Abadan. 
He hoped to secure control of the Shatt-al-Arab, the main sea-outlet 
of the Tigris-Euphrates, and possibly Iran's oilfields. In fact the war, 
instead of being a quick Iraqi triumph, lasted eight years, and cost 
(on both sides) over a million dead. Saddam ended up with very 
little: a few miles of unimportant territory, which he quickly relin- 
quished in 1990 when he found himself in trouble with the West. 



714 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

During the war itself, however, the West, though neutral, tended to 
assist Iraq. It was well aware of the cruelty and gangsterism of 
Saddam's regime. But it was still more hostile to Khomeini's Iran, 
which had invaded the American embassy and held hostage its staff 
(releasing them only in return for a ransom), as well as financing 
and arming various anti-Western terrorist groups. 

So Western warships patrolled the Gulf, clearing Iranian mines 
from the sea-lanes used by tankers exporting Arab oil, while doing 
nothing to impede Iraqi air attacks on Iranian tankers. Indeed, 
when Iraqi jets, on 27 May 1987, mistakenly fired Exocet missiles 
at the American frigate Stark, killing thirty-seven of its crew, 
Washington's protest was muted; and American readiness to attack 
Iranian targets deemed hostile was demonstrated on 3 July 1988, 
when the US Navy Warship Vincennes mistakenly shot down an 
Iranian civil airliner, killing 290 people, in the belief that it was a 
warplane. Most serious of all, however, was the complacency with 
which the West, while denying arms to Iran, sold them to Saddam, 
who was also receiving huge supplies, particularly of modern tanks, 
artillery, armoured troop carriers and aircraft, from the Soviet 
Union. 

The Iran-Iraq war came to an inconclusive end on 8 August 
1988. But Saddam, far from disarming, actually increased the size 
of his armed forces, which by 1990 were the fourth-largest in the 
world. With Western agreement, he had been subsidized militarily 
during the war by the Sunni-dominated Gulf oil states, in addition 
to Iraq's own enormous oil revenues (by the end of the 1980s it was 
the second largest oil producer, after Saudi Arabia, in the Middle 
East); virtually all these huge sums, amounting during the 1980s to 
something approaching $100 billion, went on creating a war 
machine. The Israelis did not share the West's indifference to Iraq's 
growing military power, especially when their intelligence sources 
revealed that a French-built nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, was 
being used to produce material for nuclear bombs. On 7 June 1981 
Israeli aircraft destroyed the reactor. But Saddam continued to scour 
the world for weapons of mass destruction and the means to make 
them; by the end of the 1980s he had acquired both a chemical and 
a biological warfare capability, and indeed in 1989 he killed over 
5,000 Kurds, alleged to be rebels, by dropping chemical bombs on 
their villages. 

Saddam was well-known to Western governments as a man of 
exceptional depravity, from a clan of professional brigands. 46 He 
had acquired his first gun at the age of ten (and committed his first 
murder, it was claimed, two years later). As head of the secret police 
from 1968, and as president from 1979, his career had been punc- 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 715 

tuated both by the slaughter of his colleagues and rivals, often by 
his own hand, and by atrocities on the largest possible scale, not 
least mass public hangings of Jews. A tract he published testified to 
his ambition to extend Iraq's borders on the model of the ancient 
Babylonian empire. Nonetheless, while American and British mili- 
tary assistance tapered off in the 1980s, France continued to supply 
modern weapons, West Germany provided hi-tech military expertise 
(some of it illegally), and the Russians not only poured in arms but 
kept over a thousand military experts in Iraq to train Saddam's 
armed forces in their use, and in tactics and strategy. 

Soviet policy, which became increasingly confused as the 1980s 
progressed, was dictated by its assumption that the Baathist regimes 
were its most reliable allies in the Middle East; so it armed Baathist 
Syria, as well as Baathist Iraq, though the two were irreconcilable 
enemies. The West felt it must lean, if anything, towards Iraq since 
Iran was identified with international terrorism, and especially with 
the kidnapping by Shi'ite militias of Western citizens in Beirut. It is 
true that terrorism in the 1980s took a variety of forms. An Indian 
terrorist group was probably responsible for the mid-Atlantic 
destruction of an Air India Boeing, all aboard perishing; and Sikh 
terrorists assassinated the Indian Prime Minister, Mrs Indira 
Gandhi, on 31 October 1984. A Tamil terrorist was believed 
responsible for the murder of Rajiv Gandhi in May 1991. During 
the early 1980s the Russian KGB was still training terrorists from 
various nations in special camps in the Crimea and elsewhere, and 
the Soviet government itself was guilty of a terrorist act on 1 
September 1983 when, quite deliberately and without warning, it 
shot down a civil airliner, a Boeing 747 of (South) Korean Airways, 
which had strayed off course into Soviet territory. 

Some murderous acts remained mysteries: the Swedish police 
were unable to discover who killed the country's Prime Minister, 
Olaf Palme, on 28 February 1986, the only suspect they produced 
being acquitted. On the other hand, there was no doubt that the 
Irish Republican Army was responsible for an attempt to murder 
the entire British Cabinet on 12 October 1984 in a Brighton hotel 
during the annual Conservative Party conference, and for a further 
shot at the Cabinet in January 1991, when home-made mortar 
bombs were unsuccessfully fired at 10 Downing Street. The IRA got 
its Semtex explosives from Czechoslovakia, the makers; when 
Vaclav Havel became the Czech President in 1990 he reported that 
Semtex records showed the IRA had been supplied by the 
Communist regime with enough explosives to last one hundred 
years. But the IRA also received vast quantities of weapons (some of 
them intercepted and identified) from Gadafy's Libya, from other 



716 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

Middle Eastern states and from the plo. Iranian-supported groups 
were responsible for perhaps the most successful terrorist assault of 
all, two coordinated suicide-bomb attacks in Beirut on 23 October 
1983, which killed 241 American marines and 58 French para- 
troopers, guarding their embassies. Middle Eastern groups, financed 
by Iran, Libya or possibly both, also blew up a West Berlin dis- 
cotheque patronized by American soldiers, on 5 April 1986, and a 
Pan Am 747 over Lockerbie in Scotland on 21 December 1988, 
killing its 258 passengers and crew and eleven on the ground. 

All these outrages, and many more minor ones, without excep- 
tion, failed in their political objectives. During the 1980s and still 
more into the 1990s, the West was less inclined than in the 1970s to 
have any kind of dealings with terrorist groups; indeed, internation- 
al policing became highly coordinated, and it became progressively 
easier to secure the extradition of wanted terrorists. The effect of 
international and especially state-backed terrorism was, rather, to 
distort the West's judgement in dealing with certain Middle Eastern 
states. In particular, America's obsession with hostile Iran, which in 
turn always referred to the United States as 'the Great Satan', led it 
to underestimate the growing threat from Iraq. Rarely in diplomacy 
can the old adage 'My enemy's enemy is my friend' have applied 
more aptly. 

So Iran found itself isolated. As a rule, a non-white nationalist 
leader who treated Washington as his prime enemy could expect a 
sympathetic response from the Western intelligentsia. But Khomeini 
had a unique talent for alienating potential allies. In 1988 the 
Anglo-Indian author Salman Rushdie, who had been a minor liter- 
ary celebrity since he won the Booker Prize for his novel Midnight's 
Children in 1981, published another controversial work of fiction, 
The Satanic Verses. The title referred to certain verses cut from the 
Koran by the Prophet Mohammed because he believed they were 
inspired by Satan. Many found the book obscure; nonetheless it was 
on the bestseller list in London, disposing of 40,000 hardback 
copies in three months. But it angered British Muslims, who pro- 
nounced it blasphemous. On 14 January 1989, Muslims in 
Bradford publicly burned copies of the book. It was then drawn to 
the attention of the Ayatollah himself, and on 14 February he pub- 
licly announced: 'I inform the proud Muslim people of the world 
that the author of The Satanic Verses book, which is against Islam, 
the Prophet and the Koran, and all those involved in its publication 
who were aware of its content, are sentenced to death.' 47 Muslims 
were enjoined to carry out this fatwah or religious ruling. 

There was some argument among Muslim religious authorities as 
to whether the book was indeed blasphemous, and whether the 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 717 

Ayatollah was authorized to pass a death-sentence (it was con- 
firmed by his successors when he finally went to eternity, aged 
eighty-six, on 4 June 1989). But no one was taking any chances. 
The novel had long since been banned in Pakistan, India and Saudi 
Arabia. Now, it was taken off display by Britain's biggest book- 
chain, W. H. Smith, German, French and Italian publishers scrapped 
plans to bring out translations, Penguin Books postponed, then 
dropped, plans to bring out a paperback, and Rushdie himself can- 
celled an American promotional tour and went into hiding. The 
world-wide publicity sold the book in prodigious quantities, making 
Rushdie a multi-millionaire, though also a voluntary prisoner, per- 
haps for life. The literary and arts intelligentsia on both sides of the 
Atlantic - the 'beautiful people' in New York and the 'chattering 
classes' in London - joined hands to denounce the Ayatollah, his 
successors and their regime. The Left in general became almost as 
hostile to Iran as the White House, a strange conjunction. However, 
some British Labour MPs with large Pakistani minorities in their 
constituencies appeared curiously reluctant to stand up for freedom 
of publication; and the intellectuals lost a lot of enthusiasm for 
Rushdie's cause when, abruptly in December 1990, in what may 
have been a genuine conversion but looked to many like a desperate 
(and unsuccessful, as it turned out) attempt to get the fatwah lifted, 
he announced his re-conversion to Islam and apologized for any 
offence caused. 

The Khomeini regime could thus inspire fear but it could not 
make friends in any quarter. The only merit of its isolation was that 
it ended the Shah's social engineering. The confiscation of its for- 
eign assets, the eight-year war with Iraq, the virtual cessation for a 
time of oil production, and the flight of the middle class abroad or 
into hiding, brought the modern sector of the Iranian economy to a 
juddering halt, from which it was scarcely beginning to recover 
even in the early 1990s. The inevitable consequences followed: 
unemployment, breakdown of health and other basic services, mass 
epidemics, malnutrition and even starvation. Iran's horrifying 
experiences illustrated yet again the law of unintended effect. The 
Shah's state road to Utopia led only to Golgotha. 

The Islamic revival, the Shah's fall and the fundamentalist terror 
contributed directly to the beginning of civil war in Afghanistan in 
December 1979. Here was another case of social engineering lead- 
ing to barbarism, though in this case, as so often, the Utopian 
impulse came from the Communist camp. The episode was impor- 
tant because of its eventual colossal impact on the entire Soviet 
empire. The British had fought three Afghan Wars (1838-42, 
1878-80 and 1919), all well-meaning in a sense; none served to 



71 8 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

establish stability in this unruly country or 'solve' the Afghan 'prob- 
lem'. Undeterred by this experience, the Soviet Union, from a mix- 
ture of fear, greed and good intentions, plunged into the Afghan 
maze and lost itself there. Up to 1979, the Soviet government had 
aimed for the long term. It supported the non-Marxist Prince 
Mohammed Daud when he set up a constitutional monarchy in 
1953; and again twenty years later when he threw out the King and 
made himself President. In the 1950s it gave a little money; in the 
1960s it built roads from the north (ultimately to be used by its 
troops); in the 1970s it concentrated on building up a united 
Marxist party. This last object was achieved, so it thought, in 1977 
when it brought together in the People's Democratic Party three rev- 
olutionary factions led by Babrak Karmal, Mur Muhammad Taraki 
and Hafizullah Amin. By 1978 it was considered time for the social 
engineering to begin, and in April a Soviet-sanctioned putsch over- 
threw Daud. 48 

But the experience of the twentieth century shows emphatically 
that Utopianism is never far from gangsterism. The Soviet leaders 
could start revolution in Afghanistan; they could not control it. The 
trio now in power were not unlike the saturnine ideologues who 
launched the terror in Cambodia. Amin, the most forceful of them, 
was a maths teacher, who turned eagerly from the abstractions of 
numbers to quantitative bloodletting. His first act was to have thir- 
ty members of Daud's family shot before his eyes; then members of 
the government; then Daud himself. 49 According to Amnesty 
International, 12,000 prisoners were held without trial; many were 
tortured. Pushing through the Marxist-Leninist 'plan', as in 
Cambodia, involved the destruction of entire villages. According to 
one report of eye-witness accounts: 

While the soldiers started pulling down and burning the houses, thirteen 
children were rounded up and stood in line in front of their parents. Some 
of the soldiers then poked out the children's eyes with steel rods. The muti- 
lated children were then slowly strangled to death. Next it was the parents' 
turn . . . The surrounding fields were bulldozed, all trees and shrubs 
uprooted, and the entire site reduced to an ash-strewn scar. 50 

Though Karmal later accused Amin of being a 'bloodthirsty 
hangman' and 'liquidating collectively', the evidence shows he was 
equally guilty of such atrocities until March 1979, when Amin 
made himself sole dictator and packed Karmal off to Prague as 
'ambassador'. He intensified the terror, primarily because the new 
Khomeini regime was now giving aid to Muslim insurgents within 
Afghanistan. Indeed he seems to have nursed the idea of stamping 
out Islam entirely. Violence increased throughout 1979. The 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 719 

American Ambassador, an insurgency expert, was murdered, prob- 
ably by the Russians. On 12 August, thirty Russian advisers were 
skinned alive near the Muslim shrine of Kandahar. General Alexei 
Yepishev, the senior party official within the Red Army, who 
had handled the political side of the 1968 Czech invasion, 
went to Kabul, and on his return Taraki, regarded as the most 'reli- 
able' of the trio, was ordered to remove Amin. But in the course of 
a lively discussion at the Soviet Embassy, it was Taraki who was 
shot, and Moscow was obliged to send Amin a telegram (17 
September 1979) congratulating him on surviving a 'counter-revolu- 
tionary plot'. The next week, at Amin's request, three Soviet battal- 
ions moved into the country and, on 17 December, paratroops. Un- 
known to Amin they had Karmal in their baggage and on Christmas 
Day Soviet Russia began a full-scale invasion, using two of its seven 
airborne divisions. These were the 4th and 105th, all 'Greater 
Russians' (i.e., white Europeans). The main body of the 80,000- 
strong expeditionary force came down the new roads, built for this 
very purpose. Amin was murdered two days later, together with his 
wife, seven children, a nephew and twenty to thirty of his staff. 51 
The Soviet general in charge of the putsch, Viktor Papertin, com- 
mitted suicide. Karmal set up a new government, but the new year 
revealed him as nothing more than a Soviet puppet facing a general 
uprising. 52 

The initial Soviet army of 80,000 men gradually rose to 120,000, 
and occasionally was much higher. The war lasted a decade, and at 
no point were the Russians and their allies able to control much 
more than the main towns and strategic roads. At the time and 
since, the Soviet venture into Afghanistan was compared to 
American involvement in Vietnam, a miscalculation which turned 
into a disaster and shocked national self-confidence. But the paral- 
lels should not be drawn too closely. For one thing, Soviet generals 
fought the war with a ruthlessness which the Americans rarely 
showed in any part of Indo-China. They used tanks, gunships, 
bombing, napalm, chemical warfare and the systematic destruction 
of what they termed 'bandit villages'. The war inflicted horrific 
damage on Afghanistan and created social and even political up- 
heaval in all the neighbouring countries. Hundreds of thousands of 
Afghans were slaughtered (one estimate puts the death toll at one 
million). During the fighting the Red Army lost 16,000 killed and 
30,000 wounded. Vast numbers of Afghans fled the country. Out of 
a population estimated by the UN in 1985 at 18,136,000, it was 
calculated that, by the time the fighting slackened after a decade of 
savagery, about 6 million, or nearly a third, were refugees, chiefly in 
Pakistan but also in Iran. It is a dismal fact that, during the 1970s 



720 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

and 1980s, the policies followed by Russia and its Cuban, 
Ethiopian and Indo-Chinese satellites added around 12-15 million 
to the world total of displaced persons: not unworthy of compari- 
son with the horrific statistical achievements of Stalin or Hitler. 

As the Soviet leaders gradually discovered, moreover, the entire 
military operation they had launched was futile. The mujabeddin, 
as the nationalist rebels were called, could not be finally defeated, 
or even contained, by non-Afghan forces. Indeed, the man the 
Soviets finally installed as dictator-President in 1987, Dr Najibullah, 
did better without Soviet direct assistance than with it. The cost of 
the war to the already strained and declining Soviet economy was 
unbearable, and it undoubtedly played a major role in bringing 
about the fundamental changes in Moscow's thinking which began 
in the mid-1980s. On 8 February 1988, the new Soviet leader, 
Mikhail Gorbachev, announced to an initially sceptical world that 
Soviet troops would pull out of Afghanistan completely. The actual 
withdrawal started on 15 May and was completed by 15 February 
1989. 

One reason why the Soviet leaders were, in the end, anxious to 
get out of Afghanistan was their fear that the guerrilla warfare 
might spread into the nearby Muslim areas of Soviet Asia. Soviet 
state theory had no clearer answer to the problem of Islamic funda- 
mentalism than Marxism had had. The Bolsheviks had attached 
little weight to Islam as a whole. 'The putrescent tissue of Islam', 
Trotsky thought, 'will vanish at the first puff.' It was Islam which 
had to fear change, from 'the Eastern Woman, who is to be the 
great centre of future revolutions'. 53 Stalin and still more 
Khrushchev and Brezhnev sought to run Islam as they ran the 
Orthodox Church, through pliable state clerics. At the 1970 
Tashkent Muslim Conference, the Mufti Ahmed Habibullak 
Bozgoviev praised Soviet leaders who, though infidels, shaped their 
social policies according to 'laws that were dictated by God and 
expounded by his Prophet'. Another delegate said: 'We admire the 
genius of the Prophet who preached the social principles of social- 
ism.' 54 In the 1970s and 1980s, growth of pilgrimages, cults of 
sheiks (saints), living and dead, Sufism and excited crowd move- 
ments testified to the Muslim revival within Soviet territory, with 
the Muslim leaders trying, sometimes desperately, to make Muslim 
practice, including public prayers, Ramadan and other fasts, fit in 
with Soviet rules, to 'legitimize Islam' in terms of Communist soci- 
ety. They sought to encourage Muslims, especially young people, to 
join Soviet social organizations 'as Muslims'. 55 But Muslim clerics 
working for the Shah had done exactly the same. 

The Islamic revival was part of the wider problem of the Soviet 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 721 

empire, the great unresolved anomaly of the late twentieth century. 
In the preface to the 1921 edition of his Imperialism, Lenin admit- 
ted that it was written 'with an eye to the Tsarist censorship', which 
allowed it to be published in spring 1916 provided that, while 
attacking all the other empires, it left Tsarist imperialism alone. 
Hence, said Lenin, 'I was forced to take as an example . . . Japan! 
The careful reader will easily substitute Russia for Japan.' 56 Lenin's 
theory of imperialism, therefore, contained no attack on its Russian 
variety, a fact which he and still more his successors found mightily 
convenient when they came to power and decided to keep as many 
of the Tsarist possessions as they could. Greater Russian 
imperialism therefore continued, with the Tsarist provinces and 
territories transformed into internal satellites christened 'socialist 
republics'. In the 1950s Khrushchev introduced a cosmetic process 
of 'decolonization' by issuing decrees (29 August 1957, 22 June 
1959) enlarging the powers of cabinets in the federated republics 
and judicial and administrative independence. But some of his col- 
leagues did not like even these timid measures, and they were 
reversed after his fall. The 1977 constitution kept a formal federal 
system in Article 70 and even the dreamlike 'right of secession' in 
Article 72. But in every other respect it was a monolithic document 
making the aim centralization, unity and the emergence of the 
'Soviet people' as a new historic community, embracing and eventu- 
ally superseding the fifty-three principal national communities of 
the USSR. 5 ? 

Hence in essential respects Soviet imperial policy resembled 
France's: a union in which the 'colonies' would gradually acquire 
the cultural and economic advantages of equality with the Greater 
Russians in return for relinquishing their national aspirations. The 
policy, like France's, was based on fake elections and administrative 
diktat. Much more so indeed, since imperial policy was enacted by 
the party which had a monopoly of all political power, speech and 
writing, something the French imperialists had never possessed, or 
even sought. Under the 1977 constitution the principal instruments 
of integration were the armed forces and the party, with Slavs 
(chiefly Greater Russians) forming 95 per cent of all general officers 
and the Supreme Soviet. Slavs dominated all the key state bodies 
and, through the party, controlled the selection of political, admin- 
istrative and technical cadres at all levels in the non-Russian 
republics. 58 As late as the 1980s, language was used as the dissol- 
vent of national cohesion, the number of schools teaching in 
Russian rising fast and knowledge of Russian being essential for 
social advancement. Even when a complete national system of edu- 
cation existed, Russian was made obligatory from start to finish. 59 



722 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

Where national education systems were incomplete, a change to 
Russian at some stage became mandatory. As a result, national 
groups whose languages were in decline from the 1950s included 
the Baltic peoples, the Belorussians, the Moldavians, the 1.8 million 
Germans and the Jews. Even in the Ukraine, there were accusations 
that Russian was taking over from Ukrainian in higher education. 
Teaching in national languages as a proportion of the total was in 
decline throughout Soviet Russia. 60 

As we have seen, however, French assimilationist imperialism 
failed, not least for demographic reasons. One of the lessons of the 
twentieth century is that high birth-rates in the subject peoples are a 
mortal enemy of colonialism. Until the coming of Bolshevism, 
Russia had one of the world's most dynamic populations. The total 
'demographic deficit' caused by the First World War, the Civil War 
and Lenin's famine, Stalin's famine and the Great Purges, and the 
Second World War amounted to 60 million over the whole period, 
partly offset by the 20 million gained by the acquisition of the Baltic 
States, Bessarabia, Karelia, Soviet Poland, Bukovina and other terri- 
tories. 61 There was some demographic dynamism 1945-58 and the 
annual growth-rate 1959-70 was 1.34 per cent, high by European 
standards, though falling. In the 1970s it seems to have averaged 
less than 1 per cent. Soviet demographers expected the 1970 census 
to produce a figure of over 250 million, with a projection of 350 
million by the end of the century. In fact the 1970 total fell 10 mil- 
lion short and the 1979 figure produced only 262,436,000, mean- 
ing a population of not much over 300 million in 2000 AD. What 
the 1970 census revealed for the first time was a dual birth-rate: 
low in Slavic and Baltic Russia, high in the eastern USSR, Central 
Asia and the Caucasus. In the 1960s alone the Muslim population 
leapt from 24 to 35 million, adding another 14 million in the 
1970s, giving a total of about 50 million by the beginning of the 
1980s. By this point it was clear that at the turn of the century 
Central Asia and Caucasia would contribute about 100 million, 
that is a third, of the total. 62 Even by 1979, the 137 million Great 
Russians, a markedly ageing population compared to the non-Slavs, 
felt demographically on the defensive, their growth rate well under 
1 per cent, against 2.5 to 3.5 per cent for Soviet Muslims. It was 
significant, too, that among Muslims knowledge of Russian was 
declining. 63 

Soviet Russia was not the only country worried by demographic 
trends. Total world population had been 1,262 million in 1900; by 
1930 it had passed the 2-billion-mark; it was 2,515 million 
by 1950, passed the 3-billion-mark by 1960 and the 4-billion-mark 
by 1975. By 1987 it was over 5 billion, and was increasing at the 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 723 

rate of 80 million a year or 150 a minute. One calculation put the 
estimated world population in the year 2000 at 6,130 million, a 
five-fold increase during the century. 64 How were these additional 
billions to be fed? Modern developing societies go through a cycle 
known as the 'demographic transition'. In the first phase, scientific 
medicine and public health reduce infant mortality and infectious 
diseases, thus cutting the death-rate, while the birth-rate remains 
high at its old replacement rate. So population rises fast. In the sec- 
ond phase, rising living standards cause the birth-rate to fall. The 
rate of population increase slows down and eventually comes into 
balance. Between the first and second phases, however, population 
jumps alarmingly and may produce violent political consequences. 
In Europe the 'transition' began with the Industrial Revolution, 
1760-1870, and was virtually complete by the 1970s, by which 
time the birth-rate had fallen below the critical 20-per-thousand 
mark even in Russia (1964), Yugoslavia (1967) and Portugal 
and Spain (1969). The European demographic transition spans 
and helps to explain the whole cycle of colonization and 
decolonization. Japan followed a similar pattern somewhat later 
than the European average. In the 1920s its birth-rate was still 
34-per-thousand and the death-rate was falling precipitously, from 
30-per-thousand at the beginning of the decade to 18 at the end. 
Hence Japan's growing desperation. But even in the inter-war 
period the second phase was beginning, since in the later 1930s the 
birth-rate dipped below the 30-mark for the first time. Despite an 
immediately post-war upturn (a universal phenomenon) it contin- 
ued to fall thereafter, moving below the 20-mark in the second half 
of the 1950s. 65 Japan's population problem, once so threatening, 
was therefore 'solved' by the 1960s. 

The conclusions to be drawn from the theory of the demographic 
transition were twofold. First, there was no need to panic even 
when the first phase produced its maximum effects in Asia, Latin 
America and Africa. But second, there was a real need to try to 
improve industrial growth-rates in the developing countries in order 
to reach the second phase there as rapidly as possible. Birth-control 
programmes and techniques were helpful but not decisive since 
effective use of contraception was a symptom, rather than a cause, 
of the decelerating birth-rate, which was the consequence of eco- 
nomic betterment. The great thing was to push up living standards: 
this was the real answer to those who opposed growth policies on 
environmental grounds. 

It is true that a rising GNP does not necessarily bring down the 
birth-rate immediately or, when it does so, at a uniform rate. But 
there were encouraging signs in the 1970s that China was entering 



724 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

the second phase of the transition, though death-rates had still a 
good deal to fall before they stabilized. In 1979, the US Census 
Bureau estimated the population of China at 1,010 million and cal- 
culated that it had undergone a sharp drop in the rate of increase; 
this largely accounted for the deceleration in the world growth-rate, 
which fell from an average of 2.1 per cent a year in the late 1960s 
and 1.9 per cent in the early 1970s to 1.7 per cent in the late 1970s. 
By the early 1980s the Asian growth-rate as a whole was under 1.9 
per cent, not much more than the world average. The Latin- 
American growth-rate had slowed to 2.4 per cent. The only area 
where the growth rate had actually increased, from 2.5 to 2.9 per 
cent (1979 figures), was Africa, which was exactly what demogra- 
phers had expected. 66 The most important news during the 1980s, 
perhaps, was that the population of China appeared virtually to 
have stabilized. A nationwide census in July 1982 gave a total pop- 
ulation of 1,008,175,288; and a UN estimate three years later 
reported 1,059,521,000, though a figure of 1,072,200,000 was 
also published in the late 1980s. The news from India caused 
rather more concern: the 1981 census reported a population of 
685,184,692; a 1985 UN estimate showed a rise to approximately 
750,900,000, though another estimate put the total at not much 
over 748 million. These figures too indicated deceleration, though 
at a slower rate than in China. 67 Throughout the 1980s and into the 
1990s, the areas of highest population increase remained Central 
America and, above all, Africa, though in most of the latter accu- 
rate figures were increasingly difficult to obtain. Calculations made 
in the early 1960s indicated that the point at which higher living 
standards began to affect the birth-rate was when per capita 
incomes passed the barrier of $400 (at 1964 value). By the early 
1990s, and allowing for inflation which raised the figure to about 
$2,000, few Central American and virtually no black African states 
had broken through this barrier. The experience of the 1970s and 
1980s appeared, in general, to confirm the theory of population 
growth and deceleration. In short, the 'population explosion' was 
not an explosion at all but a curve linked to economic development: 
it could be contained by sensible growth policies. 

How could such policies be promoted? The problem was not 
technical. Scientific farming was practised on a prodigious scale in 
the advanced countries in the years after 1945; knowledge, and its 
dissemination, increased steadily. The capitalist, market-orientated 
agricultural systems of the United States, Canada, Australia, 
Argentina and Western Europe produced huge and increasing sur- 
pluses in the 1970s and still more in the 1980s. These areas alone 
could feed the entire world, if necessary, and at a price. The prob- 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 725 

lem, rather, was political, and especially the adoption of collectivist 
systems of agriculture, with their lack of financial incentives to 
farmers, their gross inefficiency, and not least their neglect of mar- 
ket factors and the need for an efficient distribution system. Lenin, 
like Marx, had been a victim of the 'physical fallacy': the belief that 
only those who made goods or grew food were 'honest' workers; all 
middlemen were parasites. Lenin had denounced them as 'bagmen', 
'thieves', 'plunderers', 'economic bandits' and the like. Such atti- 
tudes persisted in the Soviet system and were exported to Eastern 
Europe, and to wherever in Asia, Africa and Latin America the col- 
lectivist, Soviet-style system was implemented. 

The result was calamitous as a rule. In India, though Soviet influ- 
ence was strong, serious efforts were made to give peasant-farmers 
incentives to modernize, and both funds and technical instruction 
were made available on a large scale. As a result, India was able to 
feed itself in the 1980s and even to achieve an overall, if modest, 
surplus for export. In China investment and the promotion of some 
market practices, combined with a refusal to echo Lenin's contempt 
for the middleman - the Chinese are particularly gifted at running 
distribution systems, both at home and as expatriates - enabled 
China, too, to feed itself in the 1980s. In most other collectivist 
areas, however, the picture was dismal. 

An egregious example was Soviet Russia itself. Until 1914, agri- 
cultural modernization and the creation of large and relatively effi- 
cient peasant farms (and voluntary cooperatives) meant that Russia 
was one of the world's largest exporters of agricultural goods, send- 
ing up to 40 per cent of its produce abroad. Under Lenin it became 
a net importer of food, and the deficit widened as the years passed. 
Stalin's collectivization policy led to the murder or death by starva- 
tion of most of Russia's best peasant farmers. It branded a mark of 
Cain on the brow of the regime, which burned more deeply over the 
decades. The 1963 harvest was the first of the big post-war Soviet 
agricultural disasters. Khrushchev complained it would have been 
even worse but for his virgin-land wheat. But his policy, like 
Stalin's, was confused and subject to abrupt reversals. His much- 
boosted virgin lands scheme was a total failure and silently aban- 
doned. He oscillated between state farms and collectives, between 
centralization and decentralization. In retirement, he complained 
bitterly of food shortages. Even in a Moscow hospital reserved for 
high party officials, he whined, the food was disgusting. And 
Moscow, as always, was the food-showplace of Soviet Russia. It 
was far worse in the provinces. He met people from traditional 
food-producing areas who 'tell me loudly and bitterly how eggs and 
meat are simply unavailable, and how they had to take a couple of 



726 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

days and travel to Moscow by train', for the privilege of queuing 
for groceries. Why, he asked, should eggs and meat be unobtainable 
'after fifty years of Soviet power'? 'I look forward to the day', he 
wrote, 'when a camel would be able to walk from Moscow to 
Vladivostok without being eaten by hungry peasants on the way.' 68 
But, while he had the power, he never dared to suggest handing 
back the land to the private sector. Brezhnev and his immediate suc- 
cessors evolved more stable policies - this period was later officially 
branded 'the years of stagnation' - and kept agriculture wholly col- 
lectivized. So the food problem grew slowly but steadily worse. 
Though the Soviet Union had twice as much land under cultivation 
as any other country, including some of the best soil on earth in the 
Ukraine, together with a relatively low population density, its 
import demands, sometimes 15 million tons of grain a year, some- 
times 30 million, tended to increase. During the 1970s and 1980s, 
meat and eggs became scarce in the non-privileged shops even in 
Moscow. 

In the late 1980s, the regime's agricultural policy changed mar- 
ginally; a private sector was allowed to develop within strict limits 
and sell its produce at market (i.e., high) prices. This merely served 
to reveal the inefficiency and confusion of the state and collectivized 
sector. Attempts in 1988-91 to introduce 'realistic' accounting and 
sales, while retaining all the basic principles of collectivism, merely 
made matters worse, especially since the distribution system 
remained primitive, corrupt and grotesquely inefficient. It was cal- 
culated that 40 per cent of the food produced never reached con- 
sumers; it rotted in warehouses and railway sidings, or was eaten by 
rats. By the winter of 1990-91 there was a real threat of starvation 
in parts of Russia, and the proud Soviet regime was forced to beg 
for Western food aid. Food-rationing was reintroduced, followed in 
March 1991 by huge increases in state-determined food prices. It 
was characteristic of Soviet realities that during the referendum held 
on 16 March 1991 to determine whether the USSR should remain a 
unity, the regime, to encourage a high turnout, sold meat and veg- 
etables from its secret reserves at polling stations; but even these 
had run out by lunchtime. 69 At the root of all Soviet difficulties was 
a theory based on dishonest use of statistical evidence, compounded 
by sheer ignorance. No Marxist ever seems to have held sensible 
views on agriculture, perhaps because neither Marx nor Lenin was 
really interested in it. Marxism is an essentially urban religion. 

The Soviets were not alone in their doctrinaire improvidence. 
Poland, a big food exporter in the 1930s, also became a major net 
importer, despite her uncollectivized peasantry, because the regime 
insisted on a socialized distribution system; the position began to 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 727 

improve slowly in the years 1989-91, with the replacement of 
Communism by a freely-elected government. Romania, another 
huge exporter in the 1930s, kept up some exports, to earn hard cur- 
rency for the ferocious Nicolae Ceausescu regime, only by starving 
its own people. Hungary, from 1985 onwards, when it began to 
adopt the market system, slowly raised productivity, so by 1991 it 
was again a net exporter. Bulgaria followed, belatedly, but 
Yugoslavia was another net importer of food in the 1980s. Hence 
the COMECON group as a whole, once an area with immense sur- 
pluses, became a burden on the world, and was often kept going by 
low-cost sales from the European Community's food mountains, 
themselves the objectionable consequence of an ill-conceived system 
of subsidies. Thus one unsatisfactory agricultural system served to 
make bearable - just - another which was an unrelieved disaster. 

The Marxist-collectivist influence on agriculture had calamitous 
results in virtually all the Third World countries which came under 
its spell. Iraq and Syria, both under radical military dictatorships, 
and embracing the Utopian mirage of Big Government and state 
management as a solution to all problems, turned surpluses into 
deficit. Iran was another example. Indonesia, under Sukarno's 
brand of socialism, ceased to export rice, and hi£ successors did 
only marginally better. Socialist Burma also became a net rice im- 
porter. Some of the worst cases occurred in post-colonial Africa, 
whose leaders eagerly embarked on socialist agricultural experi- 
ments, especially in Ghana, which rapidly turned itself from the 
richest black African territory into one of the poorest, and in 
Tanzania, which also became a net food-importer, despite receiving 
more foreign aid per capita than any other country in the world. 
Africa's food-producing problems, essentially political in origin, 
were compounded by border troubles and especially civil wars, pro- 
voked by oppressive regimes which persecuted minorities for tribal, 
racial or religious reasons, and so created uprisings. This led to 
widespread starvation, during the 1980s, in Mozambique and 
Chad, to give only two examples. During the 1980s and into the 
1990s, the most distressing and widespread famines occurred in the 
Sudan and Ethiopia, partly as a result of rain-failure but chiefly 
caused by the civil war raging between north and south Sudan, 
endemic internal unrest in Ethiopia provoked by its Marxist govern- 
ment, which shifted huge masses of peasants from their traditional 
farming and grazing areas and bombed their villages, and the 
regime's wars with its neighbours, Eritrea and Somalia. 

By the end of the 1980s, even the few black African states which, 
in the 1970s, had appeared to be making a success of independence, 
such as the Ivory Coast, Kenya and Malawi, were experiencing 



728 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

increasing economic difficulties and social unrest. The plight of 
Liberia, oldest of the black states (it was founded in 1822), was piti- 
ful: in 1990 it was torn between three murderous personal armies, 
run by rival contenders to the presidency, a conflict compounded by 
a supposed 'peacekeeping force' provided by neighbouring states 
which joined in the general pillage, while the unarmed starved. 
Many of the poorer African states, indeed, had virtually dropped 
out of the international economy by the 1990s. There were signs, 
however, of a process of self-education among the ruling elites. 
Mozambique, for instance, began to dismantle its collectivist econ- 
omy in 1988 and return to a market system, inviting back Western 
firms it had once expelled. The same year South Africa reached a 
cease-fire agreement with Angola, which likewise was repudiating 
its collectivist structure; and this in turn made possible indepen- 
dence and free elections in the former mandatory territory of South 
West Africa (Namibia), which also chose a non-radical path. 

But the most important change of all came in South Africa itself, 
which from early 1989 moved decisively away from its peculiar sys- 
tem of ethnic socialism, apartheid. Events in South Africa were of 
special significance, not only because of the immense interest the 
outside world took in its racial problems but because, in many 
ways, South Africa was a microcosm of the global problems which 
confronted humanity in the early 1990s. There is no other country 
on earth whose characteristics, and the difficulties they create, are 
closer to those of the world as a whole. The point is worth enlarg- 
ing in a little detail. In the early 1990s, the world was composed of 
a white minority, with low birth-rates, and a non-white majority, 
with (on the whole) high birth-rates. So was South Africa: in 
1989-90 there were about 5 million whites and 30 million non- 
whites living there, the ratio being of the same order of magnitude 
as the world's. South African differentials in annual population 
growth, ranging from 0.77 per cent for whites, through 1.64 for 
Asians and 1.89 for 'coloureds' (mixed race), to 2.39 for blacks 
(1988 figures) were similar to those for the world. 70 Like the world 
too, South Africa, with eleven major languages, had no one tongue 
written or spoken by a majority of its inhabitants. Like the world, it 
was a combination of a First World economy and a Third World 
one. Power, including military power, was distributed between 
whites and non-whites in a similar fashion to that in the world as a 
whole. Income ratios between whites and non-whites were also 
comparable to the world's. Rapid urbanization, which enlarged the 
proportion of the population, of all races, living in towns and cities 
from 25 per cent in 1900 to over 60 per cent in 1989, also followed 
the overall world pattern and led to similar consequences: the 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 729 

growth of huge, megapolitan slums and horrifying urban crime- 
rates. Again, like over a hundred other countries throughout the 
world, South Africa had attempted to solve the resulting problems 
by enlarging its state sector and adopting a 'command economy' 
attitude, and had thereby merely compounded them. 

The flagging of the once vigorous South African economy as a 
result of apartheid-style Big Government, was, in fact, the com- 
pelling reason why F.W. de Klerk, who became leader of the ruling 
South African Nationalist Party on 2 February 1989, and President 
of the country on the following 6 September, introduced fundamen- 
tal changes in the social, economic and political system. He began a 
dialogue with the black nationalists on 8 July 1989 when he visited 
the unofficial leader of the African National Congress, Nelson 
Mandela, in jail, where he had been held for twenty-six years after 
being convicted of sabotage. The release of Mandela, and of many 
other 'political' prisoners, the lifting of the state of emergency, the 
unbanning of the ANC and similar measures followed later in 
1989-91. One result, however, was an increase in violence between 
blacks (mainly Xhosa) supporting the ANC and blacks (mainly Zulu) 
belonging to the Inkatha movement. De Klerk also acted on the 
social front. Some aspects of the apartheid legal structure, such as 
the ban on sexual relations between the races, had been abolished in 
the 1980s; others had become inoperative under the pressure of 
population movements and economic change. In February 1991 de 
Klerk announced fundamental legal changes which ended restric- 
tions on the movement of non-whites, residence and the ownership 
of houses and land - the economic core of apartheid - leaving only 
the voting system as the last operative relic of racial discrimination. 
De Klerk hoped to negotiate some form of power-sharing with 
black leaders, the white community (and many non-whites) fearing 
that adoption of a one-man-one-vote system would simply lead to 
civil war, as it had elsewhere in Africa. Here again, the dilemma was 
mirrored in the world as a whole. A world government elected by 
universal adult suffrage would place the whites in a small, perma- 
nent majority, made progressively smaller by demographic trends; 
that was the prospect universal suffrage held for South African 
whites too. 71 

One reason why, during the 1980s, Third World countries which 
had unsuccessfully tried to operate collectivist economies began to 
turn towards reform and the market was the manifest and growing 
success of the enterprise states of East Asia. These states, of which 
Japan, Hong Kong (a British crown colony), Singapore (a former 
British crown colony, self-governing from 1959, independent from 
1965), Taiwan and South Korea, were the most important, had all 



730 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

begun the post-war period with high birth-rates and low per capita 
incomes ($100 a year or below in every case except Japan). All 
rejected the collectivist solution, in industry and agriculture. 
All adopted the market system. Each illustrated the way in which 
rising per capita incomes tended to produce falls in the birth-rate, 
thus stimulating further wealth-creation. In 1960, Hong Kong, 
Singapore, Taiwan and South Korea had birth-rates ranging from 
36 (Hong Kong) to 42.9 (South Korea) per 1,000. In all four terri- 
tories, living standards rose faster in the 1960s than anywhere else 
in the world. By 1971, Hong Kong's birth-rate was below the 20- 
per-1,000 mark, Singapore's almost there, and both Taiwan and 
South Korea were below the 30-per-l,000 mark. 72 These trends 
accelerated in the 1980s. By the late 1980s, Hong Kong's per capita 
income, despite a huge influx of penniless immigrants from China, 
was believed to be not far below $10,000, Singapore's (1987) was 
$7,464, Taiwan's (1987) $5,075 and South Korea's (1988) $3,450. 
In short, these countries were rapidly ceasing to be Third World 
states and were becoming part of the First World. In fact during the 
1970s and 1980s, the growth of the Pacific enterprise state was per- 
haps the most encouraging material aspect of human society. 

The process started in Japan in the late 1940s. As in West 
Germany in 1948-9 and France in 1958, the foundation was an 
excellent constitution. As we have seen, Japan's pre-war constitu- 
tion was a shambles and its whole system of law primitive and 
unstable. The Occupation, under which America had sole power, in 
effect vested in an autocrat, General MacArthur, proved a decisive 
blessing. He was able to play the role of enlightened despot, and 
impose on Japan a revolution from above, like the Meiji Restor- 
ation of the 1860s which launched the Japanese as a modern 
nation. The 1947 constitution, drawn up in MacArthur's headquar- 
ters, was not an inter-party compromise, representing the lowest 
common denominator of agreement, but a homogeneous concept, 
incorporating the best aspects of the British and US constitutions 
and (like de Gaulle's) steering a skilful median between executive 
and legislature and between central and devolved power. 73 Taken 
in conjunction with other Occupation laws creating free 
trade unions, a free press and devolved control of the police (the 
armed forces as such were abolished), the constitution, and the 
'American era' which it epitomized, succeeded in destroying the 
mesmeric hold the state had hitherto exercised over the Japanese 
people. The American occupation of Japan was probably the 
greatest constructive achievement of American overseas policy in 
the whole post-war period, and it was carried through virtually 
single-handed. 74 And, as with Britain's creation of a model trade 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 731 

union movement for West Germany, it raised up a mighty com- 
petitor. 

What the constitutional reforms essentially did was to persuade 
the Japanese that the state existed for its citizens, and not vice- 
versa. It laid the foundations of a new and healthy individualism by 
encouraging the emergence, as an alternative centre of loyalty to the 
state, of the family and of the many Japanese institutions which 
embody the family metaphor. As in post-war Germany and Italy, the 
family, both in its biological and its extended forms, provided the 
natural antidote to the totalitarian infection. This was assisted by a 
highly effective land reform, which gave freehold tenure to 4.7 mil- 
lion tenant farmers and raised the proportion of owner-farmed land 
to over 90 per cent. Local government reform completed the pro- 
cess of creating strong, democratic, property-owning local commu- 
nities, as in Christian Democrat West Europe. 75 The independence 
of the judiciary and an American-style Supreme Court underwrote 
individual property rights and civil liberties at the expense of the 
state and the collective. 76 On these foundations was raised an 
exceptionally stable parliamentary structure, run by a liberal- 
conservative alliance (eventually called the Liberal Democratic 
Party), whose internal factions, modelled on extended families, pro- 
vided flexibility and change, but whose external unity gave the 
country's economy a consistent free enterprise framework. The 
Liberal Democrats thus provided the same cohesion as the Christian 
Democrats in Germany and Italy, and the Gaullist-Independents in 
Fifth Republic France. The parallel went further. MacArthur's post- 
war purges made possible the emergence of an elderly political 
genius who, like Adenauer, de Gasperi and de Gaulle, had been in 
opposition under the pre-war regime. Yoshida Shigeru was a former 
diplomat and thus from the background closest to Anglo-Saxon tra- 
ditions of democracy and the rule of law. He was sixty-seven when 
he became Prime Minister in 1946 and held the job with brilliant 
tenacity for nearly nine years, as one observer put it 'like a veteran 
bonsai [plum tree], of some antiquity, on whose gnarled branches 
white blossoms flower year by year'. 77 He carried the new system 
through from adolescence to maturity, and by the time he retired in 
1954 the pattern of stability was set not only for the 1950s but for 
the next quarter-century and beyond. 

As a result, Japan had completed its post-war reconstruction by 
1953, only four years after Germany, and then embarked on a 
twenty-year period of growth which averaged 9.7 per cent annually. 
This was nearly twice the rate of any other major industrial nation 
in the post-war period. The only true comparison is with the spec- 
tacular growth of the American economy in the forty years up to 



732 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

1929.78 Th e 'miracle' was based on the car, with the growth of pas- 
senger car production in the intense period 1966-72 at the astonish- 
ing rate of nearly 29 per cent a year, with Japanese car ownership 
rising by a third annually. 79 Between the end of the 1950s and the 
end of the 1970s, Japanese car production increased one hundred 
times, reaching over 10 million in 1979, roughly the American 
total, and overtaking it decisively in the early 1980s. Of this pro- 
duction about half was exported. From cars the Japanese spread 
over virtually the whole range of consumer goods. In 1979 they 
became the world's leading watch producer, with 60 million (50 
million for Switzerland). They ousted America as the leading pro- 
ducer of radios in the 1960s, and of television sets in the 1970s, the 
same decade they took the lead from Germany in camera produc- 
tion. During the 1970s, Japan's per capita industrial production 
equalled America's and in certain important respects she became the 
world's leading industrial power. In 1978 she had an industrial 
trade surplus of $76 billion (against a US industrial trade 
deficit of $5 billion). By the end of the decade she had a steel capac- 
ity as big as America's and almost as big as the entire EEC. In the 
1980s, in many fields, Japan overtook the United States and 
European producers in quality too, particularly in high-technology 
areas such as jets, machine-tools, robots, semi-conductors, calcula- 
tors and copiers, computers and telecommunications, advanced 
energy-systems, including nuclear power, and rocketry. By 1980 
her investment was twice America's per capita, and in some years 
during the 1980s exceeded it in absolute terms. 80 

Japan's rate of economic growth slowed a little in the 1980s but 
it continued to make spectacular advances in the financial sector. It 
weathered the stock market crash of October 1987 with remarkable 
aplomb and within a year had pushed the United States into second 
place as the world's largest banking nation. Right through the 
decade it maintained the largest trading surplus. It bought heavily 
into the United States economy, by taking up huge quantities of 
American Treasury bonds and making it possible for the United 
States to run a large and growing budget deficit throughout the 
period, and by investing in, or taking over, American businesses, 
thus enabling the US to run a large and continuing deficit on visible 
trade. It also invested heavily in such territories as Australia, source 
of many of its raw materials, to the point where this former British 
political colony was in danger of becoming a Japanese economic 
colony. It also invested heavily in Britain, as a means of sliding 
under the European Community's tariff barriers. This took a variety 
of forms. On 12 November 1981, for instance, one of Japan's lead- 
ing car-makers, Honda, signed an agreement with British Leyland, 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 733 

last of the major independent British car firms, to develop a joint 
product for the 1990s, involving the mass production of matching 
components in both countries. On 8 September 1986, to give a sec- 
ond example, another major Japanese manufacturer, Nissan, 
opened a new £430 million car plant near Sunderland, in northern 
England, with a production capacity of 100,000 a year. By the early 
1990s, the Japanese possessed not only by far the world's biggest 
investment portfolio but one, in relative size and influence, which 
compared with Britain's in the period up to 1914. Japan's success, 
and the inability of Western producers to penetrate far into Japan's 
own market, aroused accusations of unfair trading practices, partic- 
ularly in the United States Congress and from the European 
Community. In some cases Japan accepted voluntary quotas on its 
manufacturing exports, and it showed its nervousness over the issue 
in March 1991 when, in a self-denying ordinance, it forbade 
Japanese contractors to bid for work in restoring Kuwait, where the 
United States and Britain, having done the lion's share in liberating 
the country, were expecting the lion's share of the post-war recon- 
struction business. By this stage Japan had easily overtaken the 
Soviet Union as the world's second largest economy, and it con- 
tinued to invest heavily in high technology, new equipment and, not 
least, in education and training. By the late 1980s, 93 per cent of 
Japanese children were attending secondary school up to the age of 
eighteen, and well over a third were going on to higher education, 
up to the age of twenty-one or twenty-two, at one or other of 
Japan's 1,000-plus universities and colleges, the vast majority of 
which were privately maintained. 

There was nothing miraculous about this miracle. It was a 
straightforward case of Adam Smith economics, with no more than 
a touch of Keynesianism. A high percentage of fixed capital forma- 
tion, very little of it in non-productive investment. Moderate taxa- 
tion. Low defence and government spending. A very high rate of 
personal saving, efficiently channelled into industry through the 
banking system. Shrewd import of foreign technology under licence. 
Very fast replacement rate of existing plant, made possible by 
remarkable wage restraint, with productivity running well ahead of 
wages. Labour was plentiful because of contraction in the agricul- 
tural sector, and exceptionally well-educated and skilled because 
Japan (and the Asian market states generally) geared the education- 
al expansion noted already closely to industrial needs and not to 
social science ideologies. Indeed, the East Asian market states were 
the only ones to gain economically from the revolution in higher 
education of the 1960s, which in Europe and North America 
proved such a handicap. It is true that Japan benefited substantially 



734 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

from the windfalls of first the Korean then the Vietnam wars. But 
all the other factors were of her own making. The Japanese govern- 
ment provided a degree of external protection and export support. 
But its chief contribution was to erect a framework of intense 
internal competition, on an Adam Smith model, and a climate of 
benevolence towards business. 81 

What was unique to Japan, and perhaps her most creative contri- 
bution to the modern world, was the way in which business used 
the principle of anthropomorphism and the new anti-collective 
stress on the family, already mentioned, to humanize the industrial 
process and so reduce the destructive impact of class warfare. Trade 
unions were by no means inactive in Japan: there were, in fact, 
34,000 of them by 1949. 82 Nor were they unsuccessful. Plant bar- 
gaining and productivity improvements, with the pressure coming 
from fellow-workers rather than management, meant that Japanese 
wage-rates rose faster in real terms than those of any other major 
industrial country during the 1970s and 1980s, with the highest 
degree of job security and the lowest unemployment, an average of 
2.6 per cent in the late 1980s. Equally important, by the 1970s 
Japan had achieved greater equality of income distribution than any 
other industrial economy and, with the possible exception of the 
Scandinavian economies, had moved further than other market 
economies to eliminate absolute poverty. 83 But most Japanese firms 
supplemented the efforts of unions by enveloping the worker in a 
familial embrace which included housing, meals, medical care, ethi- 
cal guidance, sport and holidays. The anthropomorphism extended 
to the product and even the customers. At the Kubota Iron and 
Machinery Works, for instance, the workers were taught to see their 
machines as mothers and fathers, engendering sons and daughters - 
the company's finished products - which were then 'married' to cus- 
tomers, using salesmen as marriage-brokers. Kubota dealers then 
provided 'postnatal aftercare', to the satisfaction of both 'bride' and 
'bridegroom'. In the company's chief product, a mechanical tiller, 
the casing of the machine was treated as the body, the engine as the 
heart. Visitors to the factory were 'family relations', 'friends of the 
family'. The workers ran highly critical 'self -improvement commit- 
tees' to promote productivity and sales, composed and calligraphed 
hortatory banners and were supplied with masses of production and 
investment figures on which to brood. They contributed enthusias- 
tic poetry to the works magazine. 84 The kind of collectivized pro- 
duction propaganda which failed so signally in Soviet Russia, and 
even in China where it was applied far more skilfully, worked in the 
non-totalitarian context of Japan, where it was given a human 
scale, a voluntary impulse and a familial imagery and, not least, was 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 735 

seen to produce immediate and substantial gains in personal 
consumption. 

The huge and sustained expansion of the Japanese economy was 
decisive in creating a dynamic market environment for the entire 
Pacific area. It acted both by direct stimulus and by example. The 
most striking example was South Korea. A World Bank team 
reported in 1977: 'The sustained high rate of expansion in incomes 
over fifteen years has transformed Korea from one of the poorest 
developing countries, with heavy dependence on agriculture and 
weak balance of payments, to a semi-industrialized middle-income 
nation with an increasingly strong external payments position. 85 
Taiwan's progress followed the same course. In 1949, when the now 
totally discredited kmt regime took over, the economy was substan- 
tially pre-industrial. The transformation, like Japan's, began with a 
highly successful land reform, followed by a rapid rise in farmers' 
incomes, creating a local market for new factories. Over 90 per cent 
of agricultural land passed into the hands of the farmers who tilled 
it. No-strike laws were agreed and enforced. Duty-free processing 
zones were created. At times in the 1970s and 1980s, exports rose 
to 90 per cent of GNP, the highest proportion in the world, and 
growth-rates occasionally hit the 12-per-cent mark. Thus, on top of 
a sound agricultural base, a complex industrial economy was 
created, revolving around shipbuilding, textiles, petrochemicals and 
electronic equipment. 86 Hong Kong's progress was, in some ways, 
even more impressive, since it had to absorb about 5 million 
refugees from mainland China, about five times the number of 
Palestinians the entire Arab world had failed to resettle. Here again, 
as in Taiwan and Japan, stability of government (provided by the 
Colonial Governor, advised by a local Legislative Council), and con- 
sistency of economic policy over forty years, provided the ideal hos- 
pitable environment for business, though in Hong Kong's case the 
future, during the early 1990s, became overshadowed by the 
approaching merger with the Chinese Communist Republic, set for 
1997. 

Singapore, after some instability in the decade after 1945, at last 
found a solid government framework in 1959 under Lee Kuan 
Yew's People's Action Party which began as a socialist movement 
but soon became a passionate and masterful instrument of the mar- 
ket. As Lee put it, after two decades of successful wealth-creation: 
The question was how to make a living ... a matter of life and 
death for two million people . . . How this was to be achieved, by 
socialism or free enterprise, was a secondary matter. The answer 
turned out to be free enterprise, tempered with the socialist philo- 
sophy of equal opportunities for education, jobs, health and 



736 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

housing.' 87 In the 1980s, Lee was frequently accused in the Western 
media of authoritarianism, putting pressure on the courts and local 
newspapers, and bullying the (tiny) opposition. On the other hand, 
during his rule of over thirty years (he went into semi-retirement in 
1991), he had some claim to be considered the most successful of all 
the post-war statesmen, in terms of the material benefits he con- 
ferred on his country and its people. 

Singapore was notable for possessing no natural resources at all, 
other than its geographical position. Japan, Korea and Taiwan (but 
not Hong Kong) had some reasonably good agricultural land; 
otherwise none of these enterprise states began their ascent with any 
physical advantages, other than a potentially strong work-force. As 
one report put it: 'The success is almost entirely due to good 
policies and the ability of the people, scarcely at all to favourable 
circumstances or a good start.' 88 The way in which these rugged 
market economies flourished from the 1960s onwards encouraged 
better-endowed Pacific neighbours to switch to the free market for 
both agriculture and business. Thailand's growth accelerated rapid- 
ly after it acquired a stable pro-market government in 1958, and 
achieved economic 'takeoff in the 1960s with growth rates at one 
time of 9 per cent annually. It was one of the few Third World 
countries that managed to sustain its agricultural export position, 
by raising productivity by 15 per cent a year and expanding 
acreages. 89 During the 1980s its per capita income had risen to 
$810 (1986), more than four times that of its once-richer but now 
long-socialist neighbour Burma, at $200 (1986). During the 1970s 
and 1980s Malaysia also did well, thanks partly to handsome natu- 
ral resources but mainly to political stability and economic realism, 
pushing itself into the middle-income bracket with $1,850 per capi- 
ta (1986). Indonesia, one of the world's best-endowed nations in 
natural resources, began to recover from a disastrous start under 
the Sukarno regime, and even the Philippines, bedevilled by 
Muslim-Catholic clashes, the pilfering of the monstrous Marcos 
regime and insurgency then and thereafter, made some progress, 
achieving a per capita income of $614 by 1986. 

Hence during the quarter-century 1965-90, the Pacific, defying 
the tyranny of its vast distances, became the prime trade develop- 
ment area of the world, thanks to market economics. Former Pacific 
colonies like Fiji and New Caledonia leapt into the over-$l,000-a- 
year per capita income bracket. The tiny island of Nauru, rich in 
phosphates, was not only the world's smallest republic, with a pop- 
ulation of about 8,000, but became 'acre for acre and body for 
body' one of the world's wealthiest nations, with average incomes 
of $9,091 (1985). 9 ° There was a rebirth of the free-market spirit on 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 737 

the eastern fringe of the Pacific. The most interesting case was 
Chile. In the mid-1960s, Christian Democrat Chile, under President 
Eduardo Frei, was regarded by the United States as the best hope, 
along with Romulo Betancourt's Venezuela, for Kennedy's Alliance 
for Progress. But Chile had chronic inflation: about 20 per cent a 
year in the late 1950s* 26.6 per cent in 1968, 32.5 per cent in 1970. 
Virtually the sole cause was government overspending and money- 
printing. In the 1970 elections, the reforming socialist Salvador 
Allende, at his fourth attempt, at last won the presidency because of 
a split in the anti-socialist vote, which nevertheless got 62 per cent 
combined against Allende's 36.2. The new president had a mandate 
for nothing, and, on Thomas Jefferson's principle that great innova- 
tions should not rest on narrow majorities, he should have concen- 
trated on good housekeeping. 

But Allende was a weak man with a divided, part-revolutionary 
following, which quickly slipped from his control. While he em- 
barked on a programme of wholesale nationalization, which isolat- 
ed Chile from the world trading community, the militants of his Left 
wing were not prepared to accept any of the restraints of constitu- 
tionalism. They launched 'People's Power', consisting of Peasant 
Councils which seized farms in the countryside and Workers' 
Assemblies which occupied factories. 91 The strategy was Leninist - 
The task of the moment,' said the Socialist Party, Ms to destroy par- 
liament' - but the real parallel was with Spain in 1936, where the 
divisions on the Left and the drift to violence produced Civil War. 
Allende was caught in a nutcracker with his revolutionaries forming 
one arm and the other constituted by an increasingly outraged 
middle class, with the army, originally reluctant to intervene, 
gradually politicized by the collapse of order. 

At the time Allende took over, in January 1971, inflation had 
actually fallen to about 23 per cent. Within months it was hyper- 
inflation. In 1972 it was 163 per cent. In the summer of 1973 it 
reached 190 per cent, by far the highest in the world. 92 This was 
before the quadrupling of oil prices: the Allende inflation was 
entirely his own doing. In November 1971 Chile declared a unilat- 
eral moratorium on its foreign debts (i.e., went bankrupt). The 
banks cut off credit; capital fled; with the farms in chaos, producing 
little, the factories occupied, producing less, exports vanished, 
imports soared, then vanished too as the money ran out. The shops 
emptied. The middle class started to strike. The workers, finding 
their wages cut in real terms, struck too. The official price structure 
became irrational and then irrelevant as the black market took over. 
The Left began to smuggle in arms in July 1971 and began serious 
political violence in May the next year. They had in fact more 



738 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

weapons (30,000) than the army, which numbered only 26,000 men 
plus 25,000 armed police. 93 Allende oscillated between ordering the 
police to fight the Far Left and accusing the army of plotting a 
coup. But he also countenanced a plan to arm Leftist guerrillas and 
on 4 September 1973 permitted a demonstration by 750,000 on the 
anniversary of the elections. A week later his own appointment, 
General Augusto Pinochet, led a united coup by all three armed 
forces. Chile had hitherto had an exceptionally good record, by 
Latin American standards, for constitutionalism and stability. The 
coup was by no means bloodless. Allende was killed or committed 
suicide, and the official body-count at the Santiago morgue was 
2,796. 94 Most of the resistance came from non-Chilean political 
refugees, of whom there were 13,000 in Santiago at the time. The 
failure of the workers occupying factories, or the peasants on the 
seized farms, or even of the armed 'revolutionary bands' to fight 
seriously, suggests that the Far Left commanded little enthusiasm. 

The opposition to Pinochet, though noisy, came chiefly from 
abroad, at least at the beginning of his rule. It was cleverly orches- 
trated from Moscow, though in fact Soviet Russia had flatly refused 
to bail Allende out with credits: he was more use to them dead than 
alive. 95 Though foreign criticism concentrated on the repressive 
aspect of Pinochet's military regime, the more important one was 
the decision to reverse the growth of the public sector, which 
Allende had merely accelerated, and open the economy to market 
forces, on the lines of the other Pacific economies. It was notable 
that virtually all the Pacific enterprise states, except Japan, had been 
accused at one time or another of running repressive regimes. But 
the degree to which the state was representative and elected was 
only one issue; equally important was the extent of national life it 
controlled. That was why, living as he did in a laissez-faire, mini- 
malist state, Dr Samuel Johnson was able to declare with convic- 
tion: 'I would not give half a guinea to live under one form of 
government rather than another. It is of no moment in the happi- 
ness of an individual.' 96 Market economics by definition involved a 
withdrawal by the state from a huge area of decision-making, which 
was left to the individual. Economic and political liberty were insep- 
arably linked. Freedom of the market inevitably led to erosion of 
political restraints: that was the lesson of Thailand, Taiwan and 
South Korea. 

The lesson applied equally to Chile. The disaster of 1973 pro- 
duced complete political and economic breakdown. The reconstruc- 
tion of the economy had to begin against a background of world 
recession. The merit of the regime was that it was able to reverse a 
course of government-led inflation that had persisted for many 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 739 

decades and become part of the structure of the Chilean economy. 97 
This was painful and unpopular and led initially to a falling GNP 
and high unemployment. But it allowed the economy to be refloated 
on a market basis with the help of IMF loans. During the later 
1970s, with inflation at last under control, growth was resumed 
and by the beginning of 1980 the World Bank was able to report: 
'Under extra-ordinarily unfavourable circumstances, the Chilean 
authorities have engineered an economic turnaround without prece- 
dent in the history of Chile.' 98 The economic improvement 
explained why, on 11 September 1980, a referendum showed 69,14 
per cent of those Chileans who voted favouring an eight-year exten- 
sion of Pinochet's term. But as the 1980s progressed, economic free- 
dom led to ever-increasing demands for political freedom. Pinochet 
was unwilling to grant it. In June 1983, there was nationwide riot- 
ing against the regime; two months later the government admitted 
that seventeen people had been killed in demonstrations. The vic- 
tims of Pinochet's political police, the Dina, were far more numer- 
ous. An official report, commissioned after democracy was restored, 
calculated that during the sixteen years of Pinochet's rule, 1973-89, 
1,068 people had been killed by the Dina or people working for 
them; a further 957 had 'disappeared'. 99 But fear of the Dina did 
not deter Chileans from following the logic of a free economy and 
pressing for a return to full voting rights. Pinochet agreed to hold 
another referendum on his presidency, and on 14 December 1989 
the opposition candidate, Patricio Aylwin, won the presidential elec- 
tion with 52.4 per cent of the votes, bringing the dictatorship to an 
end, though Pinochet himself remained commander of the army. 
Aylwin not only commissioned the report into the regime's excesses, 
he also set up a permanent foundation in March 1991 to investigate 
the fate of its victims case by case. But he was careful to continue, 
on the whole, the regime's well-tried economic policies. 

The success of the free enterprise economies of the Pacific 
undoubtedly helped to rekindle belief in the market system both in 
North America and in Europe. The 1970s, as we have seen, were a 
discouraging decade for capitalism. It became fashionable among 
the intelligentsia, including many economists, to speak of 'zero 
growth', of 'late capitalism' or even of 'post-capitalism', as though 
the system that had created, for the first time in history, what even 
its opponents dubbed the Affluent Society was now moribund. The 
most widely approved form of government in the West was the so- 
called 'mixed society', with the state sector absorbing between 40 
and 60 per cent of the GNP, administering welfare services on a 
growing scale, and reserving the actual wealth-creating role to the 
private sector operating about half the economy. But the weak- 



740 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

nesses of this Euro-American formula were reflected in the low 
growth-rates, the phenomenon known as 'stagflation' which 
marked most of their economies as the decade progressed, and the 
evidence of widespread popular dissatisfaction reflected in a 
growing number of strikes. Towards the end of the decade, as high- 
quality, low-priced Japanese (and South Korean and Taiwanese) 
goods began increasingly to penetrate Western markets, there was a 
growing demand for changes which would bring about Japanese- 
style efficiency. 

The watershed year was 1979, and the battlefield was Britain. 
After an unprecedented series of strikes, especially in the public sec- 
tor, dubbed by the media 'the winter of discontent', Margaret 
Thatcher, the first woman to become leader of a British political 
party (in 1975), became Britain's first woman Prime Minister on 4 
May 1979, having led the Conservatives to a 43-seat electoral vic- 
tory. Mrs Thatcher, soon dubbed by the Brezhnev regime 'the Iron 
Lady' (a title she relished), called herself a 'conviction' politician, as 
opposed to a consensus one. She implicitly repudiated much of 
Conservative post-war policy, and especially its tacit agreement 
with the Labour Party that whole areas of British public life, includ- 
ing the welfare state and the nationalized sector, were sacrosanct. 
Her first task was to curb the legal power of the trade unions 
which, as we have seen, had been growing steadily since 1945. A 
previous attempt at reform by the Conservative government in 
1971, the comprehensive and ultra-complex Industrial Relations 
Act, had proved unworkable and had been promptly scrapped by 
the incoming Labour Cabinet in 1974. Mrs Thatcher's government, 
having learned the lesson, set about the problem on a step-by-step 
basis, enacting in all five separate acts, over the space of three par- 
liaments, which progressively ended a whole series of special union 
legal privileges, made many strikes and forms of picketing unlawful, 
and subjected unions that broke the law to severe financial penal- 
ties. Mrs Thatcher also made it clear that the police, in dealing with 
'mass', 'flying' and 'secondary' pickets, which had made it virtually 
impossible in the 1970s for employers to resist strike demands and 
so inflicted grievous damage on both the private and public sector, 
would be fully backed by her government. 

The new policy was soon put to the test. The trade unions had 
effectively destroyed the governments of Harold Wilson in 
1968-70, Edward Heath in 1974 and James Callaghan in 1979. 
The National Union of Mineworkers, following aggressive tactics 
created by Arthur Scargill, leader of the Yorkshire miners, who 
became president of the NUM in 1981, had played a major role in 
these victories, which threatened to make syndicalism, rather than 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 74 1 

parliamentary democracy, the ruling force in Britain, at least in a 
negative sense. The British coal industry had been taken into public 
ownership in 1946 precisely to create industrial peace in the mines. 
But the num had always treated the National Coal Board as if it 
were as grasping and antisocial as the worst private pit-owner, thus 
defeating the central object of nationalization. On 6 March 1984, 
the ncb, which was already losing over £100 million a year, 
announced the closure of twenty uneconomic pits. Scargill had 
twice failed to bring about a general miners' strike, which under 
NUM rules required a 55 per cent majority in a national pit-head 
ballot. On this occasion, Scargill evaded the rule-book procedures. 
As his Vice-President Mick McGahey put it: 'We shall not be consti- 
tutionalized out of a strike. Area by area will decide, and there will 
be a domino effect.' 100 Hence the decision to strike was taken not 
by the union's members but by the more militant delegates; and the 
strike having begun on 10 March, a special delegate conference on 
20 April rejected demands for a national ballot by 69-54. The fact 
that the strike was called undemocratically and unconstitutionally 
was a strong point in the government's favour in resisting it. Harold 
Macmillan had frequently observed: 'There are three institutions in 
Britain so powerful that no government is wise to take them on: the 
Brigade of Guards, the Roman Catholic Church, and the National 
Union of Mineworkers.' Margaret Thatcher was encouraged in 
defying this dictum by the attitude of the Nottinghamshire miners, 
who resented Scargill's tactics, voted in a ballot four-to-one against 
a strike, kept their pits open, despite much intimidation, and even- 
tually formed a separate union, thus splitting the NUM irretrievably; 
on 7 August 1985 they won a High Court action which, four 
months later, enabled the new Union of Democratic Miners to 
achieve legal status as a trade union. 

The Scargill strike of 1984-5 merits examination in some detail 
because it was, in effect, an attempt to destroy a democratically- 
elected government, and its failure was an epochal event in British 
industrial history. It was beaten by a combination of the courts, 
enacting the new reforms governing union activities, and by effec- 
tive coordination between the various locally-commanded police 
forces of Britain. By mid- April 1984 Scargill's men had shut down 
131 out of 174 pits and they planned to 'picket out' the rest, using 
the fear-inspiring methods they had employed so successfully in the 
1970s. This time, however, the police were prepared to stop them, 
with the backing of the law. On 22 October the police won a High 
Court ruling that they had the right to stop buses carrying militant 
miners to areas of disturbance with the object of committing a 
breach of the peace. By road control, and by mass policing at func- 



742 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

tioning pit-heads, the police managed to make it possible for miners 
wishing to work to do so, though some were victimized at home. 
Thus Scargill's primary objective of shutting all pits failed. The 
strike was extremely costly: it added £2,750 million to government 
expenditure, £1,850 million to the ncb's losses, cost British Steel 
£300 million, British Rail £250 million and the electricity supply 
industry £2,200 million. 101 It was also extremely violent, and cost 
five lives; on 16 May 1985 two South Wales miners were found 
guilty of murdering a taxi-driver taking non-striking miners to 
work, though the conviction was reduced to manslaughter on 
appeal. Between March and end-November 1984, for example, 
7,100 striking miners were charged with various offences, and a 
total of 3,483 cases were eventually heard, with 2,740 convictions; 
the cost of policing alone rose to £300 million. 

But with the government determined on no surrender, the futility 
of the strike became gradually apparent. Ignoring the lessons of the 
1920s, Scargill had struck at the wrong time of year, the spring. The 
ncb and its consumers had long seen the crisis coming, and had 
built up huge stocks. As a result, there was no need for power-cuts 
throughout the winter of 1984-5, and on 8 January 1985 the high- 
est peak demand for electricity ever recorded in Britain was met 
without difficulty. Scargill's strike funds were augmented by huge 
subsidies provided by Gadafy's Libyan government, a fact denied by 
the NUM at the time but subsequently established, beyond doubt, by 
the Daily Mirror in 1990. Despite this, miners began to drift back, 
and by the end of February 1985, over half the 170,000 employees 
on the ncb's books were back at work. On 5 March a national 
miners' delegate conference assented to what was, in effect, uncon- 
ditional surrender. Court fines had already cost the NUM £1.4 mil- 
lion, and its funds were sequestrated. Some 700 strikers were 
sacked for 'gross industrial misconduct', and 30,000 were made 
redundant, 10,000 more than the pre-strike planned figure. Indeed, 
with the creation of the breakaway udm, the num itself, once the 
largest union in Europe, soon shrank to a mere 80,000 members, 
and, from being one of the richest in Britain, became among the 
poorest. 

It was perhaps the most unsuccessful major strike in British his- 
tory, though by one of the fundamental axioms of British trade 
unionism - security of tenure for officials - Scargill remained in 
charge, even if echoes of the dispute rumbled on. In 1990 he was 
accused of using Libyan-supplied funds to facilitate the purchase of 
a new home, grand by miners' standards, and it was said, 'Scargill 
started out with a big union and a small house, and ended with a 
big house and a small union.' Mrs Thatcher rightly regarded the 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 743 

defeat of the num as the most important reversal for militant trade 
unionism since the General Strike of 1926, rejoicing (6 April 1985), 
that she had 'seen off what she called 'the enemy within'. Two days 
later she added: 'Despite cruel intimidation, the working miners 
insisted on their right to continue to work, and they found they had 
an employer and a government prepared to stand up for them. I 
hope and believe the lesson will not be lost on others.' 102 

Nor was it. Perhaps the most strongly entrenched group of work- 
ers in British industry were the printers, consisting chiefly of the 
National Graphical Association (compositors) and the Society of 
Graphic and Allied Trades '82, or SOGAT '82, comprising other man- 
ual workers in the industry. In the London area in particular they 
operated a rigid closed (or union) shop system, underwritten by 
tight conditions of entry and financed by some of the highest wages 
in the country. Overmanning and restrictive practices, known in the 
trade as 'old Spanish customs', were uniquely costly, even by the 
standards of British industry. Moreover, throughout the 1970s and 
into the 1980s, work stoppages, involving the non-appearance of 
national newspapers, were becoming more frequent, and there was 
a still more disturbing tendency for compositors to censor copy, 
news stories as well as comment, with which they did not agree. In 
1983 the Financial Times was shut down by a strike from 1 June to 
8 August, and all national newspapers from 25-27 November (two 
of them did not appear till 30 November). 

Next month, however, the print unions suffered their first big 
defeat under the new union legislation when the NGA was fined (9 
December 1983) the massive sum of £525,000 for contempt in 
refusing to obey a court order (plus £150,000 for earlier con- 
tempts). They had been trying to stop the appearance of a new 
daily, Today, founded by the Asian-born Eddy Shah, and manned 
and operated outside the traditional conventions of the industry. 
Today thus continued to appear and the point was not lost on 
Rupert Murdoch, biggest and most enterprising of the British news- 
paper proprietors and publisher of the Times, the Sunday Times, the 
News of the World and the Sun, with a combined circulation of 
about 11 million copies. Having secretly constructed (1984-6) a 
high-technology printing plant at Wapping in East London, which 
embodied all the latest developments in electronic setting and make- 
up, he responded to a shutdown by the NGA and SOGAT in the tradi- 
tional Fleet Street area, where his papers were printed, by sacking 
the entire workforce on 24 January 1986 and transferring his 
papers to Wapping. There, he had already made arrangements with 
the independent-minded Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunication 
and Plumbing Union for its members to operate the new machinery. 



744 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

Once again, the unions tried to use force, and Wapping was re- 
peatedly the scene of pitched battles. But Murdoch had had the 
plant constructed with a siege in mind and not for nothing did it 
become known as Fortress Wapping. Again, a combination of court 
injunctions, using the new legislation, and efficient policing ensured 
that force was defeated. The Wapping victory and the ensuing col- 
lapse of the power of the print unions ended unofficial censorship 
of the press in Britain, revitalized an ailing industry, made national 
newspapers profitable again, and so enabled new ones, such as the 
Independent (1986), to be successfully created. But, together with 
the defeat of the miners' strike, it also effectively ended the union 
threat to the British constitutional and political system. It was the 
prelude to a new era of peace in British industry, so that in the years 
1987-90 the number of working days lost through strikes fell to 
their lowest level for more than half a century, and the 'English dis- 
ease' appeared cured. 

The decline of union restrictive practices and of overmanning in 
many sectors produced a rise in productivity in Britain which, in 
several years during the decade, was the highest in Europe; and for 
much of the 1980s the British economy expanded rapidly: in mid- 
1988, for instance, it was still growing at 4 per cent after seven 
years of continuous expansion, a record unique in the post-war 
period. 103 But what particularly struck foreigners about the perfor- 
mance of the Thatcher government was its success in reducing the 
state sector, by the process known as 'privatization'. This had two 
aspects. The first was the transfer of nationalized industries, such as 
Cable &c Wireless, British Steel, British Airways, British Telecom- 
munications, British Gas, and the water and the electricity supply 
and distribution industry, into private ownership and management. 
Many of these nationalized bodies were incurring huge losses and 
were a heavy burden on the taxpayer. Privatization rapidly trans- 
formed the loss-makers into profitable companies. British Steel, for 
instance, had incurred the largest loss in corporate history, some 
£500 million, the year before it was privatized; by the end of the 
1980s it had the highest productivity rates in the European steel 
industry and was the most profitable steel company in the world. 
The turnaround at British Airways was scarcely less spectacular. 
The second aspect was the way in which the privatization was man- 
aged by 'floating' the companies through the Stock Exchange in 
ways which encouraged small savers to buy into them. The British 
Telecom flotation, for example, was the largest public share offer in 
history. The net effect was that, during the 1980s, the number of 
individual shareholders in Britain rose from 2.5 million to nearly 10 
million, giving some substance to the notion, which came into fash- 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 745 

ion as the 1980s advanced, of 'democratic capitalism'. The rapid 
reduction of losses in the public sector, plus the proceeds of these 
sales, enabled the government not merely to reduce direct taxation, 
the standard rate falling from 37V2 to 25 per cent and top rates 
from 94 and 87 per cent to 40 per cent, but to run big budget sur- 
pluses and repay over one-fifth of the entire national debt. Privatiz- 
ation was one of the great success stories of the 1980s and found 
many imitators abroad, especially in Europe but also in Latin 
America, Australasia, Africa and Asia. Even Japan, which was 
teaching the West so much, followed Britain's example and priva- 
tized its rail network on 1 April 1987. 

By such means, Mrs Thatcher made herself one of the most con- 
sistently successful politicians of her age. On 19 June 1983 she got 
her party re-elected with a huge overall majority of 144 seats over 
all other parties, and she repeated her landslide success on 12 June 
1987, when the Conservatives won 375 against 229 for the Labour 
opposition. No British prime minister had ever won three general 
elections in a row since the Great Reform Bill of 1832. When Mrs 
Thatcher was finally forced out of office by her own party on 20 
November 1990 she had been head of the government for a longer 
continuous period, eleven and a half years, than any of her prede- 
cessors since the Earl of Liverpool (Prime Minister 1812-27). But it 
was notable that she aroused much hostility as well as enthusiastic 
support, and in the three elections she won her party never secured 
as much as 50 per cent of the votes cast. In many ways, she resem- 
bled de Gaulle: like him, she was good at saying no, and meaning it; 
like him, she restored her nation's self-confidence and pride; she 
ruled with great authority for almost exactly the same span; and, 
like de Gaulle, she fell attempting a fundamental reform of local 
government, in her case seeking to replace the outmoded and 
inequitable way in which it was financed. 

Mrs Thatcher, and 'Thatcherism', had a global influence during 
the 1980s which went well beyond the new fashion for privatization 
and reducing the state sector. The 1980s was a radical conservative 
decade, and even in states where socialist or Labour governments 
were elected, the drift away from Marxism, collectivism and all the 
traditional 'isms' of the Left was marked. The process was particu- 
larly notable in France. The election of the socialist Francois 
Mitterrand as President in 1981, after twenty-three years of 
Gaullism and its successors, introduced a brief period of socialist 
egalitarianism and anti-business policies, which led in rapid suc- 
cession to three devaluations of the franc; thereafter, the French 
Socialist Party moved sharply to the Right and to free-market poli- 
cies; and in the later 1980s and early 1990s, alternations in power 



746 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

between socialist and Conservative prime ministers appeared to 
make little difference, in economic policy, defence or foreign affairs. 
The German Social Democrats had renounced Marxism, or any- 
thing approaching it, a generation before. In Portugal, Dr Mario 
Soares, elected premier for the first time in 1976 and President in 
1987, under the new and liberal 1982 constitution, gradually 
steered Portuguese socialism into the free-market camp during the 
1980s. There was a similar movement in Spain, where the Socialist 
Party, under its moderate leader Felipe Gonzalez, far from exploit- 
ing its landslide victory of 1982, reinforced the enterprise culture 
which had transformed the Spanish economy during the years 
1950-75. In Australia Bob Hawke's Labour Party, which returned 
to power in March 1983 and was later re-elected three times, 
moved consistently towards the Right; indeed in March 1991, 
Hawke himself made a ringing declaration, warning the country 
that it could no longer afford to impose irksome restraints on busi- 
ness, for socialist, environmental or any other reasons. In New 
Zealand, the Labour leader David Lange, who became Prime 
Minister in 1984, took his party and government in the same direc- 
tion, though evidently not fast enough for some of his colleagues, 
who in effect forced his resignation in August 1989, as a result of a 
right-wing caucus putsch. In Britain, following the Labour Party's 
third successive electoral defeat in 1987, its leader, Neil Kinnock, 
began the painful process of dropping traditional Labour policies, 
and by 1990-1 had made Labour, at least in theory, electable again. 
In Labour or democratic socialist parties across the world, the 
term 'social market' came into fashion, implying acceptance of mar- 
ket forces subject to certain essential restraints to protect the poor 
and the underprivileged. But the phase was used on the Right too. 'I 
like the expression,' declared Norman Lamont in March 1991, 
immediately after delivering his first budget as Chancellor of the 
Exchequer in the government John Major formed to replace Mrs 
Thatcher's. 104 Another political cliche that came into fashion in the 
early 1990s, reflecting the Left's acceptance of the market, was 'the 
enabling state', as opposed to Big Government: the state was there, 
the argument went, not to do things itself, so much as to make it 
possible for people to do things on their own behalf. Conser- 
vatives were equally content to use this formulation of govern- 
ment's role. To some extent, then, there was a convergence of views 
in the world's democracies during the 1980s and early 1990s, but it 
was a convergence on the terms of the Right. Indeed, the 'ratchet 
effect', a phrase coined by the British Conservative ideologue Sir 
Keith (later Lord) Joseph in the 1970s, whereby policies initiated 
by left-wing governments were endorsed by their right-wing succes- 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 747 

sors, thus replacing the swing of the pendulum by a collectivist 
ratchet, was now reversed: it was the radicals of the Right who 
were now moving societies permanently in the direction of econo- 
mic liberalism. 

The same process was at work in the North American continent, 
though here it was affected by geographical factors too. Mexico, 
like Chile, was affected by the new Pacific enterprise culture, 
though like Chile it had earlier suffered from a grandiose experi- 
ment in state-directed collectivism. The economy grew very fast 
1940-70, and in the 1970s President Luis Echeverria sought to 
make Mexico the leader of the Third World as a model Big 
Government state. He increased the state's share of the economy by 
50 per cent and the number of state-owned corporations from 
eighty-six to 740. The predictable result was hyper-inflation and a 
balance-of-payments crisis. Jose Lopez Portillo came to power in 
1976 and wrenched Mexico back towards the market. 105 He told 
the IMF that he feared the 'South Americanization' of Mexico life: 
coups and dictatorships of Left or Right. 106 He was helped by the 
major oil discoveries of 1977, which suggested Mexico might even- 
tually be a producer in the same class as Kuwait or even Saudi 
Arabia. On the other hand the structure of Mexico, essentially a 
one-party state run by an elite through the Institutional 
Revolutionary Party (PRl), made cutting state employment (and 
patronage) difficult. 107 By the early 1980s, Mexico's foreign debts 
exceeded even Brazil's. In the summer of 1982 it was unable to meet 
its interest payments and nationalized the banks. But the economy 
moved back in a liberal direction during the years 1985-90, making 
possible a historic trade agreement with the United States. 

The Mexican economy, indeed, was merging into the North-East 
Pacific economy formed by the Western United States, West Canada 
and Alaska. Some 70 per cent of Mexican exports went to America 
in the 1970s and 1980s; 60 per cent of its imports were American. 
There were perhaps as many as 10 million illegal Mexican immi- 
grants in the US; one in seven families in California, and one in 
three in New Mexico, were Hispanic. It was true that Mexico's was 
also a Caribbean economy. So was America's, especially since the 
Hispanization of the economy of Florida, which grew rapidly in the 
quarter-century, 1965-90, tilted it in a Latin-American direction. 
But from the 1970s both the Mexican and the American economies 
felt the pull of the Pacific, increasingly a free-market pull. 

The shift of America's centre of gravity, both demographic and 
economic, from the North-East to the South- West was one of the 
most important changes of modern times. In the 1940s, the geogra- 
pher E.L.Ullman located the 'core area' of the US economy in the 



748 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

North-East. Though only 8 per cent of the total land area, it had 
43 per cent of the population and 68 per cent of manufacturing 
employment. 108 The pattern remained stable for most of the 1950s. 
The geographer H.S.Perloff, writing in 1960, saw what he called 
'the manufacturing belt' as 'still the very heart of the national econ- 
omy.' 109 But even while he was writing the pattern was chang- 
ing. In 1940-60 the North still gained population (2 million) but 
this was entirely accounted for by low-income, largely unskilled 
blacks from the South. It was already suffering a net loss of whites; 
this soon became an absolute loss. The change came in the 1960s 
and became pronounced in the 1970s. In the years 1970-7, the 
North-East lost 2.4 million by migration; the South- West gained 
3.4 million, most of them skilled whites. As the shift was essentially 
from the frost-belt to the sun-belt, it was reinforced by the rise in 
energy prices, as the 1980 census showed. Regional variations in 
income, once heavily in favour of the old 'core area', converged, 
then moved in favour of the South- West. Investment followed popu- 
lation. The 'core area's' share of manufacturing employment fell 
from 66 per cent in 1950 to 50 per cent in 1977. The South-West's 
rose from 20 to 30 per cent. 110 

The demographic shift brought changes in political power and 
philosophy. At the election of Kennedy in 1960, the frost-belt had 
286 electoral college votes to the sun-belt's 245. By 1980 the sun- 
belt led by four and Census Bureau projections showed that for the 
1984 election the sun-belt would have a lead of twenty-six. 111 The 
shift marked the end of the old Roosevelt interventionist coalition, 
dominant for two generations, and the emergence of a South-West 
coalition wedded to the free market. 

Richard Nixon's landslide victory of November 1972 was a fore- 
taste of the political consequences of this shift, but that was overshad- 
owed by Watergate and its aftermath. On 4 November 1980, howev- 
er, the trend became unmistakable when Ronald Reagan, a successful 
two-term Governor of California - and from one of California's most 
powerful interest-groups, the movie industry - trounced Jimmy 
Carter, the first elected sitting president to be defeated since Herbert 
Hoover in 1932. Reagan won by a huge popular margin, taking 43.9 
million votes to Carter's 35.4 million. On 6 November 1984 he 
repeated his success by an even bigger margin, taking 59 per cent of 
the popular vote, with majorities in every major bloc of voters except 
blacks, Jews and trade unionists. He beat his Democratic opponent, 
Walter Mondale, in all but one of the fifty states. It was no coinci- 
dence that the 1980s, when California, already the richest, became 
the most populous state in the USA with the most electoral college 
votes, was in many ways the Californian Decade. 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 749 

But Reagan's dominance during the 1980s was by no means 
mainly due to changing demographics. Better than any other politi- 
cian except Margaret Thatcher herself, he caught the spirit of the 
age. He was undoubtedly inspired by her victory and example - she 
was his John the Baptist or, to put it another way, he was her aptest 
pupil - and for eight years, with one exception, they formed a 
mutual admiration society of two. But most of his few, simple and 
popular ideas had entered his head long before. 'By I960,' he 
wrote, 'I realized the real enemy wasn't big business, it was big gov- 
ernment.' 112 Twenty years later, he was a man whose time had 
come. Oddly enough, he did not succeed substantially in reducing 
the size of government. In this respect he was the victim of a grow- 
ing dichotomy in American politics: a tendency to elect Republican 
presidents and Democratic congresses. His party controlled the 
Senate for a time but never the House of Representatives. There, 
indeed, the Democratic grip tightened during the 1980s. As the cost 
of electioneering rose, the chances of displacing a sitting congress- 
man declined, until by the end of the decade the turnover was less 
than 10 per cent; and Congressional tenure depended to a growing 
extent on satisfying groups of interests through federal spending. 
Hence it was beyond the power of Reagan, or indeed his Republi- 
can successor George Bush, to cut federal domestic spending. What 
Reagan could and did do however was cut taxes. The result was the 
steady growth of the budget deficit. In the first six years after the 
initial tax cuts came into effect in late 1981, the resulting stimula- 
tion of the economy actually increased tax revenues by $375 billion. 
But during the same period Congress increased domestic spending 
by $450 billion. 113 The budget deficit was accompanied by a grow- 
ing trade imbalance which during the four years of Reagan's second 
term reached the cumulative total of $541,243 million. The budget 
deficit began to fall in 1988 but remained large and that year total 
government debt passed the $2,000,000-million mark. 114 The sale of 
government bonds and private business to finance these two deficits 
meant that foreign holders and investors, with Japan in the lead but 
Britain not far behind in the investment field, were securing a signifi- 
cant grip on the American economy, or so many Americans feared. 

On the other hand, Reagan's policies, or Reaganomics as they 
were called by friends and enemies alike, produced a dynamism 
America had not known since the Eisenhower years. Over six years, 
1982-87, GNP (adjusted for inflation) rose by 27 per cent, manufac- 
turing by 33 per cent, median incomes by 12 per cent (against a 
decline of 10.5 per cent during the 1970s). 115 An estimated 20 mil- 
lion new jobs were created. Moreover, Reagan succeeded in getting 
across at the popular level the notion that America was a dynamic, 



750 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

successful nation again, after the doubts of the 1970s. He won for 
himself, from an initially hostile media, the grudging accolade of 
'The Great Communicator'. The result was that America, as a 
nation, began to recover its self-confidence, lost during the 1970s' 
suicide attempt. The prognostications, too, were that the dynamism 
would continue. Research conducted by the high-level Commission 
on Long-Term Strategy, which Reagan appointed, reported in 
January 1988 that between 1990 and 2010 the United States econ- 
omy would grow from $4.6 trillion to nearly $8 trillion, and at the 
later date would still be nearly twice as large as the world's next 
biggest economy. 116 

America's growing self-respect went a long way to erase the 
masochism generated by the Vietnam debacle, and enabled Reagan, 
who had no inhibitions about the legitimate use of America's enor- 
mous power, to perform on the world stage with growing aplomb. 
He was not a rash man, and certainly not a bellicose man, but he 
was a staunch believer in absolute values of conduct with a clear 
view of the difference between right and wrong in international 
affairs. When he felt the need to act, he acted; not without careful 
deliberation, but without any feelings of guilt or arrieres-pensees. 
But here again Mrs Thatcher served as a mentor. On Friday 2 April 
1982, without warning or any declaration of war, large Argentinian 
amphibious forces invaded and occupied the British crown colony 
of the Falkland Islands. (They also occupied South Georgia, to the 
east.) These islands, known to Argentinians as the Malvinas, had 
been in dispute for two centuries (Dr Johnson had published a 
pamphlet on the subject, rejecting British claims of ownership). 
However, all the inhabitants were of British descent, from settlers 
who arrived in the 1820s, and were thus natives by right of six gen- 
erations of ownership. The head of the then Argentine military 
junta, General Leopoldo Galtieri, was (as it happened) himself a 
second-generation immigrant from Europe, a distinction he shared, 
interestingly enough, with Ian Smith, leader of the Rhodesian 
whites, and Fidel Castro, the Cuban dictator. Argentine claims that 
they were engaged in an act of anti-colonial liberation carried little 
conviction, and the United Nations Security Council voted 10-1 in 
favour of an immediate Argentine withdrawal (Resolution 502). 
The British, however, were caught completely unprepared, with no 
forces of any significance in the area. Their Foreign Secretary, Lord 
Carrington, felt it right to resign to atone for the failure of his 
department to foresee the aggression. Margaret Thatcher, followed 
by her cabinet, determined to recover the islands, by diplomacy if 
possible, by force if necessary. 

The first British warships left for the south Atlantic two days 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 75 1 

after the invasion. A week later Britain declared a 200-mile exclu- 
sion zone around the islands, a variation on the 'quarantine' 
President Kennedy had imposed on the Cuban area during the 1962 
missile crisis. It was a hazardous decision to send an expeditionary 
force 8,000 miles, with naval escort but without full air cover (the 
two British carriers were equipped only with subsonic Harrier 
jump-jets, whereas Argentine supersonic aircraft could operate from 
airfields on her mainland, as well as the Port Stanley airport on the 
Falklands itself). It aroused the admiration of, among other people, 
Ronald Reagan himself, who throughout the operation not only 
gave the British government full diplomatic support at the United 
Nations and elsewhere but provided covert intelligence assistance. 
The daring operation succeeded. On 25 April South Georgia was 
recovered. Exactly a week later, the Argentine heavy cruiser 
Belgrano was sunk by the British submarine Conqueror, with the 
loss of 385 lives; thereafter, the Argentine navy retired to harbour 
and took no further part in the conflict. The Argentine air force 
fought rather better, using missiles to sink a total of four British 
warships and transports, though loss of life was tiny. Otherwise the 
amphibious operation proceeded according to plan. On 21 May the 
British army established a bridgehead at San Carlos; a week later 
paratroopers took Port Darwin and Goose Green, and on 14 June 
the entire Argentine garrison surrendered. Some 255 British and 
652 Argentine lives were lost in the land fighting. Three days after- 
wards, Galtieri was ousted. Indeed, the British victory led directly to 
the end of military rule in Argentina and the restoration of democ- 
racy. On 10 December 1983, Raul Alfonsin was elected Argentina's 
first civilian and democratic president for eight years, an immediate 
investigation was begun into the thousands of dissidents who had 
'disappeared' during the junta's rule, and Galtieri and many of his 
colleagues were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment. 

The effect on Reagan was also striking. The Falklands action 
served to reinvigorate the Western sense of the proprieties of inter- 
national behaviour and to remind the United States of her responsi- 
bilities as the leading democracy and defender of the rule of law. 
The first geopolitical consequences occurred late in 1983. On 19 
October Maurice Bishop, premier of the small West Indian island of 
Grenada, which was a member of the British Commonwealth, was 
murdered during a left-wing putsch, aided and possibly planned by 
Cubans. Two days later, the leaders of Grenada's neighbours, 
Jamaica, Barbados, St Vincent, St Lucia, Dominica and Antigua, 
reported a large Cuban military build-up on the island and, fearing 
for the safety of their own democratic governments, secretly peti- 
tioned for US military intervention. Reagan, on a golfing weekend 



752 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

in Georgia, was woken at four o'clock on a Saturday morning with 
this news. Informed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff that a 'rescue opera- 
tion' could be mounted within forty-eight hours, his response was, 
'Do it.' As Cuban reinforcements were feared, and eight hundred 
United States medical students were in Grenada, all potential 
hostages, the highest secrecy was imposed. 117 This had one unhappy 
consequence; Mrs Thatcher was not informed of what Reagan 
planned to do, and as Grenada was a Commonwealth country, she 
(and the Queen) took umbrage, and she made her view public, an 
unfortunate error. 118 This was the only serious disagreement she 
and Reagan had in eight years, and she later privately admitted she 
had been mistaken. Otherwise the operation was well received and 
attained all its objectives. US troops landed on 25 October, restored 
constitutional authority, and began withdrawing promptly on 2 
November. 

Nor was this the only forceful action the Reagan administration 
undertook as an unofficial world policeman and in defence of 
America's legitimate interests. On 8 July 1985 Reagan had branded 
five nations, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua and Libya, as 
'members of a confederation of terrorist states', carrying out 'out- 
right acts of war' against the United States. They were 'outlaw 
states run by the strangest collection of misfits, loony-tunes and 
squalid criminals since the advent of the Third Reich'. This state- 
ment, to the American Bar Association, was characteristic of the 
President's robust style and much relished by ordinary Americans; it 
was part of his populism. He privately regarded Colonel Gadafy of 
Libya as the most dangerous of the 'collection', on the grounds that, 
'He's not only a barbarian, he's flaky.' 119 As already noted, on 5 
April 1986, a bomb exploded in a Berlin disco frequented by US 
sevicemen, killing one, and a Turkish woman, and injuring two 
hundred. US intercepts established beyond doubt that Libya had a 
hand in the outrage, and on 13 April Reagan authorized US F-lll 
bombers to carry out an attack on Gadafy's military headquarters 
and barracks in Tripoli. It took place on the night of 14-15 April. 
Mrs Thatcher gave her permission for US aircraft to operate from 
their bases in Britain, but France and Italy refused permission to fly 
over their airspace, making necessary a 1,000-mile detour over the 
Atlantic and Mediterranean. The attack succeeded in its primary 
object: thereafter, Gadafy took a notably less prominent and active 
part in assisting international terrorism. 

This growing willingness of the United States to assert its legiti- 
mate rights and use its power continued under Reagan's successor, 
George Bush. On 21 December 1989, the White House, exasperated 
both by the treatment General Manuel Noriega, the dictator of 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 753 

Panama, meted out to his democratic opponents, and by his partici- 
pation in a narcotics ring which smuggled billions of dollars' worth 
of drugs into the United States (Noriega was wanted on serious 
criminal charges in Florida), authorized an American military inter- 
vention. The immediate pretext was the murder of an American sol- 
dier in the US canal zone. Some two hundred civilians, nineteen US 
soldiers and fifty-nine members of the Panamanian forces were 
believed killed in the fighting. But Noriega himself was quickly 
overthrown, took refuge in the Vatican nunciature, surrendered and 
was flown to trial in Florida. In Panama, as in Grenada, democracy 
was restored and the American forces withdrew quickly. These 
police actions were much criticized by some members of the 
Western intelligentsia, but appeared popular among the public, and 
served to deter some, though unfortunately not all, Third World 
dictators from aggressive and antisocial behaviour. They also pre- 
pared both the American leadership, and public opinion, to meet a 
more serious challenge to world order, as we shall see. 

In the early 1980s, however, President Reagan was more con- 
cerned with recovering some of the ground lost, in both a physical 
and a psychological sense, to the Soviet Union, her satellites and 
surrogates, during the collectivist 1970s. When Reagan became 
president, he discovered that the Soviet Union was spending 50 per 
cent more each year on weapons than the United States, and gaining 
ground in both the conventional and nuclear fields. Particularly dis- 
turbing was the large-scale deployment in Eastern Europe of inter- 
mediate-range, multiple-warhead SS-20 rockets. On 17 June 1980 
Mrs Thatcher had negotiated with President Carter an agreement 
whereby, to counter the SS-20s, American Cruise missiles were 
deployed in Britain. On the basis of this first move, Reagan and 
Mrs Thatcher were able to persuade other NATO members to pro- 
vide sites for the Cruise network. In Europe the extreme Left orga- 
nized coordinated demonstrations against the deployment: on 22 
October 1983 some 250,000 were claimed (by the organizers) to 
have marched in London; a 'human chain' was formed across Paris; 
in Germany, the Left said a million had protested; at Greenham 
Common in England, where some Cruise missiles were based, a 
Women's Peace camp was set up. But such protests were ineffective, 
and there is no evidence they enjoyed working-class support any- 
where. The Greenham women, in particular, soon made themselves 
unpopular with the local inhabitants. 

Deploying Cruise served to notify the Moscow leadership that 
the era of indecision in White House policy was over. 120 At the 
same time, from the very first days of his presidency, Reagan 
launched an across-the-board rearmament programme. As he put it, 



754 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

'I asked [the Joint Chiefs of Staff] to tell me what new weapons they 
needed to achieve military superiority over our potential enemies.' If 
it came to a choice between national security and the deficit, Td 
have to come down on the side of national defence.' 121 Additional 
defence spending was soon running at the rate of about $140 billion 
a year. It included the expansion and training of rapid-deployment 
forces, de-mothballing World War Two battleships and equipping 
them with Cruise missiles, and the development of the radar-resis- 
tant Stealth bomber and a range of high-technology laser-guided 
missiles, including anti-ballistic weapons, known collectively as the 
Star Wars programme. Strategic planning and tactical training of all 
the US armed forces were redesigned around the use, for both 
nuclear and conventional purposes, of these advanced weapons sys- 
tems, a change which was to prove of critical importance in 

1991.122 

However, the principal impact of the rearmament programme 
was, as intended, political, and in two senses. Reagan was anxious, 
first, to show to the peoples of Western Europe (and indeed the 
satellite populations behind the Iron Curtain, who were beginning 
to look increasingly to the West), that America's commitment to 
collective security was as strong as ever. This brought a positive 
response from most European governments. 123 Equally important, 
however, was the calculated impact on Soviet policy-making. As 
Reagan quickly discovered from intelligence assessments, Russia 
was running into increasing economic turbulence in the early 1980s. 
The Afghanistan war was unpopular and expensive; and by supply- 
ing the rebels with small, highly-mobile anti-aircraft and anti-tank 
weapons, America was able to raise the human and financial cost of 
the war to Russia at little expense to herself. The Russian geronto- 
cracy, the phalanx of elderly party managers and generals who had 
controlled the country since the Khrushchev era, was also running 
into severe leadership problems. Until the early 1980s, the so-called 
Brezhnev Doctrine was the basis of Soviet foreign and defence pol- 
icy; this held that once a 'Socialist State', such as Cuba or Vietnam, 
had been established, any threat to its government was to be regard- 
ed as a threat to the Soviet Union's vital interests. Whether the doc- 
trine would have been enforced in every case is arguable; but it was 
never put to the test, and the principle itself seems to have died with 
the old man on 10 November 1982. He was succeeded two days 
later as Party General Secretary, and on 16 June 1983 as President, 
by Yuri Andropov, who had been head of the KGB for fifteen years. 
On 8 March 1983, Reagan took the opportunity of warning the 
new Soviet leadership of how he regarded their expanded system, 
and what he intended to do to resist any further encroachments. In 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 755 

Orlando, Florida, he made what became known as the 'evil empire' 
speech. As he put it, he delivered the speech, 'and others like it, with 
malice aforethought' (and against the advice of his formidable wife 
Nancy) because 'I wanted to remind the Soviets we knew what they 
were up to.' 124 The much stiffer attitude of the White House, fully 
backed as it was by the Thatcher government in London, had reper- 
cussions in Moscow, where there was increasing uncertainty in the 
Soviet leadership. Seven months after he became President, 
Andropov died (9 February 1984), and his successor, Konstantin 
Chernenko, hastily installed as General Secretary and President (13 
February, 11 April ), lasted little over a year, dying on 10 March 
1985. The Soviet elite then took the momentous step of skipping a 
generation and electing the 52-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev, a party 
apparatchik, born in the Caucasus but of Ukrainian descent (on his 
mother's side), who had advanced under the aegis of Andropov. 125 

Gorbachev began to consolidate his position by making many 
thousands of personnel changes at all levels of the Soviet govern- 
ment, central and regional; but he never seems to have exercised the 
unquestioned authority which even Brezhnev had taken for granted. 
Increasingly, in the years 1987-91, his apparent orders were 
ignored or imperfectly executed, and actions took place without his 
sanction, or indeed knowledge. By the standards of the Soviet 
Communist Party, he was a liberal; but he dismissed the very idea of 
a multi-party system in Russia as 'complete nonsense'. He toured 
the country extensively, making many exhortatory speeches: his 
theme was, 'We have to change everything,' but he added, 'I am a 
Communist.' He seems to have assumed that Communism could 
reform itself from within, without abandoning its basic doctrines, 
especially its Leninist principles of how the state and economy 
should be organized. But, as we have seen, it was Lenin's system, 
not its Stalinist superstructure, which was at the root of Russia's 
problems. Again on 7 November 1989 Gorbachev told Soviet TV 
viewers: 'We have to advance faster and faster,' without indicating 
clearly what the country was advancing to. He said he believed in 
introducing the market system, thus showing he had caught, or at 
least was aware of, the spirit of the 1980s. But what this meant in 
practice was a small extension of the area of land open to individual 
cultivation, and greater accountability for industrial enterprises. But 
the first move, under which 5 per cent of the land under cultivation 
(by smallholders) was soon producing 50 per cent of the food avail- 
able in the markets, merely drew attention to the failure of the state 
farms and collectives, which remained intact; and the second, by 
reducing central subsidies to industry, led to an accelerating fall in 
output. Thus in the second half of the 1980s, and still more in the 



756 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

early 1990s, goods available in Soviet shops diminished sharply, 
and a growing proportion of the entire economy operated by barter, 
not just individually but between factories and through the black 
market. Gorbachev introduced the policy of glasnost, or 'openness', 
whereby the press and, to some extent, state broadcasting were 
allowed to criticize and call the government to account. He 
restrained the activities of the KGB. 126 Some archives were opened. 
Independent-minded Soviet historians became more daring. Mass 
graves, dating from Stalin's time, were opened and publicized, and 
the number of Stalin's victims was constantly revised upwards. 
Bukharin and nine others, judicially murdered in 1938, were rehab- 
ilitated. Fewer people were sent to prison or psychiatric hospitals 
for political offences. 

The net result was to remove, to some extent, the climate of fear 
in which the Soviet Union had lived for seventy years. But that, in 
turn, relaxed the discipline, based on fear, which alone kept the 
Soviet Communist system working at all. Absenteeism increased. 
Strikes became common. There was a huge increase in crime, in 
illicit vodka distillation and hence in drunkenness. Gorbachev first 
imposed a limited form of prohibition; then, faced with a collapse 
of state revenues from vodka duties, he abandoned it. There was a 
series of demoralizing disasters, both natural and caused by human 
failure and carelessness. On 26 April 1986, one of the nuclear reac- 
tors at Chernobyl, near Kiev in the Ukraine, blew up, constituting 
the worst calamity in the history of nuclear power, with casualties, 
fallout and long-term effects over a huge area. Four months later, 
on 31 August, the Soviet passenger liner Admiral Nakhimov sank in 
the Black Sea, with the loss of over 400 lives. Five weeks later, on 6 
October, a Soviet nuclear submarine, with sixteen multiple nuclear 
warheads, disappeared without trace in mid-Atlantic. In December 
1988, an earthquake in the Armenian districts of Soviet 
Transcaucasia killed over 20,000 people and devastated an entire 
region; the relief services functioned badly. On 4 June 1989, an 
explosion of gas from a leaking Siberian pipeline, which should 
have registered on the monitoring system, blew up two passing pas- 
senger trains, killing over 800, including many children on holiday. 

These and many other incidents provided evidence of a system 
which was showing signs of general breakdown, and which 
Gorbachev's economic reform programme, which he called pere- 
stroika or 'remodelling', in some respects aggravated. The CIA and 
other agencies had been reporting to the White House, with grow- 
ing conviction, evidence of economic and technological failure in 
the Soviet Union since the early 1980s. It was affecting all areas of 
life, including public health. Even in the field of energy, once a 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 757 

major source of Soviet strength because of its abundant natural 
resources - the USSR remained the world's largest oil exporter even 
in the early 1990s - difficulties were growing, on account of ineffi- 
cient extraction and other technological failures. 127 To some extent, 
the Soviet military-industrial complex was isolated from the worst 
of Russia's economic difficulties by receiving absolute priority in 
supplies of materials and skilled manpower. But part of the object 
of Reagan's rearmament programme was, by raising the pace of 
high-technology development in the arms race, to turn the screw on 
the Soviet economy generally, and force the leadership to ask itself 
hard questions. Was it prepared to match the US high-tech military 
effort at the expense of the civil economy, at the very time the Soviet 
people were being promised change and improvements? Could it, 
indeed, match the US effort, even if it wished? The answer to both 
these questions was no. A third question then arose: was the Soviet 
leadership prepared to respond to the American arms build-up by 
agreeing to come to the negotiating table and engage in realistic dis- 
armament negotiations? The answer to this was yes. On 19 
November 1985 Reagan and Gorbachev met in Geneva for the first 
of what was to prove a series of summit meetings. Reagan proposed 
monitored arms reductions, using the Russian phrase, Doverey no 
provorey, 'trust but verify', and warned Gorbachev that the alterna- 
tive was continuing the arms race, 'and I have to tell you if it's an 
arms race, you must know it's an arms race you can't win.' 128 

Historians will argue for many years whether the Reagan- 
Thatcher strategy of rearming and deploying advanced weapons in 
Europe, while offering the USSR a way out through verified disarm- 
ament, was effective in bringing about a fundamental change in 
Soviet foreign and defence policy, which ended the Cold War. 129 The 
evidence of timing seems to suggest that the strategy helped to push 
Gorbachev in a direction he was already inclined to take, and in 
particular to win over doubting colleagues. In 1986-7 there were 
still real doubts about Gorbachev's sincerity and the reality of the 
changes he was introducing. In the words of Henry Kissinger, 
'Afghanistan will be the test.' 130 Gorbachev had told Reagan at 
Geneva that the first he had heard of the Soviet invasion was on the 
radio, indicating he had no responsibility for it, 'and little enthu- 
siasm,' added Reagan. 131 Hence the announcement of the with- 
drawal, and its completion on schedule, came as a welcome 
reassurance to Western leaders, and thereafter they - and particular- 
ly Reagan, his successor Bush and Mrs Thatcher - regarded 
Gorbachev as the man they wished to remain in charge of the 
USSR. This was of some importance to him, since from 1987 his 
own popularity at home, once considerable, began to fall steadily. 



758 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

What Western leaders did not then know, however, was that a deci- 
sion even more important than the withdrawal from Afghanistan 
had been taken in Moscow: a determination not to use the Red 
Army (as in 1953, 1956 and 1968) to prop up failing Communist 
regimes in Eastern Europe. 

Once this decision was taken, events moved swiftly, though the 
process that destroyed Stalin's satellite empire is not entirely clear. 
Most of the East European regimes were slipping into the same kind 
of economic crisis that had engulfed Russia in the 1980s, and for 
the same reason: the cumulative failure of the collectivist system 
and the so-called 'command economy'. The detonator was, in all 
probability, a malfunction in the capitalist world itself. The years of 
growth in the West which were distinguished by 'Thatcherism' and 
'Reaganomics', and by the rapid development of world financial 
centres, led to breakneck rises in stocks and the inevitable degringo- 
lade. This came first on 19 October 1987, when the Dow Jones 
index in New York fell 508 points, or 23 per cent, in one day. It 
was not, as some feared, a repeat of the 'Black Thursday' of 1929, 
but the prolegomenon to the end of a long period of economic 
expansion, and in due course it produced a recession in 1990-1. At 
the time it was a warning to many banks that their credit lines were 
over-extended. Banks which were heavy lenders to East European 
governments and their agencies were already concerned by their 
credit-worthiness, and after October 1987 no further cash was 
available east of the Oder-Neiser line; indeed pressure to repay cap- 
ital and interest intensified. This in turn led to domestic measures 
by East European governments which reduced goods in the shops 
and raised their prices. Public anger grew, especially as the feeling 
spread that the 'evil empire' - the phrase was much relished by its 
subjects - was losing the will to govern by force. 

Thus the year 1989, which the Left throughout the world had 
planned as a celebration of the bicentennial of the French 
Revolution - the beginning of modern radical politics, as it was 
argued - turned into something quite different: a Year of 
Revolutions indeed, but of revolutions against the established order 
of Marxism-Leninism. Not all of them succeeded. In March 1989 
riots in Tibet against the Chinese occupation and its policy of geno- 
cide were put down with savage force. The next month, Chinese 
students in Peking used the occasion of the death and funeral (22 
April) of the Communist leader Hu Yaobang, who had been popu- 
lar with the masses but deposed by hardliners in 1987, to stage a 
major demonstration. By 27 April this had developed into an occu- 
pation by students of the vast Tiananmen Square in central Peking. 
Other mass demonstrations occurred in various Chinese cities, 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 759 

including Shanghai. On 15 May, student demonstrators, to the 
shame and fury of the Chinese leadership, disrupted a visit by 
Gorbachev to Peking, designed to be the first Sino-Soviet summit 
for thirty years. On 30 May, a 30-foot fibre-and-glass replica of the 
Statue of Liberty was erected in the square. This seems to have 
goaded the authorities, who had been holding inconclusive discus- 
sions with student leaders about 'reforms', into action. Large forces 
of China's Red Army, overwhelmingly drawn from peasant soldiers 
from remote regions, to whom city-dwellers were natural enemies 
and students 'parasites', were concentrated around Peking. On the 
night of 4 June, the regime attacked, using tanks and infantry in 
overwhelming numbers, clearing Tiananmen Square, and in the pro- 
cess killing 2,600 people and injuring over 10,000. Despite rumours 
of divisions in the leadership and army commanders, the unrest was 
put down everywhere with great severity, and thousands were 
jailed. 

In Europe, however, it was a different story. The lead was 
taken by Hungary, which had earlier been in the van in intro- 
ducing market factors into its crumbling 'command economy'. 
Its much-hated leader, Janos Kadar, had been removed in May 1988 
as Party General Secretary; now, on 8 May, he was dismissed as 
Party Chairman, and in due course the Hungarian Communist Party 
voted itself out of existence (10 October 1989), being replaced by a 
multi-party system. More important, however, was Hungary's deci- 
sion to dismantle the Iron Curtain itself, as this had a knock-on 
effect on other satellites. On 2 May Hungary began to roll up its 
border fence with Austria, opening the frontier to East-West traffic 
at will. Even more sensational was the decision to open its border to 
East Germany on 10 September. 

The gathering force of anti-Marxist revolutionary fervour made 
this a move of critical significance. The Polish Communist Party 
had suffered a crushing defeat at the polls on 5 June, the day after 
the Tiananmen Square massacre, and on 12 September the first 
non-Communist government took over in Warsaw. The people of 
East Germany, who had been so brutally repressed by Soviet tanks 
in 1953, were unwilling to see their Slav and Hungarian neighbours 
liberate themselves while they remained chained to the gruesomely 
unpopular regime of Erich Honecker. Once the Hungarian frontier 
was opened, many of them poured across it, en route to West 
Germany. The Iron Curtain thus had a huge hole in it, and the 
effect was to destabilize the East German government, long regard- 
ed as one of the most Stalinist and secure. While some East 
Germans fled, others began to demonstrate. The same day the 
Hungarian CP dissolved itself, mass marches began throughout East 



760 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

Germany, but especially in Berlin and Leipzig. Gorbachev, paying a 
long-arranged visit (7 October), was asked by an anxious Honecker 
to send in troops and tanks. He refused. He told the old Stalinist he 
must either enact reforms, quickly, or get out while he could. 
Publicly, Gorbachev said all the East European regimes were in dan- 
ger unless they responded to what he called 'the impulse' of the 
times. Thus abandoned by his ally, Honecker resigned on 18 
October, his colleagues having refused to authorize troops to open 
fire on the demonstrators. He was succeeded by 'a brief and embar- 
rassed phantom' (to use Disraeli's phrase) called Egon Krentz, who 
lasted exactly seven weeks. On 4 November a million marched in 
East Berlin. Five days later, at a historic press conference held by the 
East Berlin party boss, Gunter Schabowski, it was announced that 
frontier police would no longer try to prevent East Germans from 
leaving the country. A Daily Telegraph reporter asked the key ques- 
tion: 'What about the Berlin Wall?' and was told it was no longer 
an exit-barrier. 132 

That night the Berlin Wall, the ugly and despised testament to 
Communist oppression, where so many hundreds of German 
democrats had died trying to escape, was the scene of a wild orgy of 
rejoicing and destruction, as young Germans hacked at it with pick- 
axes. Television carried these historic scenes around the world and 
in other East European capitals, and, to use, ironically, a phrase of 
Marx's, 'the enflamed masses began to scream ga ira, $a iraV 133 In 
Czechoslovakia, another satellite with a hardline Stalinist govern- 
ment, demonstrations began eight days later, on 17 November, and 
the following day in Bulgaria. There, the fall of the Stalinist govern- 
ment of Todor Zhivkov was followed, on 16 December, by the 
Bulgarian Communist Party renouncing its monopoly on political 
power and opening the way to a multi-party system. Meanwhile on 
24 November, after almost continuous demonstrations in Prague, 
the entire Communist leadership resigned and a non-Communist 
government was formed under the writer Vaclav Havel, later elected 
President. In most cases, these momentous changes were brought 
about without much violence, or even peacefully. There was, happi- 
ly, no lynch law, though the nature and number of the crimes 
committed by outgoing Communist leaders, which now came to 
light, were horrific. In East Germany, for instance, the secret police 
had been involved not only in international terrorism but in large- 
scale drug smuggling to the West, producing hard currency profits 
which had gone into Swiss bank accounts kept for the benefit of 
party leaders. Honecker saved his own skin by entering an army 
hospital in a military zone controlled by the Soviet forces, from 
whence he was spirited to Moscow early in 1991. Many other 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 76 1 

satellite leaders, like Zhivkov, were arrested and in some cases 
brought to trial. 

The one exception to the non-violent revolutionary pattern was 
Romania. The 24-year dictatorship of the party boss there, Nicolae 
Ceausescu, like that of his predecessor Gheorghiu-Dej, was excep- 
tionally brutal and corrupt even by the standards of most Marxist 
regimes, his rule reinforced by a secret police organization known 
as the Securitate. Its members were recruited largely from state 
orphanages. Ceausescu, dreaming of a nation of 100 million 
Romanians, refused to allow the sale of contraceptives, banned 
abortions and penalized the unmarried and childless. In conse- 
quence there were large numbers of illegitimate or unwanted chil- 
dren. Suitable male orphans were taken into cadet battalions in 
their early teens and were trained, under Ceausescu's supervision, to 
regard the regime as their parents and to serve it with fanatical loy- 
alty. As adult members of the Securitate, they were given special 
privileges, and indeed were among the few Romanians who regular- 
ly got enough to eat. The Securitate was in some ways organized 
like Hitler's SS, with its own tanks and aircraft, and had built a com- 
plex network of tunnels and strongpoints under Bucharest. 
Protected by this formidable force, Ceausescu engaged in large-scale 
exercises in social engineering, rather like the Shah's in Iran, 
which involved the progressive destruction of over 8,000 traditional 
villages, and the herding of their inhabitants into big agricultural 
'towns . 

Curiously enough, Ceausescu was not unpopular in the West; 
indeed he was praised for his unwillingness to follow all the twists 
and turns of Soviet foreign and defence policy, and for his ability to 
service and repay his debts and pay for Western goods on the nail - 
a policy made possible by starving the mass of the people of all but 
the barest necessities, leaving the rest for export. 134 But Western 
support evaporated when the nature and scale of his rural destruc- 
tion became known, as it did from 1988 onwards. Moreover, this 
policy brought the regime into direct conflict with its large 
Hungarian minority, and its troubles started in earnest when dis- 
content burst into active revolt at the mainly Hungarian-speaking 
town of Timisoara. The Securitate hit back viciously, and it was 
later claimed that a mass grave had been discovered there filled by 
4,630 bodies of their victims. 135 

Ceausescu believed himself secure from the tides of revolution 
toppling his Marxist colleagues elsewhere. At his last great party 
gathering, early in December, there were no less than sixty-seven 
standing ovations during his five-hour speech, and he felt safe 
enough to carry out a scheduled state visit to Iran. But news that 



762 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

the Hungarian unrest was spreading, even into the capital, brought 
him scurrying back. On 21 December he addressed the crowd in 
front of his presidential palace. As a rule, Ceausescu's oratory was 
listened to by the citizens of Bucharest in silence, with cheers and 
applause supplied by recordings piped from loudspeakers - all part 
of the political surrealism which characterized his gruesome regime. 
On this occasion, however, the crowd shouted and hurled abuse, 
and Ceausescu, accompanied by his furious wife Elena, equally 
hated, stumped back into the palace: an electrifying little scene, 
recorded on video. The following day he was forced to flee the 
palace by helicopter. What happened next is mysterious. His plans 
to hole up in a Securitate redoubt clearly misfired, and it may be 
that he was abandoned by close colleagues, who regarded his per- 
sonal unpopularity as a threat to their own lives: his eventual suc- 
cessor, Ion Iliescu, was one of them. At all events, the Conducator, 
as he called himself, was captured, along with Elena; both were 
tried by a military court on Christmas Day, charged with 'crimes 
against the people', genocide and the murder of 60,000 men, 
women and children, convicted and immediately executed by firing 
squad. These events too were recorded on video. The fall of the 
Ceausescus had been made possible by a change of allegiance of the 
army, and its political masters, even though both had played a role 
in earlier Ceausescu-authorized killings. The Securitate, however, 
remained loyal to its master, even after he was dead, and fighting 
continued for a fortnight in tunnels and bunkers, as the army grad- 
ually established its control. Casualties were reported to be enor- 
mous but proved, on closer examination, to number a thousand or 
less. 136 Listeners all over the world were moved to hear, on 
Christmas Day, the church bells of Bucharest ringing out, for the 
first time in forty-five years, to celebrate the death of 'the Anti- 
Christ', as he was called. 

The aftermath, however, was less satisfactory for democracy. The 
changes in Romania, as in Bulgaria also, turned out to be more of 
persons than of regimes; in both countries the old Communist 
nomenklatura clung on to their police and military power, changed 
their titles and party names, got back control of broadcasting sta- 
tions and newspapers, and staged 'elections', in the course of 1990, 
which kept them in power. In both countries there was unfinished 
business. Much the same could be said of Albania, most Stalinist of 
all the East European regimes, where trouble started in earnest early 
in 1991, and in Yugoslavia, where the unpopularity of the federal 
Communist regime was complicated by regional divisions. As we 
have already noted, the smouldering inter-racial tensions in this 
union of South Slavs had been deplored by its architect, Professor 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 763 

Seton- Watson, as far back as the 1920s. The death of Marshal Tito 
in 1984 removed the one figure who commanded respect, or at any 
rate fear, and in the later 1980s and early 1990 the country sank 
slowly into bankruptcy and chaos. The heartland of Yugoslav 
Communism remained Serbia, which controlled 70 per cent of the 
federal army. But in 1990 both Slovenia and Croatia, the two most 
advanced states, voted non-Communist state governments into 
power, and by summer 1991 the stage was set either for civil war or 
for a break-up of the state. 

In East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary, however, 
the changes were fundamental and permanent, and by the middle of 
1991 democracy appeared to be firmly established in all four. 
Indeed, one of them, East Germany, had ceased to exist, since the 
last remnants of the Allied occupation, in Berlin, had been dis- 
solved, and, with the consent of Russia, the United States, France 
and Britain, the Germans had agreed to unify themselves. Lander 
elections had taken place in October 1990 and federal elections in 
December, confirming the Christian Democrat leader Helmut Kohl 
as first Chancellor of a united Federal Republic of all Germany. The 
merger was not without grave economic problems, for it had been 
accompanied, much against the advice of the head of the West 
German Bundesbank, Karl Otto Pohl, by a financial arrangement 
which put the West and East German marks at parity. Since East 
German industry was grotesquely inefficient and under-capitalized 
by comparison with West Germany's, the foreseeable result was the 
collapse of many East German firms, unemployment soaring to 25 
per cent of the population, and more mass demonstrations, especial- 
ly in Leipzig - this time against the workings of the capitalist sys- 
tem. 137 On the other hand, East Germany, now part of the Federal 
Republic, was also part of the European Community, and few 
doubted that, in the medium term, the former East Germans could 
be absorbed into the Community system and made affluent like the 
rest. 

But if the Prussians and the Saxons could be part of the EC, as of 
right, how could entry be denied to other historic European races: 
the Poles, the Hungarians, the Czechs and Slovaks, and indeed the 
Slovenes and Croats, if they could prise themselves loose from the 
grip of Serbian Belgrade? That was the question confronting the 
Community in the early 1990s. No one doubted that, now these 
East European peoples had chosen to repudiate Communism and 
embrace the market, much responsibility rested on the wealthy 
members of the EC to help finance what would inevitably be an 
expensive transfer. The infrastructures, transport systems, industries 
and educational provisions of these states were all inadequate and 



764 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

run-down, and, the more closely they were examined, the higher the 
bill mounted to make them competitive with Western Europe. The 
cost would run into hundreds, perhaps thousands of millions of dol- 
lars, and would clearly have to be spread over many years. There 
were also debts. Many Western banks had already made provisions 
to regard East European debts as unrecoverable, and, as a gesture, 
the United States government, in March 1991, wrote off all loans to 
Poland. But what of future finance, urgently required? 

The question was linked to the entire long-term strategy of the 
Community. As a free-trade area it had done exceptionally well, 
and by the end of the 1980s all members had passed legislation to 
complete the process of abolishing customs duties during 1992, 
making what was termed a 'single market' (with special transitional 
provisions for some countries). But two questions remained open, 
both of them serious. The first concerned external barriers. Was the 
EC to remain an outward-looking group, with low external tariffs, 
abetting the process begun in the late 1940s by the General 
Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, whose ultimate aim was a single 
world market? Or was it, rather, to be inward-looking, with a high 
tariff wall against the world outside? This question was itself linked 
to the future of farming subsidies, part of the Common Agricultural 
Policy, which by the end of the 1980s was being slowly dismantled. 
The world's leading agricultural exporters, especially the United 
States, Canada and Australia, accused the EC of excessive protec- 
tionism and conduct likely to destroy the whole GATT structure. A 
conference in 1990, called to resolve the argument, not only failed 
to do so but ended in acrimony. 

The second question concerned the way in which the EC itself was 
to develop. Now that the single market was established, some mem- 
bers, notably the French, led by the Socialist President of the 
European Commission, Jacques Delors, wished to proceed rapidly 
to financial, economic and political union, involving, in the first 
place, a common currency and a Community Central Bank. The 
British, especially while Margaret Thatcher was still in charge of 
their affairs, argued that a common currency was either going to 
displace national currencies, or prove a failure, and that not enough 
homework had been done on how it would work, or on what 
powers the new Central Bank would exercise. If the currency dis- 
placed national ones, and the Central Bank ran it, then national 
parliaments would sacrifice a huge part of their sovereignty, and 
political union would have to follow, whether or not public opinion 
was ready for it. In Britain's case it was not, and there was a strong 
suspicion that the same was true of France and Germany, whatever 
their leaders might say in public. Not everyone in British politics 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 765 

agreed with Mrs Thatcher, and her hostile attitude to further 
European unity was one reason why she was overthrown in 
November 1990. On the other hand, Germany's enthusiasm for a 
common currency, strong in 1989-90, waned noticeably as the 
experience of blending the Eastern and Western mark revealed how 
difficult it was to bring currencies into a satisfactory alignment; in 
1991 Pohl moved closer to the British position, before resigning. 
There was also a school of thought which argued that, instead of 
concentrating on vertical progress - that is, uniting the economies 
and political systems of existing members and deepening the 
Community - it should rather expand horizontally, and devote its 
resources and energies to taking in the newly-liberated states of 
Eastern Europe. 

There remained, moreover, the unresolved problem of Russia. 
Was it part of Europe, and therefore a future candidate-member of 
the EC, or not? Gorbachev indicated repeatedly that Russia was 
European. De Gaulle himself had spoken of 'a Europe from the 
Atlantic to the Urals'. He had also made the point, in the early 
1960s, before Britain became a member, that the community was 
not so much an economic or political as a cultural concept; he 
referred to 'the Europe of Dante, of Goethe and of Chateaubriand'. 
After Britain's entry, it was fair to add 'and of Shakespeare'. But if 
Europe was a cultural federation, not only was it wrong to exclude 
the countries which had produced Liszt, Chopin, Dvorak and 
Kafka, it was also unacceptable to deny - in the long term - the 
homeland of Tolstoy and Turgenev, Chekhov, Tchaikovsky and 
Stravinsky. This was certainly a question the Community would 
have to resolve, if not in the 1990s then in the early decades of the 
twenty-first century. 

In the meantime, however, Russia's internal problems mounted. 
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was a paper edifice, in 
which all real power was exercised by Greater Russians from 
Moscow. In short it was, as Reagan had said, an empire, though in 
the later 1980s it became marginally less evil. As it became less evil, 
however, and its subjects less frightened of their masters, the consti- 
tution of the USSR tended to become less of a construct and more 
of a reality. While Gorbachev's failure to implement market eco- 
nomics raised ever more serious economic problems, the decline of 
the fear factor produced ever-growing regional ones. The two were 
of course connected; the more the centre failed to fill the shops, the 
more the regions wanted to take charge of their own affairs. The 
most easily managed were the central Asian republics, run in effect 
by the kgb. But from 1989 all three of the Baltic republics, Estonia, 
Latvia and Lithuania, began to campaign not merely for greater 



766 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

autonomy but for outright independence, such as they had enjoyed 
between 1918 and 1940, when they fell victim to Stalin under the 
terms of the 1939 Soviet-Nazi pact and its secret protocols. In 
March 1991, all three held referenda, in which the demand for 
independence was endorsed by overwhelming majorities, including 
majorities among their Russian-speaking minorities. Georgia too, 
demanded independence, and in the Ukraine, largest and wealthiest 
of the Republics if we exclude Russia itself, there was a similar drift 
towards autonomy, if not yet outright independence. South of the 
Caucasus, the Christian Armenians and the Muslim Azerbaijanis 
actually fought each other, and large numbers of Soviet troops had 
to be despatched to separate the combatants. 

Gorbachev's regional problems were compounded by the 
behaviour of Russia itself (as opposed to the USSR, 'the centre') 
with its 150 million inhabitants, its vast territories, including almost 
all of Siberia, and its natural resources. It was a standing grievance 
of all the USSR's satellites, and all its republics, that they were the 
victims of Russian exploitation; it was equally the passionate con- 
viction of the Russians themselves that they were being milked by 
satellites and republics alike: 'We poor Russians pay for all,' as they 
put it. The fact, of course, was that Russians, republics and satel- 
lites alike had been the victims of an incorrigibly inefficient system. 
In so far as anyone did the exploiting, it was the nomenklatura, the 
privileged caste of high Communist Party officials and army offi- 
cers, which existed in all of them. Perhaps Gorbachev's most funda- 
mental mistake was not to abolish the caste and its privileges right 
from the beginning: then all those in positions of authority, brought 
up against the reality of shortages, would have accepted the 
inevitability of abolishing Leninism itself. But he left the privileges 
intact, and the USSR remained two nations: the ruling class and the 
hoi polloi, just like a society in antiquity. The Gorbachev family 
enjoyed the perks as much as anyone; in New York, during the 
Gorbachev-Reagan summit in Washington in December 1987, Mrs 
Raisa Gorbachev went shopping with an American Express Gold 
card, illegal in Russia and punishable with a long prison term. But 
she was above the law: a nomenklatura wife. 

It is not, therefore, surprising that, as Gorbachev's popularity 
plunged, the man who replaced him in the affections of ordinary 
Russians was Boris Yeltsin, a high functionary who had voluntarily 
relinquished, for himself and his family, the privileges of party rank. 
The former Moscow party leader, he had been sacked by Gorbachev 
in 1987 for complaining publicly that the reforms were not pro- 
ceeding fast or far enough. He then stood for the first fairly contest- 
ed elections for the Congress of People's Deputies, held on 28 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 767 

March 1989, and, in the Moscow constituency of 7 million people, 
was returned with 90 per cent of the votes. Subsequently, and 
despite much hostile manoeuvring by Gorbachev and his henchmen, 
Yeltsin was elected President (that is, head of the government) of 
the Russian Republic, the largest constituent of the USSR. 

The stage was thus set for a constitutional crisis which, as in 
Yugoslavia, had undertones of a putsch or possibly civil war. Yeltsin 
had his critics, as did Gorbachev. But Yeltsin was popular, which 
Gorbachev was not (except abroad). Moreover, Yeltsin had been 
elected by the people, whereas Gorbachev was President of the 
USSR only by courtesy of a Party caucus. Yeltsin stood for regional- 
ism, Gorbachev for 'the centre'. When Gorbachev held a country- 
wide referendum in March 1991, asking Soviet citizens if they 
wished to remain part of the USSR, some of the republics, including 
all the Baltic states, refused to take part; others, including Russia 
and the Ukraine, asked additional questions not framed by 'the cen- 
tre'. Yeltsin's Russia was asked: do you want the Presidents of the 
Republics elected by universal suffrage? Both Gorbachev and 
Yeltsin got the answers they wanted, or said they had. So little was 
resolved by this democratic exercise, such as it was. In June 1991, 
however, Yeltsin strengthened his position by becoming the first 
Russian president to be directly elected, winning nearly 60 per cent 
of the vote. 

In the meantime, two processes seemingly outside the control of 
either Gorbachev or Yeltsin appeared to proceed inexorably. The 
first was the recovery of the Communist hardliners, especially in the 
army, the KGB and the bureaucracy, who in 1990-1 began to regain 
some of their lost confidence and pulled 'the centre' more in their 
direction. They evaded orders they did not like and took actions 
which the Kremlin, or at any rate Gorbachev himself, claimed he 
had not sanctioned, such as seizing broadcasting stations, news- 
paper buildings and other emblems of regionalism in the Baltic 
republics, in one case with considerable loss of life. In the autumn 
of 1990, Gorbachev's liberal Foreign Minister, Eduard Shevard- 
nadze, resigned in protest at the behaviour of what he called 'these 
occult forces'. By the spring of 1991, Soviet Russia was suffering 
from an absence of clear lines of authority. In many countries, this 
would have constituted the curtain-raiser to a military coup. How- 
ever, it was worth noting that Russia had no tradition of generals 
seizing power; the only occasion when such had been attempted, the 
famous Decembrist movement of 1825, had ended in complete 
fiasco. Moreover the army at home, swollen by troops who had left 
their comfortable quarters in Eastern Europe reluctantly to return 
to overcrowded barracks and empty shops, was demoralized. 



768 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

This was aggravated by the accelerating decline of the Soviet 
economy as a whole. Food shortages have been noted earlier. In fact 
the industrial sector was performing, by the end of 1990, far more 
sluggishly than agriculture, which at least was still producing food, 
even if the state could not distribute it. On 9 March 1991, someone 
in Moscow leaked a secret report from Gosplan, the USSR's central 
planning agency, giving a forecast for 1991. 138 This predicted that, 
during the year, agricultural production would fall by 5 per cent, 
industrial production by a staggering 15 per cent and gnp as a 
whole by 11.5 per cent. It also envisaged what it called 'an immi- 
nent collapse' in capital investment, and concluded that the USSR 
was facing 'an economic catastrophe'. 

Hence, in the early 1990s, the Soviet Union presented the image 
of a bewildered, blind and staggering giant, conscious that it was 
stricken but uncertain of where it was going or ought to go. There 
was, however, a useful nineteenth-century diplomatic adage, proba- 
bly coined by Talleyrand, which runs: 'Russia is never as strong as it 
looks; Russia is never as weak as it looks.' There was some concern 
in Washington and London at the mood of the Soviet armed forces, 
or their commanders; and evidence that some of the provisions of 
the disarmament agreements, drawn up by Presidents Reagan and 
Bush, and by President Gorbachev, were being evaded by the 
Soviets. On the other hand, it was clear that, during the 1980s and 
early 1990s, some things in the great power relationships 
had changed permanently. Following a shipboard summit held off 
Malta on 3 December 1989, the Soviet spokesman, Gennady 
Gerasimov, had been emboldened to say: 'The Cold War ended at 
12.45 today.' That remained a fact. Increasingly, in the 1990s, the 
United States, Soviet Russia and other leading powers were able to 
discuss issues in the traditional, realistic terms of old-style power- 
politics, without ideological overtones. That was not a formula for 
Utopia, but it was progress of a sort. The Warsaw Pact was dis- 
banded, and there was even talk of enlarging NATO into a world 
security role, sharing some responsibilities with Soviet Russia. The 
notion of a thermonuclear exchange between the two superpowers 
receded into the realm of practical impossibility. Indeed, it was no 
longer plausible to see Soviet Russia as a true superpower; the 
United States was, in practice, the only one. 139 

The ending of the Cold War not only sharply diminished the 
thermonuclear threat. It also, for the first time, made it possible for 
the United Nations Security Council to function in the way its cre- 
ators intended, as an instrument to deal quickly and effectively with 
aggression. The occasion arose on 2 August 1990 when, without 
warning, Iraqi forces invaded and occupied Kuwait in the course of 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 769 

a single day. As we have already noted, Iraq had built up immense 
armed forces, with some help from the United States and Britain, 
but chiefly through Soviet Russia, China, France and (in specialist 
technical fields) West Germany. The assault was not without a pro- 
legomenon. Iraq not only had a border dispute with Kuwait, involv- 
ing part of one of its oilfields, but a much larger claim that the 
entire country was, in terms of the old Ottoman administrative divi- 
sions, Iraq's 'lost province'. This had no historical basis, since 
Kuwait had been internationally recognized as a separate entity 
long before Iraq had been put together by the British as a League of 
Nations mandate in 1920-2. But it was part of Saddam Hussein's 
vision of a resurrected Greater Babylonia; that was why he had 
acquired such immense armed forces. A further grievance against 
Kuwait was that it had lent him immense sums, to finance his eight- 
year war against Iran, and was now demanding repayment of the 
capital, or at least some interest. Saddam also accused all the Gulf 
states (17 July 1990) of 'conspiring with the United States' to cut 
the price of crude oil and 'stabbing Iraq in the back with a political 
dagger'. Five days later he began to move troops and armour 
toward the border. On 27 July, under Iraqi pressure, the Organ- 
ization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (opec) did in fact raise the 
so-called target price for oil to $21 a barrel. The same day, however, 
the US Senate ended farm credits for Iraq and prohibited any fur- 
ther transfers of military technology. By 31 July some 100,000 Iraqi 
troops were on the Kuwait border, and talks between Iraqi and 
Kuwaiti plenipotentiaries, held in Jeddah the same day, broke down 
after two hours. At the time it was widely reported that the 
American ambassador in Baghdad, in conversation with Saddam 
Hussein, had failed to warn him that an occupation of Kuwait 
would be regarded by Washington as a threat to America's vital 
interests; but this was denied in evidence before the Senate Foreign 
Affairs Committee in March 1991. 140 One thing is clear, however: 
there was a failure of US (and British) intelligence, and the actual 
invasion came as a surprise and a shock. 

By a stroke of good fortune, however, this act of aggression coin- 
cided with an international meeting in Aspen, Colorado, attended 
by, among others, Margaret Thatcher. She was thus able to meet 
President Bush immediately. Together they determined on a joint 
Anglo-American approach which remained solid throughout the 
many anxious months of diplomacy and military build-up which 
followed, and the actual hostilities. In fact at no time since the 
Second World War had the 'special relationship' between the Anglo- 
Saxon powers (as de Gaulle used to call them caustically) func- 
tioned so successfully. 



770 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

The first Allied priority was to prevent Saddam invading Saudi 
Arabia, and indeed rolling south to absorb all the rich oil states of 
the Gulf. With such resources, it was believed, Iraq could, within a 
few years, acquire not only nuclear weapons but the means to del- 
iver them over immense distances, thus threatening Europe (and 
possibly even the United States) as well as Israel and other Middle 
East countries. It was at this point that the new self-confidence 
created among the civilized Western powers by the events of the 
1980s, including the successful conduct of the Falklands campaign, 
the liberation of Grenada, the Libyan raid and the intervention in 
Panama, paid handsome dividends. George Bush and Margaret 
Thatcher determined from the start not merely to protect Saudi 
Arabia by force, but to liberate Kuwait too, whatever it cost. 
Moreover, they agreed to proceed at every stage with the full back- 
ing of the UN Security Council and, following its resolutions, to 
build up the most broadly based international force possible, 
including Arab states. 

The involvement of the UN, which would have been impossible so 
long as the Cold War continued, was the best possible proof that it 
had in fact ended. Soviet Russia also cooperated with the Anglo- 
American diplomatic effort throughout, in private even more 
wholeheartedly than in public. It was, of course, influenced by self- 
interest. On the one hand, its military investment in Iraq was enor- 
mous (including over 1,000 technicians and advisers), and it wished 
to avoid an armed conflict if possible; hence it stressed throughout 
the desirability of a non-violent solution. On the other hand, its 
need for American financial and economic assistance was becoming 
daily more pressing, and this inclined Moscow to follow the 
American lead in the last resort and to get the Gulf problem dis- 
posed of as quickly as possible. 

Hence, not without some argument and difficulty, the Security 
Council complied with the overall Anglo-American strategy. On 2 
August Security Council Resolution 660 condemned the invasion 
and demanded an unconditional withdrawal of Iraqi forces. The 
phrase was reinforced by a statement from Bush: the United States, 
he insisted, required 'the immediate, complete and unconditional 
withdrawal of all Iraqi forces from Kuwait'. On 6 August, SC 
Resolution 661 imposed a trade embargo on Iraq. On 9 August, SCR 
662 ruled that Iraq's annexation of Kuwait, announced in Baghdad, 
was unlawful, null and void. On 18 August, SCR 664 rescinded 
Iraq's order closing down diplomatic missions in Kuwait and 
demanded the right of all foreign nationals to leave. On 25 August 
the Security Council went an important step further and authorized 
the use of force to make sanctions work. Finally, on 29 November, 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 771 

SCR 678 authorized 'all necessary means' to drive Iraqi forces out of 
Kuwait if they had not left by a deadline fixed at midnight on 15 
January 1991. The text of 678 also permitted steps to be taken to 
ensure peace and stability in the area. All these resolutions, of 
which the last was by far the most important, were passed with the 
agreement of the five permanent members of the Security Council 
(two Marxist non-permanent members, Cuba and Yemen, voted 
against certain resolutions, but had no power of veto). The resolu- 
tions were negotiated beforehand with Russia, and indeed on 19 
November George Bush and Gorbachev met privately in Paris to 
discuss the whole strategy in detail. Russia did not contribute to the 
Allied forces building up in the Gulf, but it was a consenting party 
to their use, and it actively assisted the process of UN authorization; 
it also privately provided various forms of military intelligence 
about the capability, siting and command-structures of Iraqi 
weapons systems which Russia had itself supplied to Saddam's 
forces. The operation was thus the first positive result of the new 
relationship between the former Cold War powers. 141 

The Gulf War was able to demonstrate how effective the Security 
Council could be in resisting an aggressor and forcing him to dis- 
gorge, providing that - and this was a critical qualification - the 
United States, as the democratic superpower, and its leading allies, 
such as Britain, were willing to discharge their responsibilities to the 
UN Charter. The crisis was also the first one to be conducted, and 
indeed fought, entirely in front of the TV cameras, with many 
networks, such as the US-based Cable News Network, and the 
British-based Sky, providing twenty-four-hour coverage. Public 
opinion, therefore, played a prominent part throughout, and the 
American government, in the light of the bitter Vietnam experience, 
had to be careful to carry opinion with it in everything that was 
done. In fact the polls showed American voters moving steadily 
towards full backing of a forceful ejection of the Iraqi aggressor, 
and though Bush secured only a narrow majority in the Senate 
authorizing him to use force, his actions were later overwhelmingly 
endorsed by both Houses of Congress and by poll ratings some- 
times as high as 90 per cent. British opinion was always behind the 
original Thatcher determination (wholly endorsed by her successor 
John Major) by large majorities (75-80 per cent). The 'special rela- 
tionship' was thus able to supply the core of the enormous expedi- 
tional force which was assembled in the Gulf between August 1990 
and January 1991 with the approval of the American and British 
electorates. French opinion also favoured forceful intervention; the 
French government was less enthusiastic, and indeed almost until 
the last moment President Mitterrand tried to play a lone game of 



772 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

negotiations with the Iraqi dictator, though to no purpose; and in 
the end the French made a major contribution both to the Allied 
force and to its success. Opinion in other Western countries varied, 
though most made some contribution. West Germany and Japan 
claimed they were precluded from sending their armed forces by 
constitutional limitations, but they provided funds to finance the 
Allied war effort. By skilful diplomacy, the Anglo-Saxon powers 
also secured a large Arab military participation, not only by Saudi 
Arabia, Kuwait itself and other Gulf states, but by Egypt and Syria. 
Saddam Hussein's efforts to reach over the heads of hostile Arab 
governments and arouse their peoples to his defence met little suc- 
cess. Nor did his hasty signature of a final peace agreement with 
Iran, on 15 August, by which he surrendered all the meagre terri- 
torial gains he had acquired at such cost in eight years of fighting, 
bring him any support from that direction. Hence the twenty-eight- 
strong Allied coalition which eventually participated in reversing 
the Iraqi aggression represented a large cross-section of the world 
community, and this too was a significant precedent and a major 
strengthening of the UN's authority. 142 

The entire diplomatic-military exercise might still have foundered 
in doubt and acrimony if the operation itself, code-named Desert 
Storm, had proved a long and costly affair. Public support, especial- 
ly in the United States, might have been eroded, and the Arab part 
of the coalition might have unravelled if Saddam had been able to 
register any major successes. As it was, he attempted to undermine 
the support of Arab governments for the US-led coalition by 
launching numerous missile attacks on Israeli cities, inflicting some 
casualties on civilians. He hoped to provoke an Israeli military 
response, and so be able to portray the Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian 
governments as Israel's de facto allies. But Israel wisely held its 
hand, assisted by the prompt supply of US anti-missile Patriot rock- 
ets, which proved remarkably effective; so the Iraqi tactic failed. 
Desert Storm itself was planned with great care and executed with 
brilliant success. The Commander-in-Chief, General Norman 
Schwarzkopf, proved himself not merely an outstanding military 
supremo in directing one of the most complex international cam- 
paigns in history, involving sea, land and air forces, but showed 
himself well aware of the TV and public-opinion dimension of the 
operation. Indeed he proved himself an accomplished performer in 
front of the cameras at his regular briefings. His summary of Allied 
strategy, after the campaign was completed, immediately became a 
TV classic: it was as if one had watched the Duke of Wellington 
describing the Battle of Waterloo the day after it took place. 

The Allied air assault began almost immediately after the 15 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 773 

January deadline was reached and continued remorselessly up to 
and beyond the date set for the ground offensive on 24 February. 
The aim was to use precision weapons, involving the latest military 
technology (the Stealth bomber, Cruises, so-called 'Smart' bombs 
and laser guidance systems, and infra-red night-bombing equip- 
ment) to pinpoint identified military targets, avoid civilian areas 
and minimize non-military casualties. This aim largely succeeded; 
civilian casualties were minimal, and this helped the Allies to win 
the media war at home, as well as the actual one. Targeting pro- 
ceeded systematically from command-and-control systems, radar 
and missile sites, airfields and chemical, biological and nuclear 
weapons establishments, to all systems of communications. Thence 
it spread to the pinpointing and carpet-bombing of Iraqi ground 
forces deployed in Kuwait and southern Iraq. The Iraqi air force 
was either destroyed or opted out of the combat at an early stage, 
and this greatly assisted the Allied air offensive, which eventually 
consisted of nearly 140,000 sorties. 

The object was to win the war, in so far as it was possible, by the 
use of air power, thus minimizing Allied ground casualties. The 
strategy proved, in the event, more successful than even 
Schwarzkopf and his advisers, chief of whom was the Commander 
of British Forces Middle East, General Sir Peter de la Billiere, had 
dared to hope. The land offensive, launched on 24 February, 
involved an elaborate deception plan, which worked. Iraqi resis- 
tance, thanks to the sustained air offensive, was lighter than expec- 
ted, and by 28 February, forty out of forty-two Iraqi divisions in the 
war zone had been destroyed or rendered ineffective. Preliminary 
figures indicated that the Iraqis had lost 50,000 killed and 175,000 
missing or captured. Allied casualties were 166 dead, 207 wounded 
and 106 missing or captured. 143 Anxious not to exceed the terms of 
the UN mandate, and unwilling to go on to Baghdad and get 
dragged into Iraqi internal politics, Bush ordered a temporary cease 
fire on 28 February, provided Iraq accepted all Allied conditions, 
which Saddam agreed to do three days later. He himself was shortly 
involved in a struggle to retain power against his numerous internal 
enemies, and allied troops were obliged to move into northern Iraq 
to protect the Kurds from his vengeance. Thus an unprovoked 
aggression was decisively reversed by firm leadership from the civi- 
lized powers, within the strict framework of the United Nations, 
and in full accordance with international law. This augured well for 
the future of collective security, not merely throughout the 1990s 
but in the coming twenty-first century, and suggested that some, at 
least, of the lessons of the twentieth century were at last being 
learned. 



774 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

The cost, however, was heavy in some ways; Iraq's infrastructure 
had been damaged or destroyed, and Saddam himself had looted 
and wrecked much of Kuwait's. The bills ran into many hundreds 
of billions of dollars though, by one of those ironies of modernity, 
the task of rebuilding the two countries was to act as a stimulant to 
Western economies and help to pull them out of recession, Saddam, 
however, in his rage and frustration, had committed two huge 
crimes, not just against Kuwait but against all humanity. He had 
released millions of tons of crude oil into the Gulf, which slowly 
drifted southwards and polluted a huge area of sea, seabed and 
coast; and he had set fire to about five hundred oil wells in the vast 
Kuwaiti fields. At the end of March 1991, it was calculated it 
would take at least two years to extinguish them, and in the mean- 
time the largest man-made act of air pollution in world history 
would continue. 

These barbarous events reinforced fears that mankind, in its anx- 
iety to acquire higher living standards by exploiting the earth's nat- 
ural resources, was damaging the planet irreparably. The ecological 
fears of the 1980s and early 1990s were in some ways similar to the 
panics of the 1970s, in which the world was warned it was running 
out of key raw materials; that is, they were both marked by emo- 
tionalism masquerading as science, gross exaggeration and reckless 
(even dishonest) use of statistics. Nonetheless some of the much- 
publicized worries had substance. There was, for instance, justified 
concern at the rapid destruction of the tropical rainforests, especially 
in Brazil, for commercial purposes. The rainforest area was calcu- 
lated at about 1.6 billion hectares before deforestation by humans 
began in earnest in the nineteenth century. By 1987 it had been 
reduced to 1.1 billion, and about 80,000 square kilometres, an area 
the size of Austria, was being lost every year. The result was erosion 
of soil, floods, drought and appreciable effects on the world's atmo- 
sphere. An additional point, beloved of ecologists but perhaps of 
less concern to most people, was the loss of insect species caused by 
deforestation. Some 30 million species of insects lived in the rain- 
forests during the 1980s; they were being destroyed at the rate of 
six an hour, and 10-30 per cent of the earth's species, it was reck- 
oned, would be extinct by the end of the century. 144 

Tropical deforestation was linked to a problem which, in the 
later 1980s, came increasingly to be seen as serious not only by eco- 
logical pressure groups but by science and government: the 'green- 
house effect'. The earth's ozone layer, which keeps out harmful 
ultra-violet radiation from the sun, was being progressively weak- 
ened, it was argued, by a number of factors, chiefly the burning of 
fossil fuels, producing carbon dioxide which acted like the glass of a 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 775 

greenhouse, trapping the sun's heat; and by the growing use of chlo- 
rofluorocarbons, used for instance as propellants in aerosols and in 
refrigeration and air-conditioning. Sweden had passed a law ban- 
ning aerosol sprays as long ago as January 1978; but then Sweden 
passed many laws banning supposed harmful human activities. The 
first serious and documented warning about the ozone layer came 
in March 1984 from a team at the University of East Anglia. The 
'greenhouse effect' was calculated to produce warmer summers, 
milder winters, but also violent storms, floods and drought. British 
people in particular began to believe there was some truth in it dur- 
ing the 1980s, which produced some of the warmest summers on 
record and, on 16 October 1987, the most violent hurricane since 
the early eighteenth century, which destroyed millions of trees, 
including many prize specimens at Kew Gardens. The month 
before, seventy nations, meeting in Montreal, had agreed (16 
September) on a programme of measures to freeze chlorofluoro- 
carbon emissions at existing levels and reduce them by 50 per cent 
before 1999. By the early 1990s the world was slowly waking up to 
its responsibilities as a preserver of the planet, as well as its 
exploiter. 145 

Yet if the industrial use of technology, such as the immense 
machines which were tearing down the Brazilian rainforests, could 
damage the earth, technological advances, including sophisticated 
monitoring systems, could help to preserve it, by telling us exactly 
what was happening and what we were doing wrong. In any case, 
there was no halting the march of science and its application, which 
proceeded at an ever-accelerating pace throughout the twentieth 
century, both assisting man in his barbarism and reducing its worst 
consequences. The winning of the Gulf War by high-technology 
weapons, thus reducing casualties (at least on the Allied side) to a 
minimum, was both an exemplar and a pointer to the future. In 
purely physical terms, the exact sciences fulfilled all their promises 
in the twentieth century. Modern times, in earlier phases, were 
dominated by physics, especially nuclear physics and astro-physics. 
The physicist carried man to the brink of the pit but then halted 
him and bade him look down. It may be that, after the seeming 
inevitability of two world wars, the creation of nuclear weapons 
was an admonitory gift, which spared us a third clash of great 
nations and introduced what had become, by the early 1990s, 
the longest period of general peace ever recorded. The end of the 
Cold War, too, and the partial reconciliation of the two leading 
thermonuclear powers, suggested that they would be prepared to 
take joint steps to prevent the spread of such weapons to states 
foolish enough to use them. In this sense physics seems to have 



776 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

served an important political purpose in the second half of the 
century. 

But physics seemed to have come to the end of its paramountcy 
during the 1960s. In any case, it could not tell people what they 
increasingly demanded to know: what had gone wrong with 
humanity. Why had the promise of the nineteenth century been 
dashed? Why had much of the twentieth century turned into an age 
of horror or, as some would say, evil? The social sciences, which 
claimed such questions as their province, could not provide the 
answer. Nor was this surprising: they were part, and a very impor- 
tant part, of the problem. Economics, sociology, psychology and 
other inexact sciences - scarcely sciences at all in the light of mod- 
ern experience - had constructed the juggernaut of social engineer- 
ing, which had crushed beneath it so many lives and so much 
wealth. The tragedy was that the social sciences only began to fall 
into disfavour in the 1970s, after they had benefited from the great 
afflatus of higher education. The effect of the social science fallacy 
would therefore still be felt until the turn of the century. 

Indeed, in the early 1990s, social scientists at Western universi- 
ties, including some with high, if falling, reputations, were still try- 
ing to practise social engineering. At Oxford, and to a lesser extent 
at Cambridge, for instance, some colleges pursued a policy of 
discriminating, in their admissions procedures, against high- 
performing boys and girls from fee-paying schools, in favour of 
lower-performing applicants from state schools. 146 The object was 
the purely social and non-academic one of correcting supposed 
'social and financial imbalances' in the general population. The con- 
sequence, however, was simply a lowering of standards. But stan- 
dards themselves came under attack. One senior academic at the 
University of Pennsylvania, who opposed the whole idea of a hierar- 
chy of merit in literature and the arts, and who wrote that distin- 
guishing between the work of Virginia Woolf and Pearl Buck was 
'no different from choosing between a hoagy and a pizza', declared 
publicly that he was 'one whose career is dedicated to the day when 
we have a disappearance of those standards'. The fact that he was 
elected to be the 1992 president of the Modern Languages 
Association of America demonstrated the power of deconstruction- 
ists, as they were called, in academia. 147 But if, as deconstructionists 
maintained, 'hierarchical' systems of judgement, which favoured the 
study of Shakespeare's plays over, say, comic books, were a source 
of social evil, what was the point of universities, whose traditional 
purpose was the pursuit of excellence? 

Some universities now argued that the function of the campus 
was to correct social abuses. At Harvard, Yale, Stanford and else- 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 777 

where, social engineering operated in a variety of ways. While it 
was difficult to expel students for organizing violent demonstrations 
on behalf of approved causes, or indeed for doing no academic 
work at all, it was comparatively easy to extrude them summarily 
for offending against the code of liberal censorship by using words 
condemned by organized pressure groups. At Smith, once one of the 
best women's colleges in the world, forbidden activities included not 
merely racism, sexism, 'ageism', heterosexism and other narrowly- 
defined antisocial evils, but 'lookism', said to 'oppress' ugly people 
by 'supposing a standard for beauty and attractiveness'. A visiting 
professor at Harvard Law School, once the best law school in the 
world, committed the particularly heinous crime of 'sexism' by 
quoting Byron's famous line, 'And whispering I will ne'er consent - 
consented'. In 1991 Stanford was reported to be working on a 
'speech code', in which such words as 'girls' and 'ladies' were for- 
bidden as 'sexist'; instead of 'girl', the term 'pre-woman' had to be 
employed, though on this point there was some disagreement, since 
some female pressure groups insisted the word 'woman' should be 
spelt 'womyn', and others 'wimman'. 148 Significantly, just as in 
Marxist states social engineering went hand in hand with financial 
corruption of the most blatant kind, the same conjunction appeared 
in 'progressive' American universities. Early in 1991, the House of 
Representatives' Energy and Commerce Committee, under the 
chairmanship of John Dingell, began a vigorous investigation into 
the use of $9.2 billion a year funded to American universities by the 
federal government in the form of research contracts. They discov- 
ered that at Stanford, which had received $1.8 billion during the 
previous ten years, about $200 million had been syphoned off into 
unjustifiable expenditure, designed chiefly to give the academic 
staff, from the university's president downwards, a higher standard 
of living. 149 Such scandals contributed to the process which, by the 
early 1990s, had begun to undermine the standing of the univer- 
sities in general, and the social sciences in particular, among the 
public. 

But if physics seemed to have entered, by comparison with its 
triumphs in the first half of the century, a period of relative 
quiescence, and if the social sciences were discredited, a new era of 
biology began from the 1950s onwards. Hitherto, the exact sciences 
had been able to tell us far too little about life, as opposed to mat- 
ter. By the 1950s, the way in which the non-organic world operated 
was generally known; what began to mature in the next thirty years 
was knowledge of the laws of life. Such law-systems proved to be 
unitary and holistic. Just as Einstein's recasting of the laws of 
physics applied both in the ordering of gigantic stellar congreg- 



778 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

ations and in the minute structures of subatomic particles, so the 
evolving biological rules applied over the whole spectrum of living 
matter, from the smallest to the greatest. 

In the mid-nineteenth century, Charles Darwin's theory of evolu- 
tion for the first time provided a scientific organizing principle to 
explain why plants and animals developed the characteristics they 
exhibit. It was not a deductive system, permitting the prediction of 
future developments or even the reconstruction of the past: in this 
sense it was unlike Newton's laws or Einstein's modifications of 
them. Darwin himself always stressed the limits of his discoveries. 
He discouraged those who sought to build ambitious projections on 
them. That was why he gave no licence to the theories of the 'social 
Darwinists', which terminated in Hitler's Holocaust, and why he 
likewise brushed off Marx's attempts to appropriate Darwinism for 
his own theories of social determinism, which eventually produced 
the mass murders of Stalin, Mao Tse-tung and Pol Pot. In the sec- 
ond half of the twentieth century, however, there were at last signs 
of a unified theory emerging from the laboratory and reaching to 
both ends of the spectrum. 

At the microcosmic end, molecular biology, neurophysiology, 
endocrinology and other new disciplines began to explain such pro- 
cesses as the mechanism of genetic inheritance and programming. 
The most important of the micro-level discoveries came at 
Cambridge University in 1953 when James Watson and Francis 
Crick succeeded in deciphering the double-helix configuration of 
the molecule of deoxyribonucleic acid (dna). 150 They found that 
molecules of dna, which determine the structure and function of 
every living animal or plant, were in the shape of a double coil, like 
a spiral ladder, built up of sugars and phosphates and formed into 
rungs containing various acids. The structure, like a magnificently 
complex, living computer, constitutes the particular code telling the 
cell what protein to make, the heart of the creative operation. 151 
More striking still was the speed with which this discovery was 
given a multitude of practical applications. The gap between the 
theoretical basis of nuclear physics and actual nuclear power was 
half a century. In the new biology the gap was less than twenty 
years. In 1972 scientists in California discovered 'restriction enzymes', 
which allowed the dna to be split in highly specific ways and then 
recombined or spliced for a particular purpose. The recombinant dna 
was put back into its cell or bacterium and, operating according to 
normal biological principles, divided and reduplicated itself to form 
new protein material. The man-made micro-organism was then fed 
with nutrients and fermented by procedures in use by the pharmaceu- 
tical industry for half a century in the production of antibiotics. 152 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 779 

Once dna had been explored, the formidable resources of mod- 
ern commercial chemistry had no difficulty in devising a range of 
products for immediate use. The process of mass production and 
marketing began in June 1980, when the US Supreme Court, in a 
historic decision, granted the protection of the patent law to 
man-made organisms. Earlier fears of 'Frankenstein monster 
viruses' being secretly developed and then 'escaping' from labora- 
tories quickly evaporated. In America, where gene-splicing was con- 
centrated, the restrictive regulatory structure on dna research was 
replaced, in September 1981, by a voluntary code. 153 In the late 
1970s less than a score of laboratories and firms specialized in 
splicing. By the early 1990s there were many thousands. With its 
immediate and multiplying applications over animal and vegetable 
food production, energy and, above all, medical science and phar- 
maceutical products, the new industrial biology promised to be a 
primary dynamic of the last years of the century. 

The speed with which the dna discovery was developed and 
applied to practical problems raised questions about the macro- 
scopic end of the biological spectrum: the process of explaining the 
evolution of social behaviour in terms of the growth and age-struc- 
ture of whole animal populations, humanity included, and in terms 
of their genetic constitution. Granted the unitary nature of biologi- 
cal laws, if a scientific revolution could occur at one end of the 
range, was it not to be expected (or feared) at the other? It was in 
this area that the social sciences had most conspicuously failed, not 
least because they had been penetrated by Marxist superstition. The 
academic imperialism of some social scientists prevented much seri- 
ous work being done on the lines Darwin's discoveries had suggest- 
ed: that minds and mental attitudes evolved like bodies, and that 
behaviour could be studied like other organic properties, by means 
of comparative genealogies and evolutionary analysis. Such ap- 
proaches were, quite irrationally, discredited by the weird racist 
eugenics which the inter-war fascists (and, in the 1920s, the 
Communists also) believed and practised. 

In the 1930s, however, the Chicago scientist Warder Alee pub- 
lished Animal Aggregations (1931) and The Social Life of Animals 
(1938), which gave illuminating examples of the effect of evolution 
on social behaviour. The real breakthrough came at roughly the 
same time as the Watson-Crick discovery, when the British ecologist 
V.C. Wynne-Edwards published Animal Dispersion in Relation to 
Social Behaviour (1962). He showed that virtually all social be- 
haviour, such as hierarchies and pecking-orders, securing territory, 
bird-flocking, herding and dances, were means to regulate numbers 
and prevent species exceeding available food supplies. Socially 



780 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

subordinate members were prevented from breeding; each animal 
sought to maximize its own reproduction; the fittest succeeded. In 
1964 another British geneticist, W.D. Hamilton, showed in The 
Genetic Evolution of Social Behaviour how important devotion to 
one's own genes was in ordering social behaviour: parental 'protec- 
tion' was a case of concern for others in proportion as they shared 
parents' genes. Unselfishness or altruism found in natural selection, 
therefore, was not moral in origin, nor implied a conscience or per- 
sonal motivation: there were altruistic chickens, even viruses. 
Genetic kin theory stated that occurrence of altruistic behaviour 
increased in proportion to the number of genes shared by common 
ancestry. It had a cost-benefit element, being more likely to occur 
when the cost to the donor was small, the recipient's benefit large. 
Kin theory was refined by the Harvard biologist Robert Trivers, 
who developed the notions of 'reciprocal altruism' (a form of 
enlightened self-interest) and 'parental investment', which enhanced 
the offspring's chances of survival at the cost of parents' ability to 
invest in subsequent offspring. Females invested more than males, 
since eggs 'cost' more than sperm. Female choice was largely re- 
sponsible for the evolution of mating systems, being attuned to the 
maximizing of evolutionary fitness. As this new methodology devel- 
oped, it became possible to show that social patterns in almost any 
species had their origins in evolutionary natural selection. 

In 1975 the Harvard scientist Edward Wilson brought together 
two decades of specialist research in his book, Sociobiology: the 
New Synthesis. 154 His own work lay with insects but he drew on a 
vast array of detailed empirical studies to mount his case that the 
time was ripe for a general theory analogous to the laws of Newton 
or Einstein. This book, and other studies, drew attention to the bio- 
logical process of self-improvement which is going on all the time 
and is a vital element in human progress. They suggested the pro- 
cess should be studied by empirical science, not metaphysics, and by 
the methodology so brilliantly categorized by Karl Popper, in which 
theory is made narrow, specific and falsifiable by empirical data, as 
opposed to the all-purpose, untestable and self-modifying explana- 
tions offered by Marx, Freud, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Barthes and 
other prophets. 

What was clear, by the last decade of the century, was that 
Alexander Pope had been right in suggesting, 'The proper study of 
mankind is man.' 155 For man, as a social being, was plainly in need 
of radical improvement. He was, indeed, capable of producing sci- 
entific and technical 'miracles' on an ever-increasing scale. The abil- 
ity to create new substances further accelerated the communications 
and electronics revolution that had started in the 1970s and 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 781 

gathered pace throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s. As the 
number of circuits which could be imprinted on a given area multi- 
plied, calculators and computers grew in capacity and fell in price. 
The first true pocket calculator, on which mankind had been 
working since the time of Pascal in the mid-seventeenth century, 
was produced by Clive Sinclair in 1972 and cost £100; by 1982 a 
far more powerful model cost £7. The emergence of the silicon chip 
led directly to the development of micro-processors. Whereas com- 
plex electronic controls had previously to be specifically constructed 
for each job, the micro-processor was a general-purpose device 
which could be cheaply made in vast numbers. Its emergence was 
followed, in December 1986, by high-temperature super-conduc- 
tors, materials which lose all resistance to electric currents at very 
low temperatures. These, and other new materials and processes, 
not only advanced the frontiers of high technology, thus making 
possible the kind of long-distance space probes common in the 
1980s and early 1990s, advanced laser surgery and the devastating 
military technology employed in the Gulf War, but introduced mass- 
manufactured, low-cost devices which affected the life and work of 
hundreds of millions of ordinary people. Video machines and 
micro-discs transformed popular entertainment. Portable phones 
and car phones gave a new, and often unattractive, dimension to 
work. Conven-tional telephone cables were replaced by fibre-optic 
ones, whose signals coded as light-pulses enabled thousands of 
phone conversations and scores of TV channels to be carried simul- 
taneously along a single circuit. While the capacity of specialist 
computers enabled governments and businesses to perform prodi- 
gies of computations in micro-seconds, word-processors trans- 
formed office work throughout the advanced nations and were 
employed by ever-widening ranges of people, even including humble 
world-historians. Machines, often of astonishing complexity, now 
entered and often dominated the lives of the masses. 

Yet, in the early 1990s, as many people died of starvation as ever 
before in world history. Moreover, many innovations designed to 
increase human happiness ended by diminishing it. In the West, the 
spread of contraception, in a variety of forms, and the growing 
availability of abortion on demand, made fortunes for pharmaceuti- 
cal firms and clinics, but, in a hedonistic and heedless society, did 
not appreciably diminish the number of unwanted children. One 
striking and unwelcome phenomenon of the 1970s and still more of 
the 1980s was the growth of what were euphemistically termed 
'one-parent families', in most cases mothers, usually dependent on 
welfare payments, looking after children on their own. These 
deprived children were the products of promiscuity and divorce-by- 



782 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

consent. The numbers of illegitimate children, in societies which 
called themselves advanced, grew at an astonishing rate in the 
1980s. By the spring of 1991, one in four live births in Britain was 
illegitimate; in parts of Washington DC, capital of the richest nation 
on earth, the proportion was as high as 90 per cent. There was no 
point in trying to pretend that one-parent families and illegitimacy 
were anything other than grave social evils, devastating for the indi- 
viduals concerned and harmful for society, leading, as they 
inevitably did in many cases, to extreme poverty and crime. Crime- 
rates rose everywhere, fuelled by growing abuse of alcohol and 
drugs. The spread of unlawful drug habits was just as likely to be 
prompted by affluence as by poverty. By the end of the 1980s it was 
calculated that the illegal use of drugs in the United States now net- 
ted its controllers over $110 billion a year. On 6 September 1989, 
President Bush announced plans to reduce drug abuse in the United 
States by half by the year 2000, and to spend $7.86 billion in 
federal funds on the effort. Few expressed much confidence in the 
project. 

Another self-inflicted wound in the advanced nations was the 
spread of aids (Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome). The ori- 
gins of this fatal and seemingly incurable disease, which destroys 
the body's self-defence system against infection, remained obscure 
even in the early 1990s, despite much research. It appeared to be 
spreading most rapidly in black Africa, where heterosexuals acted 
as transmitters. In the West, however, it was largely confined to 
male homosexuals and (to a much lesser extent) to drug-users. It 
was the product of drug abuse and, far more seriously, of the homo- 
sexual promiscuity which, often in extreme form, had followed the 
decriminalization of homosexuality in the 1960s and 1970s. Some 
male homosexuals were shown to have had 300 or more sexual 
partners in a single year, and against this background the disease 
spread rapidly. First reports of its seriousness came on 31 December 
1981, when 152 cases had emerged, chiefly in San Francisco, Los 
Angeles and New York; one was an intravenous drug-abuser; the 
rest were male homosexuals. By 13 October 1985 the World Health 
Organization declared that the disease had reached epidemic pro- 
portions. By February 1989 it was widely reported that those tested 
for AIDS with positive results were being denied life insurance; oth- 
ers were losing their jobs. Drugs like azidothymidine (azt) were 
used to delay (not cure) the progress of the disease, but often with 
horrific side effects. On 9 February 1989 it was announced that a 
new antibody called cd4 had been developed in San Francisco; this 
promised to delay the fatal consequences of aids for possibly years, 
and with minimal side-effects. But no actual cure appeared in sight 



THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 783 

despite vast expenditure and effort. Uncertainties about the disease 
produced bitter political arguments. Governments were particularly 
anxious to prevent its spread among the community as a whole, and 
spent many millions on advertising campaigns designed to reduce 
heterosexual promiscuity, and encourage the use of condoms. 
Again, the pharmaceutical industry benefited, but whether govern- 
ment expenditure had any other effect, no one knew. By the early 
1990s it was generally believed that the likelihood of an epidemic 
among heterosexuals, once confidently forecast by the homosexual 
lobby, was negligible. 

Hugely expensive and probably ineffectual government cam- 
paigns against drug-abuse and AIDS saw the modern state in a char- 
acteristic twentieth-century posture - trying to do collectively what 
the sensible and morally educated person did individually. The disil- 
lusion with socialism and other forms of collectivism, which became 
the dominant spirit of the 1980s, was only one aspect of a much 
wider loss of faith in the state as an agency of benevolence. The 
state was, up to the 1980s, the great gainer of the twentieth century; 
and the central failure. Before 1914 it was rare for the public sector 
to embrace more than 10 per cent of the economy; by the end of the 
1970s, and even beyond, the state took up to 45 per cent or more of 
the GNP in liberal countries, let alone totalitarian ones. But whereas, 
at the time of the Versailles Treaty in 1919, most intelligent people 
believed that an enlarged state could increase the sum total of 
human happiness, by the 1990s this view was held by no one out- 
side a small, diminishing and dispirited band of zealots, most of 
them academics. The experiment had been tried in innumerable 
ways; and it had failed in nearly all of them. The state had proved 
itself an insatiable spender, an unrivalled waster. It had also proved 
itself the greatest killer of all time. By the 1990s, state action had 
been responsible for the violent or unnatural deaths of some 125 
million people during the century, more perhaps than it had suc- 
ceeded in destroying during the whole of human history up to 1900. 
Its inhuman malevolence had more than kept pace with its growing 
size and expanding means. 

The fall from grace of the state likewise, by the early 1990s, had 
begun to discredit its agents, the activist politicians, whose phenom- 
enal rise in numbers and authority was one of the most important 
and baleful human developments of modern times. It was Jean- 
Jacques Rousseau who had first announced that human beings 
could be transformed for the better by the political process, and 
that the agency of change, the creator of what he termed the 'new 
man', would be the state, and the self-appointed benefactors who 
controlled it for the good of all. In the twentieth century his theory 



784 THE RECOVERY OF FREEDOM 

was finally put to the test, on a colossal scale, and tested to destruc- 
tion. As we have noted, by the year 1900 politics was already 
replacing religion as the chief form of zealotry. To archetypes of the 
new class, such as Lenin, Hitler and Mao Tse-tung, politics - by 
which they meant the engineering of society for lofty purposes - 
was the one legitimate form of moral activity, the only sure means 
of improving humanity. This view, which would have struck an 
earlier age as fantastic, even insane, became to some extent the 
orthodoxy everywhere: diluted in the West, in virulent form in the 
Communist countries and much of the Third World. At the demo- 
cratic end of the spectrum, the political zealot offered New Deals, 
Great Societies and welfare states; at the totalitarian end, cultural 
revolutions; always and everywhere, Plans. These zealots marched 
across the decades and hemispheres: mountebanks, charismatics, 
exaltes, secular saints, mass murderers, all united by their belief that 
politics was the cure for human ills: Sun Yat-sen and Ataturk, Stalin 
and Mussolini, Khrushchev, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, Castro, Nehru, 
U Nu and Sukarno, Peron and Allende, Nkrumah and Nyerere, 
Nasser, Shah Pahlevi, Gadafy and Saddam Hussein, Honecker and 
Ceausescu. By the 1990s, this new ruling class had lost its confi- 
dence and was rapidly losing ground, and power, in many parts of 
the world. Most of them, whether alive or dead, were now execrat- 
ed in their own homelands, their grotesque statues toppled or 
defaced, like the sneering head of Shelley's Ozymandias. Was it pos- 
sible to hope that 'the age of polities', like the 'age of religion' 
before it, was now drawing to a close? 

Certainly, by the last decade of the century, some lessons had 
plainly been learned. But it was not yet clear whether the underlying 
evils which had made possible its catastrophic failures and tragedies 
- the rise of moral relativism, the decline of personal responsibility, 
the repudiation of Judeo-Christian values, not least the arrogant 
belief that men and women could solve all the mysteries of the uni- 
verse by their own unaided intellects - were in the process of being 
eradicated. On that would depend the chances of the twenty-first 
century becoming, by contrast, an age of hope for mankind. 



Source Notes 



1 A Relativistic World 

1 A.Einstein, in Annalen der Physik, 
17 (Leipzig 1905), 891ff. 

2 Banesh Hoffman, Einstein 
(London 1975 ed.), 78; John 
White, The Birth and Rebirth of 
Pictorial Space (London 1967 ed.), 
236-73. 

3 Hoffman, op cit., 8 1-2. 

4 A. Vibert Douglas, The Life of 
Arthur Stanley Eddington (London 
1956), 39-40. 

5 Daily Telegraph, IS June 1980; 
D.W.Sciama, The Physical 
Foundations of General Relativity 
(New York 1969). 

6 Karl Popper, Conjectures and 
Refutation (London 1963), 34ff.; 
and Popper, Unended Quest: an 
Intellectual Autobiography 
(London 1976 ed.), 38. 

7 A.N. Whitehead, Science and the 
Modern World (London 1925). 

8 A.Einstein, Out of My Later Years 
(London 1950), 41. 

9 The Born-Einstein Letters 
1916-1955 (London 1971). 
Ibid., 149. 

Ernest Jones, The Life and Work of 
Sigmund Freud, ed. Lionel Trilling 
and Steven Marcus (New York 
1961),493ff. 
Ibid., 493. 

13 B. A.Farrell, The Standing of 
Psychoanalysis (Oxford 1981); 
Anthony Clare, The Times Literary 
Supplement, 26 June 1981, 735. 

14 P.B.Medawar, The Hope of 
Progress (London 1972). 

15 Jones, op. cit., 493. 



10 
11 



12 



16 Letter of 18 December 1912. 
William McGuire (ed.), The 
Freud-Jung Letters, (tr. London 
1971), 534-5. 

17 See Freud's essay, 'Psychoanalysis 
Exploring the Hidden Recesses of 
the Mind', in the Encyclopaedia 
Brittania survey, These Eventful 
Years: the Twentieth Century in 
the Making, 2 vols (New York 
1924), ii 51 Iff. 

18 Sigmund Freud, The Future of an 
Illusion (London 1927), 28. 

19 Quoted by Richard Buckle, 
Diaghilev (New York 1979), 87. 

20 Walter Laqueur, Weimar: a 
Cultural History, 1918-1 933 
(London 1974). 

21 There is no evidence they met. The 
conjunction forms the setting for 
Tom Stoppard's play Travesties 
(1977). 

22 George Painter, Marcel Proust, 2 
vols (New York 1978), n 293ff. 

23 Theodore Zeldin, France 
1848-1945, 2 vols (Oxford, 
1977), vol. ii Intellect, Taste, 
Anxiety, 370ff. 

24 Quoted in Lionel Trilling, The Last 
Decade: Essays and Reviews 

1 965-1 977 (New York 1979), 28. 

25 Painter, op. cit., ii 339. 

26 Camille Vettard, 'Proust et 
Einstein', Nouvelle Revue 
Franqaise, August 1922. 

27 Trilling, op. cit., 28-9. 

28 Karl Marx, A Contribution to the 
Critique of Political Economy, 20. 

29 Sigmund Freud, Beyond the 
Pleasure Principle (1920) 70-81. 



785 



786 



SOURCE NOTES 



30 Quoted in Fritz Stern, The Failure 
of llliberalism (London 1972), 
'Bethmann Hollweg and the War', 
77-118. 

3 1 FrederickR. Karl, Joseph Conrad: 
the Three Lives (New York 1979), 
737-8. 

32 J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress 
(London 1920), 352; see 
I.F.Clarke, The Pattern of 
Expectation, 1744-2001 (London 
1979). 

33 Quoted by Martin Gilbert in 
R.S.Churchill and Martin Gilbert, 
Winston S. Churchill, 5 vols (to 
date) with companion volumes 
(London, 1966-) iv 913-14. 

34 Randolph Bourne, Untimely 
Papers (New York 1919), 140. 

35 Foster Rhea Dulles, The United 
States Since 1 865 (Ann Arbor 
1959), 263. 

36 Figure given by Karl Deutsch, The 
Crisis of the State', Government 
and Opposition (London School of 
Economics), Summer 1981. 

37 W.W.Rostow, The World 
Economy: History and Prospect 
(University of Texas 1978), 59. 

3 8 Margaret Miller, The Economic 
Development of Russia, 
1905-1914 (London 1926), 299. 

39 Olga Crisp, Studies in the Russian 
Economy Before 1914 (London 
1976). 

40 G.Garvy, 'Banking under the Tsars 
and the Soviets', Journal of 
Economic History, xxxn (1972), 
869-93. 

41 Stephen White, Political Culture 
and Soviet Politics (London 1979), 
50. 

42 Stern, op. cit., 91. 

43 E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik 
Revolution, 1 91 7-1 923, 2 vols 
(London 1952) ii 81. 

44 Riezler's diary, 4 August 1917; 
Stern, op. cit., 118. 

45 Hajo Holborn, A History of 
Modern Germany 1840-1945 
(London 1969), 466, 454. 

46 Arthur M.Schlesinger, The Crisis of 
the Old Order 1919-1 933 (Boston 
1957), 20ff. 

47 Dulles, op. cit., 260-1. 

48 John Dewey, The Social 
Possibilities of War', Characters 
and Events, 2 vols (New York 
1929)n552-7. 



49 Dulles, op. cit., 262. 

50 See Henry Kissinger, A World 
Restored: Castlereagh, Metternich 
and the Restoration of Peace 
(London 1957). 

5 1 Harold Nicolson, Peacemaking 
1919 (London 1945 ed.), 25. 

52 Quoted by Robert Wohl, The 
Generation of 1914 (London 
1980), 44. 

53 Ibid.,25ff. 

54 Professor Carl Pribham and 
Professor Karl Brockhausen, 
'Austria' in These Eventful Years. 

55 Carr, op. cit., i 254. 

56 F.Lorimer, The Population of the 
Soviet Union (Geneva 1946), gives 
full list, Table 23, 55-61. 

57 Nicolson, op. cit., 200-1. 

58 Papers Respecting Negotiations for 
an Anglo— French Pact, Cmnd 
2169 (London 1924), 5-8. 

59 For the secret treaties see Nicolson, 
op. cit., 108ff.; Howard Elcock, 
Portrait of a Decision: the Council 
of Four and the Treaty of 
Versailles, (London 1972), chapter 
1. 

60 P.S.Wandycz, France and Her 
Eastern Allies (Minneapolis 1962), 
11-14. 

61 H. and C.Seton- Watson, The 
Making of a New Europe: 
R,W.Seton-Watson and the last 
years of Austria-Hungary (London 
1981). 

62 Peter A. Poole, America in World 
Politics: Foreign Policy and 
Policymakers since 1 898 (New 
York 1975), 39. 

63 Ibid., 46. 

64 L.E.Gelfand, The Inquiry: 
American Preparations for Peace, 
1917-1919 (Yale 1963). 

65 Nicolson, op. cit., 21-2. 

66 Ibid., 31-3. 

67 Holborn, op. cit., 502. 

68 For the armistice negotiations see 
Harold Temperley, A History of 
the Peace Conference of Paris, 

4 vols (London 1920-4), i 448ff. 

69 For the 'Commentary', see 
C.Seymour (ed.), The Intimate 
Papers of Colonel House, 4 vols 
(London 1928), iv 159ff. 

70 Keith Middlemas (ed.), Thomas 
Jones: Whitehall Diary, i 
1916-1925 (Oxford 1969), 70. 



SOURCE NOTES 



787 



71 Nicolson, op. cit., 83-4. 

72 For this episode, see Robert 
Lansing's own account, The Peace 
Negotiations: a Personal Narrative 
(Boston 1921). 

73 Nicolson, op. cit., 79-82. 

74 Elcock, op. cit., 241. 

75 Ibid., 242. 

76 Nicolson, op. cit., 270. 

77 Elcock, op. cit., 270-89. 

78 Foreign Relations of the United 
States: Paris Peace Conference 
1919, 13 vols (Washington dc 
1942-7), xi 600. 

79 Francois Kersaudy, Churchill and 
de Gaulle (London 1981). 

80 Elcock, op. cit., 320-1. 

81 Andre Tardieu, The Truth About 
the Treaty (London 1921), 287. 

82 Elcock, op. cit., 310. 

83 Paris Peace Conference, xi 547-9. 

84 Lansing, op. cit., 3. 

85 Paris Peace Conference, xi 570-4. 

86 Walter Lippmann, letter to 
R.B.Fosdick, 15 August 1919, in 
Letters on the League of Nations 
(Princeton 1966). 

87 Howard Elcock, 'J- M.Keynes at 
the Paris Peace Conference' in Milo 
Keynes (ed.), Essays on John 
Maynard Keynes (Cambridge 
1975), 162ff. 

8 8 Collected Writings of J. M. Keynes, 
xvi Activities 1914-1919 (London 
1971), 313-34. 

89 Ibid., 375 (the paper is 334-83). 

90 Ibid., 418-19. 

91 H.RoyHarrod, Life of John 
Maynard Keynes (London 1951), 
246. 

92 Drafts in Lloyd George Papers, 
Beaverbrook Library (f/7/2/27 and 
f/3/34) quoted in Elcock, 'Keynes 
at the Paris Peace Conference'. 

93 See for example Arthur Walworth, 
America's Moment 1918: 
American Diplomacy at the end of 
World War One (New York 
1977). 

94 Keynes, Collected Writings, xvi, 
438. 

95 Harrod, op. cit., 250. 

96 Elcock, Keynes, 174; Harrod, 
op. cit., 253. 

97 Paul Levy, The Bloomsbury 
Group' in Milo Keynes, op. cit., 
68. 

98 Quotations from ibid., 67, 69. 



99 For Cecil see Kenneth Rose, The 
Later Cecils (London 1975), 
127-84. 

100 Hankey minute, 1916, Foreign 
Policy Committee 27/626/, fp (36) 
2; Crowe memo, 12 October 1916: 
Admiralty minute 23 December 
1918 cab 27/626/, fp(36)2. 
Quoted in Corelli Barnett, The 
Collapse of British Power (London 
1972), 245. 

101 G. Clemenceau, Grandeur and 
Misery of a Victory (London 
1930); A. Tardieu, op. cit. 

102 Henry Cabot Lodge, The Senate 
and the League of Nations (New 
York 1925). 

103 R.S.Baker and W.E.Dodds (eds), 
The Public Papers ofWoodrow 
Wilson, 6 vols, (New York 
1925-7), vi 215. 

104 For the details of Wilson's last 
eighteen months in office, see Gene 
Smith, When the Cheering 
Stopped: the last years of 
Woodrow Wilson (New York 
1964). 

105 Ibid., 153. 

106 Ibid., 107, 111-13, 126-8. 

107 Dulles, op. cit., 273. 

108 G. Smith, op. cit., 149; Robert 
Murray, The Harding Era: Warren 
G.Harding and his Administration 
(University of Minnesota 1969), 
91. 

109 For the importance of Article 1 9 see 
Nicolson, op. cit., 73-5. 

110 See Table of Wholesale Prices^ US 
Federal Reserve Bulletin (1924). 

111 See R. L. Schuettinger and 
E.F.Butler, Forty Centuries of 
Wage and Price Controls 
(Washington dc 1979). 

112 These Eventful Years, vol i; this 
gives complete table of 
international indebtedness, 410. 

113 A.J.V.Taylor, English History 
1914-45 (London 1970 ed.), 74, 
169. 

114 See Dulles's essay, 'Reparations' in 
These Eventful Years, vol i. 

115 Karl Popper, Conjectures and 
Refutations (London 1972 ed.), 
367-9. 

116 Stern, op. cit., 119. 

117 Martin Kaplan and Robert 
Webster, The Epidemiology of 
Influenza', Scientific American, 
December 1977. 



788 



SOURCE NOTES 



118 Lee Williams, Anatomy of Four 
Race Riots 1919-1921 (University 
of Mississippi 1972). 

119 S. W. Horrall, The Royal N W 
Mounted Police and Labour Unrest 
in Western Canada 1919', 
Canadian Historical Review, June 
1980. 

120 Jones, Whitehall Diary, i 132-6. 

121 For this and the following 
paragraphs, see Roy Mellor, 
Eastern Europe: a Geography of 
the Comecon Countries (London 
1975), 65 ff. 

122 Quoted by Norman Stone, The 
Times Literary Supplement, 

2 October 1981, 1131. 

123 Mellor, op. cit., 73. 

124 H. and S.Seton- Watson (eds), 
R.W.Seton-Watson and the 
Yugoslavs: Correspondence 
1906-1941, 2 vols (London 1979), 
ii 97. 

125 Mellor, op. cit., 75-7. 

126 4 January 1918. Stephen Roskill, 
Hankey: Man of Secrets, 3 vols 
(London 1970-4), i 479. 

127 Statistics of the Military Effort of 
the British Empire during the 
Great War (London 1922), 756. 

128 See S.F.Waley, Edwin Montagu 
(London 1964). 

129 Barnett, op. cit., 144ff. 

130 Nicholas Mansergh, The 
Commonwealth Experience 
(London 1969), 256. 

131 Report on Indian Constitutional 
Reforms, Cmnd 9109 (1918), 3; 
quoted in Barnett, op. cit., 147. 

132 Ibid, 120; quoted in Barnett, 
148. 

133 See 'History and Imagination', 
Hugh Trevor-Roper's valedictory 
lecture, Oxford University, 20 May 
1980, published in Hugh 
Lloyd-Jones etal. (eds), History and 
Imagination (London 1981). 

134 S. W. Roskill, Naval Policy 
Between the Wars, 2 vols (London 
1968), i 70. 

135 John Gallagher, 'Nationalism and 
the Crisis of Empire 1919-22', in 
Christopher Baker et al. (eds), 
Power, Profit and Politics: essays 
on imperialism, nationalism and 
change in twentieth -century India 
(Cambridge 1981). 



136 C.E.Ca\\we\\,FM Sir Henry 
Wilson, 2 vols (London 1927) n 
240-1. 

137 Jones, Whitehall Diary, I 101. 

138 Philip Woodruff, The Men Who 
Ruled India, 2 vols (London 1954), 
i 370. 

139 Guardian (London), 21 September 
1981. 

140 Percival Griffiths, To Guard My 
People: the History of the Indian 
Police (London 1971), 243 ff; 
Dyer's entry in the Dictionary of 
National Biography; Alfred 
Draper, Amritsar: the Massacre 
that Ended the Raj (London 1981), 
and the review of it in Booknews, 
September 1981, by Brigadier Sir 
John Smyth, who was also 
commanding security forces in the 
Punjab in April 1919. 

141 Gilbert: op. cit., iv, chapter 23, 
401-11. 

142 Jawaharlal Nehru, Autobiography 
(Indian edition 1962), 43-4; 
Nehru, India and the World 
(London 1936), 147. 

143 Woodruff, op. cit., n 243. 

144 Griffith, op. cit., 247ff. 

1 45 Quoted by J. P. Stern, Nietzsche 
(London 1978), 93. The passage is 
from the fifth part of The Joyous 
Science, translated as The Gay 
Science (New York 1974). 



2 The First Despotic Utopias 

1 For a discussion of 
Revolutionierungspolitik, see 
G.Katkof, The February 
Revolution (London 1967). 

2 There are various eye-witness 
accounts of Lenin's return to 
Russia. See Edmund Wilson, To 
the Finland Station (London 1966 
ed.), 468ff. 

3 Carr, op. cit., i 77 (and footnote 2), 
78; Wilson, op. cit., 477-8. 

4 David Shub, Lenin: A Biography 
(London 1966), 13-16. 

5 Ibid., 39. 

6 J.M.Bochenski, 'Marxism- 
Leninism and Religion' in 
B.R.Bociurkiw et al. (eds), Religion 
and Atheism in the ussr and 
Eastern Europe (London 1975). 



SOURCE NOTES 



789 



7 V.I.Lenin, 'Socialism and 
Religion', Collected Works, xn 
142; all the relevant texts are in 
V.I.Lenin ob ateisme i tserkvi 
(V.I.Lenin on Atheism and the 
Church) (Moscow 1969). 

8 Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (tr. 
London 1930), 35. 

9 Maxim Gorky, Days with Lenin 
(tr. London 1932), 52. 

10 Lenin, Collected Works, iv 390-1. 

11 G.V.Plekhanov, Co/fectaf Works, 
xin 7, 90-1. 

12 Iskra No. 70, 25 July 1904. 

13 Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet 
Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921 
(London 1954), 91-6. 

14 Shub, op. cit., 137. 

15 Ibid., 153-4. 

16 Ibid., 180. 

17 Ibid., 88. 

18 Lenin, 'Materialism and 
Empiro-Criticism', Collected 
Works, xiv 326. 

19 Nikolai Valentinov, My Talks with 
Lenin (New York 1948), 325. 

20 Lenin, Collected Works, xx 102, 
xxvi 71. 

21 Trotsky, O Lenine (Moscow 
1924), 148. 

22 Jean Variot, Propos de Georges 
Sorel (Paris 1935), 55. 

23 F.Engels, The Class War in 
Germany, 135. 

24 Lenin, Collected Works, v 370ff. 

25 Lenin, Collected Works, iv 447, 
466-9. 

26 Vera Zasulich in Iskra, 25 July 
1904. 

27 Rosa Luxemburg, Neue Zeit, xxn 
(Vienna 1903-4). 

28 Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian 
Revolution and Leninism and 
Marxism (tr. Ann Arbor 1961), 
82-95. 

29 A.James Gregor, Italian Fascism 
and Development Dictatorship 
(Princeton 1979). Olivetti's article 
was published in Pagine libere 1 
July 1909. 

30 Benito Mussolini, Opera Omnia, 
36 vols (Florence 1951-63), n 32, 
126. 

31 Ibid., i 92, 103, 185-9. 

32 Ibid., v 69. 



33 Ernst Nolte, Three Faces of 
Fascism (tr. London 1965), 155; 
see also Nolte's essay 'Marx und 
Nietzsche im Sozialismus des 
jungen Mussolini', Historische 
Zeitschrift, cxci 2. 

34 Nolte, Three Faces of Fascism, 
154. 

35 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, v 346. 

36 A.James Gregor, Young Mussolini 
and the Intellectual Origins of 
Fascism (Berkeley 1979); Denis 
Mack Smith, Mussolini (London 
1982), 10-12, 17,23. 

37 Lenin, Collected Works, xvm 
44-6. 

38 Ibid., xix 357. 

39 Stalin, Collected Works, vi 333-4. 

40 The 'April Theses' were published 
in Pravda, 7 April 1917. 

41 Carr, op. cit., i40-l. 

42 Ibid., 82. 

43 John L. H.Keep, The Russian 
Revolution: a study in 
mass-mobilization (London 1976), 
9. 

44 D.J.Male, Russian Peasant 
Organization before 
Collectivization (Cambridge 
1971); T. Shanin, The Awkward 
Class: Political Sociology of the 
Peasantry in a Developing Society: 
Russia 1910-1925 (Oxford 1972); 
Moshe Lewin, Russian Peasants 
and Soviet Power (tr. London 
1968). 

45 Keep, op. cit., 172-85. 

46 Ibid., 207ff., 216. 

47 M.Ferro, La Revolution (Paris 
1967), 174, 183. 

48 Carr, op. cit., i 80. 

49 Ibid., 83-6. 

50 Ibid., 89. 

51 I asked Kerensky in a bbctv 
interview why he did not have 
Lenin shot. He replied: 'I did not 
consider him important.' 

52 Lenin, Collected Works, xxi 
142-8. 

53 Carr, op. cit., I 94-9. 

54 Stalin, Collected Works, vi 347. 

55 John Reed, Ten Days that Shook 
the World (Penguin ed. 1966), 
38-40,61,117. 

56 See decree in Mervyn Matthews 
(ed.), Soviet Government: A 
selection of official Documents on 
Internal Policies (London 1974). 



790 



SOURCE NOTES 



57 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago 

(London 1961), 194. 
5 8 Quoted in Victor Woroszynski, 

The Life of Mayakovsky (London 

1972), 194. 

59 Nicholas Sukhanov, The Russian 
Revolution (Oxford 1955), 518. 

60 G. Vellay (ed.), Discourses et 
Rapports de Robespierre (Paris 
1908), 332. 

61 Karl Mar x-Friedrich Engels: 
Historisch-Kritische 
Gesamtausgabe, l er Teil, vn 423; 
see Carr, op. cit., I 155. 

62 Bericht uber den 
Griindungsparteitag der 
Kommunistischen Partei 
Deutschlands (Spartakusbund) 
(Berlin 1919), 52. 

63 Figure quoted by Alexander 
Solzhenitsyn, speech in 
Washington, 30 June 1975, 
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Speaks to 
the West (London 1978). 

64 Carr, op. cit., I 153, footnote 2. 

65 Lenin, Collected Works, iv 108. 

66 V. Adoratsky, Vospominaniya o 
Lenine (1939), 66-7; 
V.Bonch-Bruevich, Na Boevykh 
Postakh Fevral'skoi i Oktyabr'skoi 
Revolyutsii (1930), 195; both 
quoted in Carr, op. cit., i 156-7 
footnote 4. 

67 Trotsky, Collected Works, n 
202. 

68 See Lenin, Collected Works, xxn 
78. 

69 Carr. op. cit., i 158, footnote 3; 
The History of the Civil War in the 
USSR, II (tr. London 1947), 
599-601; J. Bunyan and 
H.H.Fisher, The Bolshevik 
Revolution 1917-1918 (Stanford 
1934), 297-8. 

70 Carr, op. cit., I 157. 

71 George Leggett, The Cheka: 
Lenin's Political Police (Oxford 
1981). 

72 Solzhenitsyn, op. cit. 

73 Carr, op. cit., I 158-9. 

74 Ibid., 159. 

75 Leggett, op. cit. 

76 Lenin, Collected Works, xxn 
166-7,243,449,493. 

77 Pravda, 23 February 1918; Bunyan 
and Fisher, op. cit., 576. 

78 Quoted in Leggett, op. cit. 

79 Ibid. 



80 Douglas Brown, Doomsday 1917: 
the Destruction of Russia's Ruling 
Class (London 1975), 173-4. 

8 1 A. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag 
Archipelago (London 1974), 
3 vols, I 28. 

82 Quoted in Harrison Salisbury, 
Black Night, White Snow: Russia's 
Revolutions, 1905-19 17 (London 
1978), 565 

83 Lenin, Collected Works, xxn 
109-10. 

84 Ibid., xxn 131-4. 

85 Izvestiya, 22 December 1917. 

86 Carr, op. cit., 1 117-18. 

87 Ibid., 119 footnote 2, 120. 

88 Holborn, op. cit., 490. 

89 Gilbert, op. cit., iv 220. 

90 J.M.Thompson, Russia, 
Bolshevism and the Versailles 
Peace (Princeton 1966). 

91 Gilbert, op. cit., iv 225. 

92 Ibid., 227, 278, 235, 275, 362-4. 

93 Ibid., 257-9. 

94 Ibid., 244, 228, 305-6, 261. 

95 Ibid., 342, footnote 2. 

96 Ibid., 316. 

97 E.g., General Sir H.C.Holman's 
telegram to Churchill of 8 January 
1920, printed Gilbert, op. cit., iv 
366-7. 

98 Carr, op. cit., i 263ff., 291-305, 
and note B410ff. 

99 Stalin, Collected Works, iv 31-2. 

100 Leon Trotsky, Stalin (New York 
1946), 279. 

101 Carr, op. cit., I 364. 

102 Ibid., 380-409. 

103 Ibid., 141. 

104 Ibid., 143. 

105 Bertrand Russell, The Practice and 
Theory of Bolshevism (London 
1920), 26. 

1 06 For the Kronstadt affair see 
Leonard Schapiro, The Origin of 
the Communist Autocracy 
(London 2nd ed., 1977), 301-14. 

107 Lenin, Collected Works, xxvi 352. 

108 Ibid., xxvi 208. 

109 Carr, op. cit., 221-2. 

110 Ibid., 205-8. 

111 S.Liberman, Building Lenin's 
Russia (Chicago 1945), 13. 

112 Lydia Bach, Le Droit et les 
Institutions de la Russie Sovietique 
(Paris 1923), 48. 



SOURCE NOTES 



791 



113 See George L.Yaney, The 
Systematization of Russian 
Government, . . 1711-1905 
(Urbana, Illinois, 1973). 

114 T.H. Rigby, Lenin's Government: 
Sovnarkom, 1917-1922 
(Cambridge 1979), 230-5. 

115 Shapiro, op. cit., 343. 

116 Carr, op. cit., i 190 footnote 3. 

117 Lenin, Collected Works, xxvi 227. 

118 Quoted in Schapiro, op. cit,, 320. 

119 Rigby, op. cit., 236-7. 

120 Schapiro, op. cit., 322; Carr, 
op. cit., I 204-5. 

121 Carr, op. cit., i 213. 

122 Lenin, The State and the 
Revolution (1917). 

123 Lenin, Collected Works, xxvn 
239-40. 

124 Ibid., xxvii 296. 

125 Rigby, op. cit., 191-2. 

126 Ronald Hingley, Joseph Stalin: 
Man and Legend (London 1974), 
141. 

127 Schapiro, op. cit., 320. 

128 Hingley, op. cit., 144-5. 

129 Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography 
(New York 1931), 791-2; William 
Bullitt, The Bullitt Mission to 
Russia (New York 1919). 

130 Carr, op. cit., n 24. 

131 Keep, op. cit., 261. 

132 A.Moriset, Chez Lenine et Trotski 
a Moscou (Paris 1922), 240-2. 

133 K.Marx, Capital, n chapter xvi; 
Communist Manifesto; Critique of 
the Gotha Programme. 

134 Lenin, Collected Works, xxn 378. 

135 Ibid., xxn 516-17. Lenin later 
dropped this reference to Peter the 
Great, the only time he ever openly 
compared himself to the Tsars. 

136 Carr, op. cit., ii 68. 

137 Lenin, Collected Works, xxn 493. 

138 Carr, op. cit., n 102-8. 

139 Lenin, Collected Works, xx417. 

140 Carr, op. cit., ii 109-10. 

141 Ibid., 202 footnote 2. 

142 Ibid., 209-10. 

143 Legal enactments are: Sobranie 
Uzakonenii, 1919, No. 12 article 
124; No. 20 article 235; No. 12 
article 130 etc. 

144 Carr, op. cit., n 212-13; Izvestia, 

2 April 1920; Sobranie Uzakonenii 
1920, No. 35 article 169. 

145 Carr, op. cit., ii 215-16. 



146 Sobranie Uzakonenii, 1 91 8, Article 
11(e). 

147 Lenin, Collected Works, xxn 
356-7. 

148 Ibid., xxvi 204. 

149 For nep see Carr, op. cit., n 
273-82. 

150 Lenin, Collected Works, xxvn 35. 

151 Lenin, Collected Works, xxv 389, 
491; Pravda, 22 February 1921. 

152 Holborn, op. cit., 512-13, 
526-32; Sebastian Haffner, Failure 
of a Revolution: Germany 
1918-1919 (London 1973). 

153 For Gombos, see Carlile 
A.MacCartney, October 15: 
A History of Modern Hungary 
1929-1945, 2 vols (Edinburgh 
1956). 

154 David O.Roberts, The Syndicalist 
Tradition and Italian Fascism 
(Manchester 1979). 

155 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xm 
170. 

156 Nolte, op. cit., 10. 

157 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, in 206; 
v67. 

158 Luigi Barzini, From Caesar to the 
Mafia: sketches of Italian life 
(London 1971), 139. 

159 Figure given in Giordano Bruno 
Guerri, Galeazzo Ciano: una vita 
1903-1944 (Milan 1980). 

160 G. d'Annunzio, 'II Trionfo della 
Norte', Prose di Romani (Milan 
1954), i 958. 

161 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, vi 82; 
vi 248. 

162 Ibid., xiv 60. 

1 63 See Walter L. Adamson, 
Hegemony and Revolution: 
Antonio Gramscts Political and 
Cultural Theory (University of 
California 1980). 

164 Quoted in Angelo Tasca, Nascita e 
awento del fascismo (Florence 
1950), 78. 

165 For socialist violence, see Giorgio 
Alberto Chiurco, Storia della 
rivoluzione fascista, 5 vols 
(Florence 1929-), ii 78, 168. 

166 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xv 267. 

167 Giorgio Rochat, Italo Balbo: 
aviatore e ministro 
delVaeronautica, 1926-1933 
(Bologna 1979). 

168 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xvi 31, 
xi 344, xvi 44, 276, 288, 241. 



792 



SOURCE NOTES 



169 Tasca, op. cit., 276; Nolte, op. cit., 
210-11. 

170 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xvin 
581. 

171 The incident is described in Ivone 
Kirkpatrick, Mussolini: Study of a 
Demagogue (London 1964), 144. 

172 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xix 196. 

173 Gaetano Salvemini, La Terreur 
Fasciste (Paris 1930). 

174 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xx 379. 

175 Ibid., xxii 109. 

176 Ibid., xxix 2. 

177 Quoted in Roberts, op. cit., 301. 

178 13th Plenary Session of the 
Executive Committee of the 
Communist International, 
December 1933; quoted in Nolte, 
op. cit. 

179 Arthur Koestler, 'Whereof one 
cannot speak', Kaleidoscope 
(London 1981), 323 ff. 

180 For the malaria problem, see 
Norman Douglas, Old Calabria 
(London 1915), chapter 34. 

181 Sergio Romano, Giuseppe Volpi: 
Industria e finanza tra Giolitti e 
Mussolini (Milan 1979). 



3 Waiting for Hitler 

1 Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 202-4; 
Joachim Fest, Hitler (tr. London 
1977), 117. 

2 Holborn, op. cit.,487. 

3 Ibid., 561. 

4 Ibid., 602. 

5 Translated as F.Fischer, 
Germany's Aims in the First World 
War (London 1967). 

6 For the Fischer controversy, see 
Fritz Stern, The Failure of 
llliberalism (London 1972); 
International Affairs (1968). 

7 J.Tampke, 'Bismarck's Social 
Legislation: a Genuine 
Breakthrough?' in W.J.Mommsen 
(ed.), The Emergence of the 
Welfare State in Britain and 
Germany, 1850-1950 (London 
1981), 71ff. 

8 Fritz Fischer, The War of Illusions: 
German Policies from 1911 to 
1914 (tr. London 1975). 

9 Riezler's diary, 18 April 1915. 
Quoted in Stern, op. cit. 

10 Ibid., 4 October 1915. 

11 Ibid., 1 October 1918. 



12 Holborn, op. cit., 562—3. 

13 Stern, op. cit., 118. 

14 Gerhard Ritter, Staatskunst und 
Kriegshandwerk (2nd ed., Munich 
1965), 2 vols, ii 129. 

15 Holborn, op. cit., 514. 

16 Ibid., 519-21. 

17 George L. Mosse, The Crisis of 
German Ideology (London 1966); 
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural 
Despair (Berkeley 1961). 

18 Laqueur, op. cit., 27-30. 

19 Martin Esslin, Brecht: the Man 
and his Work (London 1959); 
John Willett, The Theatre of 
Bertolt Brecht (London 1959). 

20 H.F.Garten, Modern German 
Drama (London 1958). 

21 Laqueur, op. cit., 36. 

22 Frederick V.Grunfeld, Prophets 
Without Honour: a Background to 
Freud, Kafka, Einstein and their 
World (New York 1979). 

23 Laqueur, op. cit., 155. 

24 Roger Manvell and Heinrich 
Fraenkel, The German Cinema 
(London 1971); Lotte Eisner, The 
Haunted Screen (London 1969). 

25 Walter Gropius, The New 
Architecture and the Bauhaus 
(London 1965); Barbara Miller 
Lane, Architecture and Politics in 
Germany, 1918-1945 (New York 
1970). 

26 Arts Council, Neue Sachlichkeit 
and German Realism of the 
Twenties (London 1979). 

27 Kurt Tucholsky, Deutchland, 
Deutchland uber alles (Berlin 
1931). See Harold Poor, Kurt 
Tucholsky and the Ordeal of 
Germany 1914-1935 (New York 
1969). 

28 Quoted in Laqueur, op. cit., 81. 

29 See Ruth Fischer, Stalin and 
German Communism (London 
1948). 

30 See Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron 
(London 1977). 

31 Grunfeld, op. cit., 26-7: Laqueur, 
op. cit., 73. 

32 F.Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der 
Moral (1887). 

33 Die Tat, April 1925. 

34 Gerhard Loose, The Peasant in 
Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's 
Sociological and Novelistic 
Writings', Germanic Review, xv 
(1940). 



SOURCE NOTES 



793 



35 Mosse, op. cit., 23. 

36 Ibid., 171ff., 112,82. 

37 Laqueur, op. cit., 87. 

38 For Lagarde and Lengbehn, see 
Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural 
Despair, 

39 Mosse, op. cit., 96-7. 

40 Ibid., 143. 

41 Quoted in Laqueur, op. cit., 75. 

42 Ibid., 76. 

43 Fest, op. cit., 138. 

44 H-P Ullmann, 'German Industry 
and Bismarck's Social Security 
System', in Mommsen, op. cit., 
133ff. 

45 Max Weber, 'Politics as Vocation', 
printed as Gesammelte Politische 
Schriften (Munich 1921). 

46 K.Hornung, Der Jungdeutsche 
Orden{Dusse\dor(l95$). 

47 Georg Franz-Willing, Die 
Hitlerbewegung 2 vols (Hamburg 
1926), I 82. 

48 Holborn, op. cit., 585. 

49 Ibid., 586. 

50 Figures from E.J.Gumpel, Vier 
Jahrepolitischer Mord (Berlin 
1922); quoted in Grunfeld, op. cit., 
211, footnote. 

5 1 Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the 
German Mandarins: the German 
Academic Community, 
1890-1933 (Harvard 1969), 446; 
Laqueur, op. cit., 189. 

52 Holborn, op. cit., 658. 

53 Joseph Bendersky, The 
Expendable Kronjurist: Carl 
Schmitt and National Socialism 

1 933-6 ' , Journal of Contemporary 
History, 14 (1979), 309-28. 

54 For van den Bruck see Fritz Stern, 
The Politics of Cultural Despair. 

55 Michael Steinberg, Sabres and 
Brownshirts: the German 
Students' Path to National 
Socialism 1918-1935 (Chicago 
1977), 7. 

56 Laqueur, op. cit., 186. 

57 Istavan Meszaros, Marx's Theory 
of Alienation (London 1970), 
29-30. 

58 Robert S. Wistrich, Revolutionary 
Jews from Marx to Trotsky 
(London 1976). 

59 Quoted in Robert S. Wistrich, 
'Marxism and Jewish Nationalism: 
the Theoretical Roots of 
Contradiction' in The Left Against 
Zion (London 1981), 3. 



60 Laqueur, op. cit., 103. Hubert 
Lanzinger's portrait of Hitler as a 
knight is reproduced as plate 3 1 in 
Joseph Wulf, Die Gildenden 
Kunste im Dritten Reich 
(Gutersloh 1963). 

61 Fest, op. cit., 76. 

62 Ibid., 32. 

63 August Kubizek, Young Hitler: the 
story of our friendship (tr. London 
1954), 140f. 

64 Wilfried Daim, Der Mann, der 
Hitler, die Ideengab (Munich 
1958). 

65 Hans Jiirgen Syberberg, 'Hitler, 
Artiste d'Etat et l'Avant-Garde 
Mephistophelique du XXe siecle' 
in Les Realismes 1919-1939 (Paris 
1980), 378-403. 

66 Adolf Hitler, Monologe im 
Fuhrerhauptquartier 1941-1944 
(Hamburg 1980), 54, 90, 331. 

67 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 474ff. 

68 Fest, op. cit., 482. 

69 William Carr, Hitler: a Study in 
Personality and Politics (London 
1978), 2-3. 

70 Fest, op. cit., 489. 

71 H.P.Knickerbocker, The German 
Crisis (New York 1932), 227. 

72 Weigand von Miltenberg, Adolf 
Hitler Wilhelm ///(Berlin 1931), 
II. 

73 Max H.Kele, The Nazis and the 
Workers (Chapel Hill 1972) argues 
that Hitler had a powerful 
working-class following; 

J. Noakes, The Nazi Party in 
Lower Saxony 1921-1 933 
(Oxford 1971), and R.Heberle, 
From Democracy to Nazism 
(Baton Rouge 1970) put the 
opposite case. 

74 W.Carr,op.cit., 6. 

75 Holborn, op. cit., 596-8. 

76 Fest, op. cit., 271-88. 

77 Ernst Hanstaengl, Zwischen 
weissem und brannen Haus 
(Munich 1970), 114. 

78 Werner Maser, Hitler's Mein 
Kampf: an Analysis (London 
1970); see also his Hitler: Legend, 
Myth and Reality (New York 
1973). 

79 Hitler, Mein Kampf, 654. 

80 Lawrence's 'Letter' was first 
published in the New Statesman, 
13 October 1924; reprinted in 
Phoenix (London 1936), 107-10. 



794 



SOURCE NOTES 



8 1 Hans Frank, Im Angesicht des 
Galgens (2nd ed., Neuhaus 1955), 
47. 

82 Otto Dietrich, Zwolfjahre mit 
Hitler (Munich 1955), 180. 



4 Legitimacy in Decadence 

1 Pierre Miquel, Poincare (Paris 
1961). 

2 Harold Nicolson, Curzon: the Last 
Phase 1919-1925 (London 1934), 
273-4. 

3 Charles Petrie, Life of Sir Austen 
Chamberlain, 2 vols (London 
1939), ii 263. 

4 Lord Murray of Elibank, 
Reflections on Some Aspects of 
British Foreign Policy Between the 
World Wars (Edinburgh 1946), 10. 

5 See D'Abernon's An Ambassador 
of Peace, 3 vols (London 
1929-30), 1 14. 

6 Barnett, op. cit.,323; Lord 
Vansittart, The Mist Procession 
(London 1958), 341. 

7 L.B.Namier, Facing East (London 
1947), 84. 

8 Zeldin, op. cit., n 949-50. 

9 J. M. Read, Atrocity Propaganda 
1914-19 (Yale 1941); Alfred 
Sauvy, Histoire Economique de la 
France entre les deux guerres, 4 
vols (Paris 1967-75). 

10 Andre Bisson: LTnflation franqaise 
1914-1952 (Paris 1953). 

11 Zeldin, op. cit., 961,971. 

12 Ibid., 78-81. 

13 Ibid., 623-5, 637-42. 

14 Sauvy, op. cit. 

15 Richard Kuisel, Ernest Mercier, 
French Technocrat (University of 
California 1967); J.N.Jeanneney, 
Franqois de Wendel en 
Republique: I Argent et le pouvoir 
1914-1940 (Paris 1976). 

16 Zeldin, op. cit., 324-9. 

17 Franqois Chatelet, La Philosophie 
des professeurs (Paris 1970). 

18 G. Pascal, Alain educateur (Paris 
1969);B.deHuszar(ed.),T/7e 
Intellectuals (Glencoe, Illinois, 
1960). 

19 Zeldin, op. cit., 1032. 

20 Jean Pelissier, Grandeur et 
servitudes de Venseignment libre 
(Paris 1951). 



21 Joseph de Maistre, Les Soirees de 
Saint-Petersbourg, 7e entretien; 
Du Pape (1819), Book 3, chapter 
2; Les Soirees, 2e entretien. 
Quoted in Nolte, op. cit., 34-5. 

22 See Erich Maria Remarque, Arch 
de Triomphe (New York 1946). 

23 Zeldin, op. cit., 15-16. 

24 Jacques Barzun, Race: a Study in 
Modern Superstition (London 
1938), 227-41. 

25 These were Maurras's own claims 
in his posthumous book, Le 
Bienhereux Pie X, sauveur de la 
France (Paris 1953), 52, 71. 

26 Eugen Weber, Action Franqaise 
(Stanford University, 1962), 189. 

27 Anatole France, VOrmedu Mail 
(Paris n.d.), 219; quoted in Nolte, 
op. cit., 267. 

28 Quotations from Le nouveau Kiel 
et Tanger; Enquete sur la 
monarchie; Le Mauvais traite. 

29 Jacques Bainville, Journal, 2 vols 
(Paris 1948), ii 172, 174. 

30 Nolte, op. cit., 79. 

3 1 Keith Middlemass and John 
Barnes, Baldwin: a Biography 
(London 1969), 356. 

32 Barnett, op. cit., 332. 

33 Committee of Imperial Defence 
meeting of 13 December 1928; 
Barnett, op. cit., 324. 

34 'A Forecast of the World's Affairs', 
These Eventful Years (New York 
1924), ii 14. 

35 Christopher Andrew and 
A.S.Kanya-Forstner, France 
Overseas: the Great War and the 
Climax of French Imperial 
Expansion (London 1981), 208-9, 
226-7. 

36 J.LMiller, The Syrian Revolt of 
1925', International Journal of 
Middle East Studies, vm (1977). 

37 Andrew and Forstner, op. cit., 248, 
238. 

3 8 Quoted in W. P. Kirkman, 
Unscrambling an Empire: a 
Critique of British Colonial Policy 
1955-1966 (London 1966), 197. 

39 A.P.Thornton, Imperialism in the 
Twentieth Century (London 
1978), 136. 

40 Andrew and Forstner, op. cit., 245. 



SOURCE NOTES 



795 



41 Robin Bidwell, Morocco under 
Colonial Rule: French 
Administration of Tribal Areas 
1912-1956 (London 1973); Alan 
Scham, Lyautey in Morocco: 
Protectorate Administration 
1912-1925 (University of 
California 1970). 

42 J. L. Hymans, Leopold Sedar 
Senghor: an Intellectual Biography 
(Edinburgh 1971). 

43 Andrew and Forstner, op. cit., 
244-5. 

44 Quoted in H. Grimal, 
Decolonization (London 1978). 

45 A.Savvant, Grandeur et Servitudes 
Coloniales (Paris 1931), 19. 

46 Alistair Home, A Savage War of 
Peace: Algeria 1954-1962 
(London 1977), 37. 

47 Ronald Robinson and John 
Gallagher, The Imperialism of 
Free Trade', Economic History 
Review, 2nd series, 6 (1953), 1-15. 

48 Donald Winch, Classical Political 
Economy and Colonies (Harvard 
1965). 

49 Quoted in Raymond Betts, The 
False Dawn: European 
Imperialism in the Nineteenth 
Century (Minneapolis 1976). 

50 J.S.Mill, Principles of Political 
Economy (London 1848). 

51 Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire: 
British Radical Attitudes to 
Colonialism in Africa, 1895-1914 
(London 1968), 168-79. 

52 J.A.Hobson, Imperialism (London 
1954 ed.), 94. 

53 Richard Koebner, The Concept of 
Economic Imperialism', Economic 
History Review, 2 (1949), 1-29. 

54 J.Schumpeter, Imperialism and 
Social Classes (New York 1951); 
quoted in Fieldhouse, Colonialism 
1870-1945: An Introduction 
(London 1981), 20. 

55 A.S.Kanya-Forstner, The 
Conquest of the Western Sudan 
(Cambridge 1968). 

56 Quoted in Andrew and Forstner, 
op. cit., 11. 

57 Ibid., 13. 

58 Fieldhouse, op. cit. 

59 D.K. Fieldhouse, Unilever 
Overseas (London 1978), chapter 
9. 



60 H.S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina 
in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford 
1960). 

61 David S. Landes, 'Some Thoughts 
on the Nature of Economic 
Imperialism', Journal of Economic 
History, 21 (1961), 496-512. 

62 A.F.Cairncross, Home and Foreign 
Investment 1870-1913 
(Cambridge 1953), 88; 
S.G.Checkland, The Mind of the 
City 1870-1914', Oxford 
Economic Papers (Oxford 1957). 

63 Lord Lugard, The Dual Mandate 
(London 1926 ed.), 509. 

64 C.Segre, Fourth Shore: The Italian 
Colonization of Libya (Chicago 
1974). 

65 Fieldhouse, Colonialism, 93—5. For 
India see D.H.Buchanan, The 
Development of Capitalist 
Enterprise in India, 1 900-1 939 
(London 1966 ed.); A.K.Bagchi, 
Private Investment in India 
1900-1939 (Cambridge 1972). 

66 I. Little et ai, Industry and Trade in 
Some Developing Countries 
(London 1970). 

67 For this debate see C.Furtado, 
Development and 
Underdevelopment (University of 
California 1964); Andre G. Frank, 
Development Accumulation and 
Underdevelopment (London 
1978); H.Myint, Economic 
Theory and the Underdeveloped 
Countries (Oxford 1971). 

68 J.J.Poquin, Les Relations 
economique exterieures des pays 
d'Afrique noire de VUnion 
franqaise 1925-1955 (Paris 1957), 
102—4; printed as table in 
Fieldhouse, Colonialism, 87. 

69 V.Purcell, The Chinese in 
South-East Asia (London 1962 
ed.); H. Tinker, A New System of 
Slavery (London 1974). 

70 J.S.Furnivall, Netherlands India: a 
study of plural economy (New 
York 1944), chapter 5. 

71 Lord Hailey, An African Survey 
(Oxford 1975 ed.), 1362-75. 

72 E.J. Berg in the Quarterly Journal 
of Economics, 75 (1961). 

73 Betts, op. cit., 193 footnote 7. 

74 B.R.Tomlinson, The Political 
Economy of the Raj, 1914-1947 
(London 1979). 



796 



SOURCE NOTES 



75 Malcom Muggeridge, Chronicles 
of Wasted Time (London 1972), 

I 101. 

76 Evelyn Waugh, Remote People 
(London 1931). 

77 L.S. Amery, My Political Life, n 
1914-1929 (London 1953), 336. 

78 H.Montgomery Hyde, Lord 
Reading (London 1967), 317-27. 

79 Jones, Whitehall Diary, I 274. 

80 George Orwell, 'Shooting an 
Elephant', New Writing 2 (1936). 

8 1 For an examination of British 
casualties see John Terraine, The 
Smoke and the Fire: Myths and 
Anti-Myths of War 1861-1945 
(London 1980), 35-47. 

82 Paul Fussell, The Great War and 
Modern Memory (Oxford 1975). 

83 See Brian Gardener (ed.), Up the 
Line to Death: War Poets 
1914-1918 (London 1976 ed.) 

84 H.J.Massingham, The English 
Countryman (London 1942), 101. 

85 C.F.G.Masterman, England After 
the War (London 1923), 31-2. 

86 H.Williamson, The Story of a 
Norfolk Farm (London 1941), 
76-7. 

87 J.M.Keynes, General Theory of 
Employment, Interest and Money 
(London 1954 ed.); 333, 348-9; 
Gilbert, op. cit.,v 99-100. 

88 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead 
Revisited (London 1945), Book 
Two, chapter Three. 

89 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
1 1 1-42, 220. 

90 Alan Wilkinson, The Church of 
England and the First World War 
(London 1979). 

91 Sidney Dark (ed.), Conrad Noel: 
an Autobiography (London 1945), 
110-20. 

92 F.A.lremonger, William Temple 
(Oxford 1948), 332-5. 

93 Ibid., 340. 

94 Ibid., 438-9. 

95 Quoted in Barnett, op. cit., 241. 

96 Peter Allen, The Cambridge 
Apostles: the early years 
(Cambridge 1978), 135. 

97 Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey 
(London, Penguin ed. 1971), 37-8, 
57ff. 

98 G.E.Moore, Principia Ethica 
(Cambridge 1903), The Ideal'. 



99 Strachey to Keynes, 8 April 1906, 
quoted in Holroyd, op. cit., 
211-12. 

100 FromE.M.Forster, 'What I 
Believe' (1939), printed in Two 
Cheers for Democracy (London 
1951). 

101 Leon Edel, Bloomsbury: a House 
of Lions (London 1979). 

102 P.Allen, op. cit., 71. 

103 Jo Vallacott, Bertrand Russell and 
the Pacifists in the First World War 
(Brighton 1980). 

104 Holroyd, op. cit., 629. 

1 05 Letter to C. R. L. Fletcher, quoted in 
Charles Carrington, Rudyard 
Kipling (London 1970 ed.), 553. 

106 Holroyd, op. cit., 200. 

107 Noel Annan, 'Georgian Squares 
and Charmed Circles', The Times 
Literary Supplement, 23 
November 1979, 19-20. 

108 E. M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes 
Dickinson (London 1934). 

109 Frank Swinnerton, The Georgian 
Literary Scene (London 1935), 291. 

110 Holrovd,op.cit.,738,571. 

111 Kingsley Martin, Father Figures 
(London 1966), 120. 

112 Ibid., 121. 

113 Holroyd, op. cit., 200. 

114 Quoted in Paul Levy, G.E.Moore 
and the Cambridge Apostles 
(London 1979), 176. 

115 Alan Wood, Bertrand Russell: the 
Passionate Sceptic (London 1957), 
87-8. 

116 Holroyd, op. cit., 164-5. 

117 John Pearson, Facades: Edith, 
Osbert and Sacheverell Sitwell 
(London 1978), 124, 126. 

118 Quoted in Ronald Clark, The Life 
of Bertrand Russell (London 
1975), 380. 

119 Ibid., 395. 

120 Lionel Trilling, E.M. Forster: a 
Study (London 1944), 27. 

121 Clarke, op. cit., 386-7. 

122 Barnett, op. cit., 174 

123 John Darwin, 'Imperialism in 
Decline? Tendencies in British 
Imperial Policy between the Wars', 
Cambridge Historical Journal, 
xxiii (1980), 657-79. 

124 Barnett, op. cit., 252. 

125 R.W.Curry, Woodrow Wilson and 
Far Eastern Policy 1913-1921 
(New York 1957). 



SOURCE NOTES 



797 



126 H.C.Allen, The Anglo— A merican 
Relationship since 1 783 (London 
1959). 

127 Microfilm, ar/195/76 US Navy 
Operational Archives, Historical 
Section, Washington Navy Yard, 
Washington DC. 

128 Barnett, op. cit., 252-65. 

129 Vincent Massey, What's Past is 
Prologue (London 1963), 242. 

130 H.C.Allen, op. cit., 737. 

131 Gilbert, Churchill, v 69-70. 

132 Barnett, op. cit., 217-18. 

133 Gilbert, Churchill, v, (Companion 
Volume) Part i, 303-7. 



5 An Infernal Theocracy, a Celestial 
Chaos 

1 L.Mosley, Hirohito: Emperor of 
Japan (London 1966), 2, 21, 23 
footnote. 

2 David James, The Rise and Fall of 
the Japanese Empire (London 
1951), 175. 

3 See Kurt Singer, Mirror y Sword and 
jewel: a study of Japanese 
characteristics (London 1973), 
98-100. 

4 YoscoMaraini, Japan: Patterns of 
Continuity (Palo Alto 1971), 191. 

5 Chie Nakane, Japanese Society 
(London 1970), 149. 

6 George Macklin Wilson, 'Time and 
History in Japan', in Special Issue, 
'Across Cultures: Meiji Japan and 
the Western World', American 
Historical Review, June 1980, 
557-72. 

7 Singer, op. cit., 147; Tetsuro 
Watsuji, A Climate: a 
Philosophical Study (Tokyo 1961). 

8 W.G.Beasley, The Modern History 
of Japan (London 1963 ed.), 
212-17. 

9 Robert E. Ward and Dankwart A. 
Rustow (eds), Political 
Modernization in Japan and 
Turkey (Princeton 1964). 

10 Singer, op. cit., 57-8, 71ff. 

11 I. Nitobe, Bushido (London 1907); 
see also Sir George Sansom, Japan: 
a short cultural history (New York 
1943), 495. 

12 B.Hall Chamberlain, Things 
Japanese (London 1927), 564. 

13 In William Stead (ed.), Japan by 
the Japanese (London 1904), 266, 
279. 



14 Ito Hirobumi, 'Some 
Reminiscences' in S.Okuma (ed.), 
Fifty Years of New Japan, 2 vols 
(London 1910), i 127. 

15 Chie Nakane, Kinship and 
Economic Organization in Rural 
Japan (London 1967); and his 
Japanese Society (London 1970). 

16 Ozaki Yukio, The Voice of 
Japanese Democracy (Yokohama 
1918), 90f. 

17 Beasley, op. cit., 226-7. 

18 A.M.Young, Japan under Taisho 
Tenno (London 1928), 280. 

19 Beasley, op. cit., 237-9. 

20 James, op. cit., 162. 

21 Hugh Byas, Government by 
Assassination (London 1943), 
173-92. 

22 Ibid., 173-92. 

23 Quoted in Harold S. Quigley and 
JohnE. Turner: The New Japan: 
Government and Politics 
(Minneapolis 1956), 35. 

24 James, op. cit., Appendix vin, 
376. 

25 Ibid., 163-4. 

26 Richard Storry, The Double 
Patriots (London 1957), 52. 

27 A.M.Young, Imperial Japan 
1926-1928 (London 1938), 
179-80. 

28 Byas, op. cit., 17-31,41-2. 

29 For examples see Young, Japan 
under Taisho Tenno. 

30 Joyce Lebra, Japan s Greater 
East- Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in 
World War Two (London 1975). 

31 M.D.Kennedy, The Estrangement 
of Great Britain and Japan 
1917-1935 (Manchester 1969). 

32 James, op. cit., 16; Beasley, op. cit., 
218. 

33 Quoted in W.T.deBary (ed.), 
Sources of the Japanese Tradition 
(New York 1958), 796-7. 

34 James, op. cit., 166. 

35 Ibid., 134. 

36 Ibid., 138. 

37 Singer, op. cit., 39-40. 

38 Charles Drage, Two-Gun Cohen 
(London 1954), 131. 

39 Stuart Schram, Mao Tse-tung 
(London 1966), 25, 36. 

40 Joseph Levenson, Confucian China 
and its Modern Fate (London 
1958). 

41 Drage, op. cit., 130-1. 



798 



SOURCE NOTES 



42 Hallett Abend, Tortured China 
(London 1931), 14-15. 

43 Schram, op. cit., 74. 

44 Drage, op. cit., 154-5. 

45 Schram, op. cit., 79. 

46 Ibid., 83 footnote. 

47 Ibid., 93. 

48 Abend, op. cit., 39. 

49 Conrad Brandt, Stalin's Failure in 
China 1924-1927 (Harvard 
1958), 178. 

50 Drage, op. cit., 167ff; John 
Tolland, The Rising Sun: the 
decline and fall of the Japanese 
Empire, 1936-1945 (London 
1971), 38, footnote. 

51 Abend, op. cit., 49-50, 61, 251. 

52 Hsiao Hsu-tung, Mao Tse~tung 
and I were Beggars (Syracuse 
1959). 

53 Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of 
Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the 
West (Harvard 1964). 

54 Chow Tse-tung, The May Fourth 
Movement: Intellectual Revolution 
in Modern China (Harvard 1960). 

55 Far Eastern Review, December 
1923. 

56 Reminiscences of Professor Pai Yu, 
quoted in Schram, op. cit., 73. 

57 Sun Yat-sen, lecture 3 February 
1924, quoted by John Gittings, 
The World and China 1 922-1 975 
(London 1974), 43; Stalin, 
Collected Works, ix 225. 

58 Gittings, op. cit., 39-40. 

59 Cf. Mao's poem 'Snow', written 
February 1936; Schram, op. cit., 
107-8. 

60 Stuart Schram, The Political 
Thought of Mao Tse-tung (London 
1964), 94-5. 

61 Chalmers A. Johnson, Peasant 
Nationalism and Communist 
Power: the Emergence of 
Revolutionary China 1937-1945 
(Stanford 1962). 

62 Schram, Mao Tse-tung, 127. 

63 Ibid., 153. 

64 Abend, op. cit., 147-8. 

65 Ibid., 80, 67. 

66 Ibid., 75, 82. 

67 James, op. cit., 139. 

68 John Tolland, op. cit., 7 footnote. 

69 Quoted in Dulles, op. cit., 28 1 . 



6 The Last Arcadia 

1 The figure 106 (which includes 
many sub-groups) is used in 
Stephan Thernstrom and Ann 
Orlov, Harvard Encyclopaedia of 
Ethnic Groups (New York 1980). 

2 Madison Grant, The Passing of the 
Great Race (New York 1916), 
3-36. 

3 The Klan's Fight for Americans', 
North American Review, March 
1926. 

4 William C. Widenor, Henry Cabot 
Lodge and the Search for an 
American Foreign Policy 
(University of California 1980); 
Robert Murray, The Harding Era 
(University of Minnesota 1969), 
64. 

5 John Morton Blum, The 
Progressive Presidents: Roosevelt, 
Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson (New 
York 1980), 97. 

6 Dulles, op. cit., 295. 

7 A.Mitchell Palmer, The Case 
Against the Reds', Forum, 
February 1920. 

8 Quoted in Arthur Ekirch, 
Ideologies and Utopias and the 
Impact of the New Deal on 
American Thought (Chicago 
1969), 13-14. 

9 Baltimore Evening Sun, 
27 September 1920. 

10 Horace Kellen, Culture and 
Democracy in the United States 
(New York 1924). 

11 V. W. Brooks, Towards a National 
Culture' and The Culture of 
Industrialism', Seven Arts, April 
1917. 

12 V.W.Brooks, Trans-National 
America', Atlantic Monthly, 1916. 

13 Van Wyck Brooks, An 
Autobiography (New York 1965), 
253-6. 

14 James Hoopes, Van Wyck Brooks 
in Search of American Culture 
(Amherst 1977), 130. 

15 William Jennings Bryan (and Mary 
Baird Bryan), Memoirs 
(Philadelphia 1925), 448. 

16 Ibid., 479-84. 

17 New Republic, 10 May 1922. 

18 Robert Sklar (ed.), The Plastic Age 
1917-1930 (New York 1970), 14. 



SOURCE NOTES 



799 



19 Albert E. Sawyer, The 
Enforcement of National 
Prohibition', Annals, September 
1932. 

20 Alan Block, East Side, West Side: 
Organized Crime in New York 
1930-1950 (Cardiff 1980). 

21 The Illinois Crime Survey (Chicago 
1929), 909-19. 

22 Lloyd Wendt and Herman Cogan, 
Big Bill of Chicago (Indianapolis 
1953),271ff. 

23 Charles Fecher, Mencken: a Study 
of his Thought (New York 1978), 
159. 

24 Sidney Bulletin, 20 July 1922; for 
non-enforcement, see Charles 
Merz, The Dry Decade (New York 
1931), 88, 107, 123-4, 144,154. 

25 T.K.Derry, A History of Modern 
Norway 1814-1972 (Oxford 
1973), 301-4. 

26 The Prohibition Amendment: 
Hearings before the Committee of 
the Judiciary, 75th Congress, 
Second Session (Washington DC 
1930), Part i, 12-31. 

27 Mark H. Haller, The Changing 
Structure of American Gambling in 
the Twentieth Century', Journal of 
Social Issues, xxxv, 

(1979), 87-114. 

28 For instance, Annelise Graebner 
Anderson, The Business of 
Organized Crime: a Cosa Nostra 
Family (Stanford 1979). 

29 Quoted in Seymour Martin Lip'set, 
'Marx, Engels and America's 
Political Parties', Wilson Review, 
Winter 1979. 

30 David Shannon, The Socialist 
Party of America: a History (New 
York 1955). 

3 1 Theodore Draper, The Roots of 
American Communism (New York 
1957). 

32 John Hicks, The Republican 
Ascendancy 1921-1933 (New 
York 1960). 

33 Robert Murray, The Harding Era 
(University of Minnesota 1969), 
67. 

34 Dulles, op. cit., 302. 

35 Murray, op. cit., 70. 

36 Ibid., 420. 

37 Andrew Turnbull (ed.), Letters of 
F. Scott Fitzgerald (New York 
1963), 326. 



38 Murray, op. cit., 112. 

39 Quoted in Murray N. Rothbard, 
America's Great Depression (Los 
Angeles 1972), 167. 

40 Murray, op. cit., 178-9. 

41 New York Times, 14 October 
1922; see Fritz Marx, The Bureau 
of the Budget: its Evolution and 
Present Role', American Political 
Science Review, August 1945. 

42 Murray, op. cit., 168-9. 

43 Ibid., 117-19. 

44 Ibid., 108. 

45 Investigation of Veterans Bureau: 
Hearings before Select Committee, 
US Senate (Washington dc 1923). 

46 Burl Noggle, The Origins of the 
Teapot Dome Investigation', 
Mississippi Valley Historical 
Review, September 1957; 
M.R.Werner and John Starr, 
Teapot Dome (New York 1959), 
194-277; Murray, op. cit., 473. 

47 Murray, op. cit., 486-7. 

48 Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 
Crowded Hours (New York 1933), 
324-5. 

49 Arthur M. Schlesinger, 'Our 
Presidents: a Rating by 
Seventy-five Historians', New 
York Times Magazine, 29 July 
1962; for a full analysis of the 
historiography of Harding, see 
Murray, op. cit., 487-528. 

50 William Allen White, A Puritan in 
Babylon (New York 1938), 247. 

51 Donald McCoy, Calvin Coolidge: 
the Quiet President (New York 
1967),33,158ff., 139-41. 

52 Ishbel Ross, Grace Coolidge and 
her Era (New York 1962), 65. 

53 Mark de Wolf Howe (ed.), The 
Holmes-Laski Letters 1 91 6-1 935, 
2 vols (Harvard 1953), i 673. 

54 Quoted in Sklar, op. cit., 297. 

55 McCoy, op. cit., 256—63. 

56 Gamaliel Bradford, The Quick and 
the Dead (Boston 1931), 241. 

57 McCoy, op. cit., 99,58, 208ff., 
255. 

58 Calvin Coolidge, Autobiography 
(New York 1929). 

59 Howard Quint and Robert Ferrell 
(eds), The Talkative President: 
Off-the-Record Press Conferences 
of Calvin Coolidge (Amhurst 
1964), preface. 

60 McCoy, op. cit., 384, 395. 



800 



SOURCE NOTES 



61 Ibid., 53-5. 

62 Calvin Coolidge: 'Government and 
Business' in Foundations of the 
Republic: Speeches and Addresses 
(New York 1926), 317-32. 

63 F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-up, 
ed. by Edmund Wilson (New York 
1945). 

64 Letter to Maxwell Geismar, 
10 June 1942, in Elena Wilson 
(ed.), Edmund Wilson: Letters on 
Literature and Politics 1912-1972 
(New York 1977), 385. 

65 James Truslow Adams, The Epic of 
America (Boston 1931), 400. 

66 Michael Rostovtzeff, A Social and 
Economic History of the Roman 
Empire (Yale 1926), 487. 

67 Stuart Chase, Prosperity: Fact or 
Myth? (New York 1930). 

68 George Soule, Prosperity Decade 
from War to Depression 
1917-1929 (New York 1947). 

69 Cited in Sklar, op. cit. 

70 Rostow, World Economy 209 and 
Table 1 1 1— 3 8 ; Harold Underwood 
Faulkner, American Economic 
History (New York 7th ed. 1954), 
622. 

71 Faulkner, op. cit., 624. 

72 Ibid., 607-8. 

73 Sinclair Lewis, 'Main Street's Been 
Paved!' Nation, 10 September 
1924. 

74 Herbert Blumer, Movies and 
Conduct (New York 1933), 
243-7,220-3. 

75 Sophia Breckenridge, The 
Activities of Women Outside the 
Home' in Recent Social Trends in 
the US (New York 1930), 709-50. 

76 Samuel Schmalhausen and 
V.F.Calverton (eds), Woman's 
Coming of Age: a Symposium 
(New York 1931), 536-49. 

77 RS.andH.R.Lynd,Middletown: 
a Study in Modern American 
Culture (New York 1929), 
251-63. 

78 LewisL.Lorwin, The American 
Federation of Labour: History, 
Policies and Prospects (New York 
1933), 279. 

79 R.W.Dunn, The Americanization 
of Labour (New York 1927), 153, 
193-4. 

80 Kenneth M. Goode and Harford 
Powel, What About Advertising? 
(New York 1927). 



81 Warren Suzman (ed.), Culture and 
Commitment 1929-1945 (New 
York 1973). 

82 See Leon Edel, The Life of Henry 
James (London 1977 ed.), i 
Chapter 84: 'A Storm in the 
Provinces'. 

83 Nathaniel Hawthorne, Preface to 
A Marble Faun (Boston 1860). 

84 Lionel Trilling, 'Manners, Morals 
and the Novel', printed in The 
Liberal Imagination (1950). 

85 E.g., 'Best Sort of Mother', written 
for J.M.Barrie's burlesque Rosy 
Rapture, see Gerald Boardman, 
Jerome Kern: his Life and Music 
(Oxford 1980). 

86 See the Introduction by Edward 
Jablonski to Lady, Be Good! in the 
Smithsonian Archival 
Reproduction Series, the 
Smithsonian Collection r008 
(Washington dc 1977). 

87 Quoted in McCoy, op. cit., 392. 

88 Charles and Mary Beard, The Rise 
of American Civilization, 2 vols 
(New York 1927), ii 800. 

89 Walter Lippmann, Men of Destiny 
(New York 1927), 23ff. 

90 Lincoln Steffens, Individualism 
Old and New (New York 1930), 
35ff. 



7 Degringolade 

1 Norman Mursell, Come Dawn, 
Come Dusk (London 1981). 

2 Gilbert, op. cit., v, (Companion 
Volume) Part 2, 86-7. 

3 J.K.Galbraith, The Great Crash 
1929 (Boston 3rd ed. 1972), 83. 

4 Ibid., 104-16. 

5 William Williams, 'The Legend of 
Isolationism in the 1920s', Science 
and Society '(Winter 1954). 

6 William Williams, The Tragedy of 
American Diplomacy (New York 
1962); Carl Parrini, The Heir to 
Empire: US Economic Diplomacy 
1916-1923 (Pittsburg 1969). 

7 See Jude Wanninski's letter in the 
Wall Street Journal, 16 June 1980. 

8 Rothbard, op. cit., 86. 

9 Federal Reserve Bank, Annual 
Report 1923 (Washington dc 
1924), 10. 

10 Seymour E. Harriss, Twenty Years 
of Federal Reserve Policy (Harvard 
1933), 91. 



SOURCE NOTES 



801 



1 1 Rothbard, op. cit., 128-30. 

12 Harris Gaylord Warren, Herbert 
Hoover and the Great Depression 
(Oxford 1959) 27. 

13 Congressional investigation of 
Stock Exchange Practises: 
Hearings 1933, 2091ff; Report 
1934, 220-1. Galbraith, op. cit., 
186-7. 

14 Rothbard, op. cit., 158ff. 

15 For Strong, see Lester V. Chandler, 
Benjamin Strong, Central Banker 
(Washington DC 1958). 

16 Rothbard, op. cit., 133. 

17 Melchior Palyi, The Meaning of 
the Gold Standard', Journal of 
Business , July 1941. 

18 Rothbard, op. cit., 139. 

19 Quoted in Lionel Robbins, The 
Great Depression (New York 
1934), 53. Lord Robbins 
repudiated this book in his 
Autobiography of an Economist 
(London 1971), 154-5, written 
just before the great Seventies 
recession brought Keynesianism 
down in ruins. 

20 Quoted in Chandler, op. cit., 
379-80. 

21 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
n-7,68. 

22 Rothbard, op. cit., 157-8; 
R.G.Hawtrey, The Art of Central 
Banking (London 1932), 300. 

23 Galbraith, op. cit., 180. 

24 Dulles, op. cit., 290. 

25 Schmalhausen and Calverton, 
op. cit., 536-49. 

26 Selma Goldsmith et air. 'Size 
Distribution of Income Since the 
Mid-Thirties', Review of 
Economics and Statistics, February 
1954; Galbraith, op. cit., 181. 

27 Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street 
(London 1922 ed.), 151. 

28 For the collected sayings of 
'experts', see Edward Angly, Oh 
Yeah? (New York 1931). 

29 Galbraith, op. cit., 57ff. 

30 Securities and Exchange 
Commission in the Matter of 
Richard Whitney, Edwin D. 
Morgan etc (Washington DC 
1938). 

31 Bagehot, op. cit., 150. 

32 Galbraith, op. cit., 140, 

33 Ibid., 147. 



34 The principal works are: 
E.K.Lindley, The Roosevelt 
Revolution. First phase (New York 
1933); Raymond Moley, After 
Seven Years (New York 1939); 
Dixon Wecter, The Age of the 
Great Depression (New York 
1948); Richard Hofstadter, The 
American Political Tradition (New 
York 1948); Robert Sherwood, 
Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York 
1950); Rexford Tugwell, The 
Democratic Roosevelt (New York 
1957); and, not least, the many 
writings of J. K. Galbraith and 
Arthur M.Schlesinger, especially 
the latter's The Crisis of the Old 
Order 1919-1933 (Boston 1957). 

35- See JohnP.Diggins, The Bard of 
Savagery: Thorstein Veblen and 
Modern Social Theory (London 
1979). 

36 For Hoover's early life see David 
Burner, Herbert Hoover: a Public 
Life (New York 1979). 

37 Quoted in William Manchester, 
The Glory and the Dream, a 
Narrative History of America 

1 931-1 972 (New York 1 974), 24. 

38 Murray Rothbard: 'Food 
Diplomacy' in Lawrence Gelfand 
(ed.), Herbert Hoover: the Great 
War and its Aftermath, 
1914-1923 (University of Iowa 
1980). 

39 J.M.Keynes, Economic 
Consequences of the Peace 
(London 1919), 257, footnote. 

40 The letter was to Hugh Gibson and 
Hoover preserved it in his files; 
now in the Hoover Papers. 

41 Herbert Hoover, Memoirs, 3 vols 
(Stanford 1951-2), ii 42-4. 

42 Ibid., ii 41-2. 

43 Martin Fasault and George 
Mazuzan (eds), The Hoover 
Presidency: a Reappraisal (New 
York 1974), 8; Murray Benedict, 
Farm Policies of the United States 
(New York 1953). 

44 Murray, The Harding Era, 195. 

45 Ellis Hawley: 'Herbert Hoover and 
American Corporatism 1929-33' 
in Fasault and Mazuzan, op. cit. 

46 Eugene Lyons, Herbert Hoover, a 
Biography (New York 1964), 294. 



802 



SOURCE NOTES 



47 Joan Hoff Wilson, American 
Business and Foreign Policy 
1920-1933 (Lexington 1971), 
220; Donald R.McCoy's 'To the 
White House' in Fasault and 
Mazuzan, op. cit., 55; for Wilson's 
anti-Semitism, David Cronon (ed.), 
The Cabinet Diaries ofjosephus 
Daniels 1913-1921 (Lincoln, 
Nebraska 1963), 131, 267, 497; 
for FDR's, Walter Trohan, 
Political Animals (New York 
1975), 99. 

48 Quoted in Galbraith, op. cit., 143. 

49 Hoover to J. C. Penney, quoted by 
Donald McCoy in Fasault and 
Mazuzan, op. cit., 52-3. 

50 Hoover to General Peyton Marsh 
at the War Food Administration; 
quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, The 
Crisis of the Old Order, 80. 

5 1 Rothbard, The Great Depression, 
187. 

52 Hoover, op. cit., ii 108. 

53 Ibid., in 295. 

54 American Federation, January, 
March 1930. 

55 Harrod, op. cit., 437-48. 

56 Galbraith, op. cit., 142. 

57 Rothbard, op. cit., 233-4. 

58 Hoover, Republican Convention 
acceptance speech, 1 1 August 
1932; speech at Des Moines, 

4 October 1932. 

59 Rothbard, op. cit., 268. 

60 Ibid., 291. 

61 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
m-42,220. 

62 Fortune, September 1932. 

63 Manchester, op. cit., 40-1. 

64 C.J.Enzler, Some Social Aspects of 
the Depression (Washington DC 
1939), chapter 5. 

65 Ekirch, op. cit., 28-9. 

66 Don Congdon (ed.), The Thirties: a 
Time to Remember (New York 
1962), 24. 

67 James Thurber, Fortune, January 
1932; Rothbard, op. cit., 290. 

68 Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go 
Home Again (New York 1934), 
414. 

69 Edmund Wilson: The Literary 
Consequences of the Crash', The 
Shores of Light (New York 1952), 
498. 

70 Harper's, December 1931. 

71 Charles Abba, Business Week, 
24 June 1931. 



72 Fausold and Mazuzan, op. cit., 10. 

72 Quoted by Albert Romasco, The 
End of the Old Order or the 
Beginning of the New', in Fausold 
and Mazuzan, op. cit., 80. 

74 Ibid., 91, 92. 

75 H.G.Wells, An Experiment in 
Autobiography (London 1934). 

76 Roger Daniels, The Bonus March: 
an Episode in the Great 
Depression (Westport 1971), esp. 
chapter 10, The Bonus March as 
Myth'. 

77 Theodore Joslin, Hoover Off the 
Record (New York 1934); 
DonaldJ.Lision, The President and 
Protest: Hoover, Conspiracy and 
the Bonus Riot (University of 
Missouri 1974), 254ff. 

78 James MacGregor Burns, 
Roosevelt: the Lion and the Fox 
(New York 1956), 20. 

79 Quoted in Ekirch, op, cit. 

80 Ekirch, op. cit., 87-90. 

8 1 Letter to Christian Gaus, 24 April 
1934, in Elena Wilson (ed.), 

op. cit., 245. 

82 Hoover, speech at Madison Square 
Garden 31 October 1932. 

83 Roosevelt, acceptance speech at 
Democratic Party Convention. 

84 Frank Freidel, The Interregnum 
Struggle Between Hoover and 
Roosevelt', in Fausold and 
Mazuzan, op. cit., 137. 

85 Ibid., 137-8. In the Hoover papers 
there is a document entitled 'My 
personal relations with Mr" 
Roosevelt'. 

86 Burns, op. cit., 162. 

87 Trohan, op. cit., 83-4. 

88 For composition of this speech, see 
Samuel I. Rosenman, Working 
with Roosevelt (New York 1952), 
81—99. The idea came from 
Thoreau. 

89 Moley, op. cit., 151. 

90 Burns, op. cit., 148-9. 

91 Press conferences of 24 March and 
19 and 26 April 1933. 

92 Burns, op. cit., 167, 172; Elliot 
Roosevelt (ed.), FDR: His 
Personal Letters, 4 vols (New York 
1947-50), i 339-40, letter to 
Josephus Daniels 27 March 1933; 
Trohan, op. cit., 64. 

93 J.M.Keynes in New York Times, 
31 December 1933. 



SOURCE NOTES 



803 



94 Joan Robinson, 'What Has Become 
of the Keynesian Revolution?' in 
Milo Keynes (ed.) op. cit., 135; 
Raymond Moley, The First New 
Deal (New York 1966), 4. 

95 Faulkner, op. cit., 658-62. 

96 Arthur M.Schlesinger, The 
Coming of the New Deal (Boston 
1958), 123; Manchester, op. cit., 
89. 

97 Leverett S. Lyon et al., The 
National Recovery Administration 
(Washington dc 1935). 

98 Quoted in Eric Goldman, 
Rendezvous with Destiny (New 
York 1952). 

99 Broadus Mitchel, et al., Depression 
Decade (New York 1947). 

100 Walter Lippmann, The Permanent 
New Deal , Yale Review, 24 
(1935), 649-67. 

101 For example, William Myers and 
Walter Newton, The Hoover 
Administration: a Documented 
Narrative (New York 1936). 

102 Francis Sill Wickware in Fortune, 
January 1940; Economic 
Indicators: Historical and 
Descriptive Supplement, joint 
Committee on the Economic 
Report (Washington dc 1953); 
Galbraith, op. cit., 173; Rostow, 
World Economy, Table in— 42. 

103 Keynes in New Republic, 29 July 
1940. 

104 Trohan, op. cit., 59ff., 67-8, 115. 

105 Joseph P. Lash, Eleanor and 
Franklyn (New York 1971), 
220ff.; Doris Feber, The Life of 
Lorena Hickok, ER's Friend (New 
York 1980), passim-, Richard W. 
Steele, TranklinD. Roosevelt and 
his Foreign Policy Critics', Political 
Science Quarterly, Spring 1979. 

106 The Hullabaloo over the Brains 
Trust', Literary Review, cxv 1933. 

107 Bernard Sternsher, Rex ford 
Tugwell and the New Deal 
(Rutgers 1964), 114-15; Otis 
Graham: 'Historians and the New 
Deals', Social Studies, April 1963. 

108 Manchester, op. cit., 84. 

109 Lippmann, Saturday Review of 
Literature, 11 December 1926. 

110 Fecher, op. cit. 

111 George Wolfskill and John 
Hudson, All But the People: 
Franklyn D. Roosevelt and his 
Critics (New York 1969), 5-16. 



112 Elizabeth Nowell (ed.), The Letters 
of Thomas Wolfe (New York 
1956),551ff. 

113 Quoted in Ekirch, op. cit., 27-8. 

114 Stuart Chase, The New Deal (New 
York 1932), 252. 

115 Frank Warren, Liberals and 
Communism (Bloomington 1966), 
chapter 4. 



8 The Devils 

1 Dmitri Shostakovitch, Memoirs. 

2 Boris I. Nicolaevsky , Power and the 
Soviet Elite: e The Letter of an Old 
Bolshevik' and Other Essays (New, 
York 1965), 3-65. 

3 Quoted in K.E.Voroshilov, Stalin 
and the Armed Forces of the USSR 
(Moscow 1951), 19. 

4 Albert Seaton, Stalin as Warlord 
(London 1976), 29ff. 

5 Stephen F. Cohen, Bukharin and 
the Bolshevik Revolution (London 
1974). 

6 E.H.Carr, From Napoleon to 
Stalin and Other Essays (London 
1980), 156. 

7 Isaac Deutscher's three-volume life 
of Trotsky is The Prophet Armed 
(Oxford 1954), The Prophet 
Unarmed (1959), The Prophet 
Outcast (1963), but it is his Stalin: 
a Political Biography (1949, 1966, 
1967) which gives his best-known 
presentation of the Stalin-Trotsky 
dichotomy. For an exposure of his 
work, see Leopold Labedz, 'Isaac 
Deutscher's "Stalin": an 
Unpublished Critique', Encounter, 
January 1979, 65-82. 

8 W.H.Chamberlin, The Russian 
Revolution 1917-1921, 2 vols 
(New York 1935), n 119. 

9 Hingley, op. cit., 162-3; Paul 

Av rich, Kronstadt 1921 (Princeton 
1970), 176-8,211. 

10 Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and 
Ours (New York 1942), 35. 

11 Kolakowski, op. cit., in 186, 199. 

12 Leonard Schapiro, The Communist 
Party of the Soviet Union (2nd ed. 
London 1970), 353. 

13 Boris Bajanov, Avec Staline dans le 
Kremlin (Paris 1930), 74-7, 91, 
145, 156ff. 



804 



SOURCE NOTES 



14 Trotsky, My Life (London 1930), 
433, claimed he was deliberately 
misinformed of the time of the 
funeral. 

15 Ian Grey, Stalin: Man of History 
(London 1979), 199-200. 

16 Stalin, Collected Works, vi 328. 

17 The circumstances of Frunze's 
death are described in Boris 
Pilnyak's novel, Tale of the 
Unextinguished Moon-, and in 
Trotsky's Stalin: an Appraisal of 
the Man and his Influence, 2 vols 
(tr. London 1969), ii 250-1. 

18 Hingley, op. cit., 168. 

1 9 Quoted in Deutscher, Stalin, 311. 

20 E.H.CarrandR.W.Davies, 
Foundations of a Planned 
Economy (London 1974 ed.), 
184-5. 

21 Carr, Foundations, n 65—6; 
Hingley, op. cit., 191; Deutscher, 
Stalin, 314; B.Souvarine, Stalin 
(London, n.d.), 485. 

22 Stalin, Collected Works, x 191. 

23 Eugene Lyons, Assignment in 
Utopia (London 1937), 117, 123, 
127. 

24 Abdurakhman Avtorkhanov, 
Stalin and the Soviet Communist 
Party (London 1959), 28-9. 

25 Hingley, op. cit., 197. 

26 Lyons, op. cit., 372. 

27 Stalin, Collected Works, xn 14. 

28 Cohen, op. cit., 372. 

29 Hingley, op. cit., 201; Souvarine, 
op. cit., 577. 

30 Hingley, op. cit., 200. 

31 Schapiro, Communist Party, 368. 

32 Kolakowski, op. cit., in 25ff. 

33 Stalin, Collected Works, vm 142; 
Carr, Foundations, i 28-9. 

34 For figures see Carr, Foundations, i 
120-1. 

35 M.Fainsod, Smolensk under Soviet 
Rule (London 1958), 46; Stalin, 
Collected Works, xi, 44-5, 48. 

36 Tatiana Chernavin, Escape from 
the Soviets (tr. London 1933), 37. 

37 Robert C. Williams, The Quiet 
Trade: Russian Art and American 
Money', Wilson Quarterly, Winter 
1979. 

38 Stalin, Collected Works, xi 90. 

39 Carr, Foundations, i 201. 

40 M.Hindus, Red Bread (London 
1931), 335; Carr, op. cit., 223. 



41 T.H.Rigby (ed.), The Stalin 
Dictatorship: Khrushchev's 'Secret 
Session Speech and Other 
Documents (Sydney 1968). 

42 Carr, Foundations, i 283. 

43 Deutscher, Stalin, 320; Stalin, 
Collected Works, xn 170. 

44 Deutscher, Stalin, 325 footnote 1. 

45 Lewin, op. cit., 514. 

46 Kolakowski, op. cit., in 38. 

47 Winston Churchill, The Second 
World War, 12 vols (London 
1964), vm 78. 

48 S. Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and 
Economic Development: an 
Inquiry into the Experience of 
Soviet Industrialization (London 
1965), 123; Lewin, op. cit., 508. 

49 Kolakowski, op. cit., in 39. 

50 Robert Conquest, The Great 
Terror: Stalin's Purge of the 
Thirties (London 1969), 22. 

5 1 Deutscher, Stalin, 325 ; Roy 
Medvedev, Let History Judge: the 
Origins and Consequences of 
Stalinism (tr. New York 1971), 
90-1 ; figures from Istoriia sssr 
(1964), No. 5, p. 6. 

52 See the summary-article, 'Revising 
Stalin's Legacy', Wall Street 
Journal, 23 July 1980; 
M.Msksudov, Tertes subies par la 
population de l'URSS 
1918-1958', Cahier du monde 
russe et sovietique, March 1977. 

53 Kolakowski, op. cit., in 43. 

54 Cohen, op. cit., 364. 

55 Alexander Orlov, The Secret 
History of Stalin's Crimes (London 
1954), 317-18; Alexander 
Barmine, One Who Survived (New 
York 1945), 256, 264; Svetlana 
Alliluyeva, Twenty Letters to a 
Friend (tr., London 1967), 351. 

56 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Only One 
Year (New York 1969), 143. 

57 Wolfgang Leonhard, Kreml ohne 
Stalin (Cologne 1959), 95; 
Nicolaevsky, op. cit., 93-4. 

5 8 Stalin, Collected Works, xi 1 1 
161-215. 

59 Borys Lewytzkyj, Die rote 
Inquisition: die Geschichte der 
sowjetischen Sicherheitsdienste 
(Frankfurt 1967), 76. 

60 Hingley, op. cit., 214. 

6 1 Albert Speer, The Slave State 
(London 1981), 303. 



SOURCE NOTES 



805 



62 Muggeridge, op. cit., I 234-5. 

63 Victor Serge, Memoirs of a 
Revolutionary (tr., New York 
1963), 250. 

64 Paul Hollander, Political Pilgrims: 
Travels of Western Intellectuals to 
the Soviet Union, China and Cuba 
1928-1978 (Oxford 1981), 
chapter 4. 

65 Amabel Williams-Ellis, The White 
Sea Canal (London 1935), 
introduction; Sidney and Beatrice 
Webb, Soviet Communism: a New 
Civilization? (London 1935); 
Harold Laski, Law and justice in 
Soviet Russia (London 1935); 
Anna Louise Strong, This Soviet 
World (New York 1936); 
G.B.Shaw, The Rationalization of 
Russia (London 1931); 
Solzhenitsyn's account of the 
Canal is in The Gulag Archipelago 
(New York 1975), ii 80-102. 

66 Julian Huxley, A Scientist Among 
the Soviets (London 1932), 67; 
Lyons, op. cit., 430; Shaw, op. cit., 
28. 

67 Hesketh Pearson, GBS: a 
Full-Length Portrait (New York 
1942), 329-31. 

68 Wells, Autobiography, 799-807; 
for other refs. see Hollander, 
op. cit., 167-73. 

69 Williams, op. cit. 

70 Muggeridge, op. cit., 254. 

71 Ed ward N.Peterson, The Limits of 
Hitler s Power (Princeton 1969), 
154. 

72 Mosse, op. cit., 294ff. 

73 Bendersky, op. cit. 

74 Mosse, op. cit., 280. 

75 Holborn, op. cit., 658. 

76 Fritz Stern, 'Adenauer in Weimar: 
the Man and the System' in The 
Failure of Illiberalism, 178—87; 
Paul Weymar, Konrad Adenauer 
(Munich 1955), 129-43; the 
quotation is from Adenauer's letter 
to M.Tirard, chairman of the 
Allied Rhineland Committee in 
1923, in the Stresemann Papers; 
see Henry Turner, Stresemann and 
the Politics of the Weimar 
Republic (Princeton 1963). 

77 For instance his secret report to the 
cabinet, 31 March 1931, cited in 
Barnett, op. cit., 340. 

78 Michael Balfour, West Germany 
(London 1968), 85-6. 



79 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
in-42; Holborn, op. cit., 639-40. 

80 Holborn, op. cit., 732. 

81 Laqueur, op. cit., 257. 

82 Holborn, op. cit., 687. 

83 Karl Dietrich Bracher, The 
German Dictatorship: the Origins, 
Structure and Effects of National 
Socialism (tr., London 1970), 6. 

84 Chrisopher Isherwood, The Berlin 
Stories (New York 1945 ed.), 86. 

85 Fest, op. cit., 517. 

86 Francis Carsten,Reichswehrund 
Politik 1918-1933 (Cologne 
1964), 377. 

87 Fest, op. cit., 545. 

88 Ibid., 507. 

89 Ibid., 546. 

90 Thomas Mann, Betrachtungen 
eines Unpolitischen (Berlin 1918). 

91 Quoted in E.K.Bramstedt, 
Dictatorship and Political Police 
(Oxford 1945), 98. 

92 See Arnold Brecht, Prelude to 
Silence: the End of the German 
Republic (New York 1944). 

93 Quoted by Fest, op. cit., 618. 

94 Roger Manvell and Heinrich 
Fraenkel, Goering (New York 
1962)296. 

95 Manvel and Fraenkel, Heinrich 
Himmler (London 1965), 10-15, 
31-2. 

96 Ibid., 34. 

97 Neueste Nachrichten (Munich), 
21 March 1933. 

98 Quoted in Manvell and Fraenkel, 
Himmler, 35-6. 

99 Ibid., 41. 

100 Ibid., 38-9. 

101 Grunfeld, op. cit., 126-9. 

102 Peterson, op. cit., 14; Hans 
Buchheim, ss und Polizei im NS 
Start (Duisberg 1964). 

103 Hans Frank, 1m Angesicht des 
Galgens (Munich 1953). 

104 Hitler's Secret Conversations (New 
York 1953), 420. 

105 Peterson, op. cit., 70-1. 

106 Hitler's Secret Conversations, 
306; Peterson, op. cit., 72. 

107 Peterson, op. cit., 133-42. 

108 Frank, op. cit., 167; Lutz Graf 
Schwerin von Krosigk, Es geschah 
in Deutschland (Tubingen 1951). 

109 Paul Seabury, The Wilhelmstrasse: 
a Study of German Diplomacy 
under the Nazi Regime (Berkeley 
1954). 



806 



SOURCE NOTES 



110 Herbert Jacob, German 
Administration Since Bismarck 
(New Haven 1963), 113; Peterson, 
op. cit., 37. 

1 1 1 Helmut Heiber, Adolf Hitler 
(Berlin 1960), 92ff.; Alan Bullock, 
Hitler: a Study in Tyranny 
(London 1964), 386; Joseph 
Nyomarkay, Charisma and 
Factionalism in the Nazi Party 
(Minneapolis 1967). 

112. Fest, op. cit., 807. 

113 Otto Dietrich, Zwolfjahre mit 
Hitler (Munich 1955), 153. 

114 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Part 
1, chapter xi. 

1 15 Peterson, op. cit., 75—6. 

116 David Schoenbaum, Hitler's Social 
Revolution (New York 1966), 
159-86,200-1,285. 

117 Heinrich Uhlig, Die Warenhauser 
im Dritten Reich (Cologne 1956). 

118 Friedrich Facius, Wirtschaft und 
Staat (Schriften des Bundesarchiv) 
(Koblenz 1959) 147. 

119 Raul Hilberg, The Destruction of 
the European Jews (Chicago 
1961), 98. 

120 This is the view of E.K.Bramsted, 
Goebbels and National Socialist 
Propaganda (Lansing 1965); 
Helmut Heiber, Josef Goebbels 
(Berlin 1962) argues that Goebbels 
was not anti-Semitic. 

121 Bullock, op. cit., 121. 

122 Arthur Schweitzer, Big Business in 
the Third Reich (London 1964), 
643, note 25. 

123 Hermann Rauschning, Hitler's 
Revolution of Destruction 
(London 1939). 

124 Quoted Holborn, op. cit., 753. 

125 Joseph Borking, The Crime and 
Punishment of I. G. Far ben 
(London 1979), 56-60. 

126 For Todt's ability see Alan 
Milward, The German Economy 
at War (London 1965). 

127 Speer, op. cit., 4ff. 

128 David Schoenbaum, Die braune 
Revolution (Cologne 1968), 150. 

129 Fest, op. cit., 559. 

130 David Carlton, Anthony Eden 
(London 1981), 46. 

131 Hans Gisevius, Adolf Hitler 
(Munich 1963), 173. 

132 Holborn, op. cit., 745-7; Manvell 
and Fraenkel, Himmler, 42—6. 



133 Fest, op. cit., 705. 

134 Nicholaevsky, op. cit., 28-30. 

135 For the influence of the Roehm 
purge on Stalin, see George 
Kennan, Russia and the West 
Under Lenin and Stalin (New York 
1960), 285. 

136 Conquest, op. cit., 44. 

137 Medvedev, op. cit., 157ff.; 
Hingley, op. cit., 236ff.; Conquest, 
op. cit., 47ff. 

138 Orlov, op. cit., 17-18, 129. 

139 Orlov, op. cit., 350. 

140 Rigby, The Stalin Dictatorship, 
39-40. 

141 W.G.Krivitsky,/ Was Ste/w's 
Agent (London 1940), 166. 

142 Ibid., 228. 

143 Paul Blackstock, The Secret Road 
to World War Two: Soviet versus 
Western Intelligence 1921-1939 
(Chicago 1969); Hingley, op. cit., 
292ff. 

144 John Erickson, The Soviet High 
Command, a Military and Political 
History, 1918-1941 (London 
1962), 374; Conquest, op. cit., 224; 
Hingley, op. cit., 258-9. 

145 Schapiro, Communist Party, 440. 

146 Medvedev, op. cit., 294-6. 

147 Ibid., 219-23. 

148 Fitzroy Maclean, Eastern 
Approaches (London 1966 ed.) 
119-20. 

149 For details of the use of torture, see 
Medvedev, op. cit., 259-70, 286. 

150 Simon Wolin and Robert 
M.Slusser, The Soviet Secret Police 
(New York 1957), 194; Antoni 
Ekart, Vanished Without Trace 
(London 1954), 244. 

151 Medvedev, op. cit., 239; Conquest, 
op. cit., 525—35; see also losif 
Dyadkin's calculations, Wall Street 
Journal, 23 July 1980, which are 
similar. 

152 Laqueur, op. cit., 266-7. 

153 For right-wing intellectuals, see 
Richard Griffiths, 
Fellow-Travellers of the Right: 
British Enthusiasts for Nazi 
Germany 1933-1938 (London 
1980), and Alastair Hamilton, The 
Appeal of Fascism: a Study of 
Intellectuals and Fascism 
1919-1945 (London 1971); see 
also Malcolm Muggeridge, The 
Thirties (London 1940), 281-2. 



SOURCE NOTES 



807 



154 For Stalin's anti-Semitism, see 
Medvedev, op. cit., 493ff.; he gives 
a list of books banned by Stalin on 
p. 524; for Gorky, see Hingley, 
op. cit., 241-2. 

155 The Letters of Lincoln Steffens, ed. 
E. Winter and G. Hicks, 2 vols 
(New York 1938), ii 1001. 

156 Shaw, The Rationalization of 
Russia (Bloomington, Ind., 1964 
ed.), 112. 

157 Quoted by Jean Lacourure, Andre 
Malraux (New York 1975), 230. 

158 Quoted by Sidney Hook in 
Encounter , March 1978. 

159 Cohen, op. cit., 376. 

160 Muggeridge, Chronicles of W asted 
Time, 254-5. 

161 Walter Duranty, The Kremlin and 
the People (New York 1941), 65. 

162 Quoted in Hollander, op. cit., 164. 

163 Trilling, in The Last Decade, 'Art, 
Will and Necessity'. 

164 Ibid., 'A Novel of the Thirties'. 



9 The High Noon of Aggression 

1 Manchester, op. cit., 7. 

2 James Margach, The Abuse of 
Tower (London 1978). 

3 Barnett, op. cit., 291 ; Mary Agnes 
Hamilton, Arthur Henderson 
(London 1938). 

4 Beasley, op. cit., 245. 

5 Documents on British Foreign 
Policy, 2, ix No. 43; see Ian Nish, 
Japanese Foreign Policy y 1 869— 
1942 (London 1977), 260ff. 

6 Barnett, op. cit., 300. 

7 Middlemass and Barnes, op. cit., 
729. 

8 James Neidpath, The Singapore 
Naval Base and the Defence of 
Britain s Eastern Empire 
1919-1941 (Oxford 1981). 

9 James, op. cit., 167. 

10 Harold S.Quigley and 

John E.Turner, The New Japan: 
Government and Politics 
(Minneapolis 1956), 38-9. 

1 1 Quoted by Hugh Byas, op. cit., 
265-6. 

12 Ibid., 97. 

13 Mosley, op. cit., 154-5. 

14 Tolland, op. cit., 13. 

15 Byas, op. cit., 119f£ i ; Tolland, 
op. cit., 13-33; Beasley, op. cit., 
250; James, op. cit., 170ff. 



16 Tolland, op. cit., 21. 

17 Ibid, 33 footnote; for Sorge, see 
William Deakin and G.R.Storry, 
The Case of Richard Sorge 
(London 1964). 

18 Anthony Garavente, 'The Long 
March', China Quarterly, 22 
(1965), 84-124. 

1 9 Edgar Snow, Red Star over China 
(London 1938); Chen Chang-Feng, 
On the Long March with 
Chairman Mao (Peking 1959); The 
Long March: Eyewitness Accounts 
(Peking 1963). 

20 Edgar Snow, Random Notes on 
Red China (Harvard 1957), 1-11; 
J.M.Betram, Crisis in China: the 
Only Story of the Sian Mutiny 
(London 1937). 

21 Agnes Smedley, Battle Hymn of 
China (London 1944), 96-143. 

22 Tolland, op. cit., 44—7; see also 
James B. Crowley in the Journal of 
Asian Studies, May 1963, and 
C.P.Fitzgerald, The Birth of 
Communist China (Baltimore 
1964). 

23 Nish, op. cit., 232; Katsu Young, 
The Nomohan Incident: Imperial 
Japan and the Soviet Union', 
Monumenta Nipponica, 22 (1967), 
82-102. 

24 Tolland, op. cit., 44 footnote. 

25 Ibid., 47. 

26 Mosley, op. cit., 177-81; Tolland, 
op. cit., 50. 

27 Quoted by Nish, op. cit., 260. 

28 Hugh Byas in New York Times, 
31 July 1938. 

29 Hans Frank, Im Angesicht des 
Galgens (Munich 1953), 92; 
Joseph Goebbels, Der Faschismus 
und seine praktischen Ergebnisse 
(1935). 

30 Nolte, op. cit., 230. 

31 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xxvi 
233. 

32 Barnett, op. cit., 344-8. 

33 Ibid., 379-80; Carlton, op. cit., 68. 

34 Carlton, op. cit., 84-6. 

35 Barnett, op. cit., 381. 

36 Ciano's Diplomatic Papers 
(London 1948), 56. 

37 For Italian fascist racialism, see 
Antonio Spinosa, 'Le persecuzioni 
razziali in Italia', // Ponte vm 
(1952), 964-78, 1078-96, 
1604-22, ix (1953), 950ff. 



808 



SOURCE NOTES 



38 Salvador de Madariaga, Spain: a 
Modern History (London 1961), 
455. 

39 Quoted in Paul Preston, The 
Coming of the Spanish Civil War 
(London 1978), 15. 

40 Largo Caballero, Mis Recuerdos 
(Mexico City 1954), 37. 

41 Mariano Perez Galan, La 
Ensenanza en la II Repuhlica 
espanola (Madrid 1975), 332-3. 

42 See articles by Luis Araquistain, 
El Sol (Madrid), 18, 21, 24 July 
1931. 

43 Preston, op. cit., 107. 

44 Stanley Payne, The Spanish 
Revolution (New York 1970), 108. 

45 Eye-witness 1933, quoted Ramon 
Sender, Viaje a la aldea del crimen 
(Madrid 1934), 33-42. 

46 J.Arraras Irribaren (ed.), Historia 
de la Cruzada Espanola, 8 vols 
(Madrid 1940-4), ii 263; 

J. A. Ansaldo, Para Qui? De 
Alfonso xni a Juan in (Buenos 
Aires 1951), 51. 

47 George Dimitrov, The Working 
Classes Against Fascism (London 
1935), 47. 

48 Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil 
War (London 1961 ed.), 95; 
George Hills, Franco: the Man and 
his Nation (London 1967), 210. 

49 J.W.D.Trythall,Fr<mco:tf 
Biography (London 1970), 80. 

50 R. A. H.Robinson, The Origins of 
Franco's Spain (Newton Abbot 
1970), 12. 

5 1 Thomas, op. cit., 5 . 

52 Preston, op. cit., 162-3, 172. 

53 Trythall, op. cit., 81; Preston, 
op. cit., 176. 

54 Burnett Bolloten, The Grand 
Camouflage (London 2nd ed. 
1968), 115-16; Juan-Simeon 
Vidarte, Todos fuimos culpahles 
(Mexico 1973), 56-7. 

55 Robinson, op. cit., 259-60; 
Preston, op. cit, 185. 

56 Vidarte, op. cit., 100, 115-27; 
Idalecio Prieto, Convulciones de 
Espana, 3 vols (Mexico 1967-9), 
in 143-4. 

57 Constancia de la Mora, In Place of 
Splendour (London 1940), 
214-15; Claud Bowers, My 
Mission to Spain (London 1954), 
200-8; Henry Buckley, Life and 



Death of the Spanish Republic 
(London 1940), 129; Stanley 
Payne, Falange: a History of 
Spanish Fascism (Stanford 1961), 
98-105; Ian Gibson, La Represion 
nacionalista de Granada en 1936 
(Paris 1971) 40-3. 

58 Thomas, op. cit., 5; Robles's 
figures were broadly correct. 

59 Vidarte, op. cit., 213-17. 

60 J.Gutierrez-Rave, Gil Robles: 
caudillo frustrado (Madrid 1967), 
198-9. 

61 Thomas, op. cit. 52—4. 

62 Ibid., 269, footnote 1. 

63 Antonio Montero, La Persecucion 
religiosa en Espagna 1 936-1 939 
(Madrid 1961), 762. 

64 Thomas, op. cit., 270-2. 

65 Arthur Koestler, The Invisible 
Writing (London 1954), 347; 
Ignacio Escobar, Asi empezo 
(Madrid 1974). 

66 Thomas, op. cit., 270 footnote 2. 

67 Juan de Iturralde, El Catolicismo y 
la cruzada de Franco, 2 vols 
(Bayonne 1955), ii 88-9. 

68 Ignacio de Azpiazu, Siete meses y 
siete dias en la Espana de Franco 
(Caracas 1964), 115. 

69 Georges Bernanos, Les Grands 
Cimitieres sous la lune (Paris 
1938), 72-3; Koestler, Invisible 
Writing, 333-5. 

70 Thomas, op. cit., 265, citing 
authorities in footnotes; Ian 
Gibson, The Death of Lorca 
(London 1973), 167-9. 

71 Trythall, op. cit., 94. 

72 S.G.Payne, Politics and the 
Military in Modern Spain 
(Stanford 1967), 371-2. 

73 Thomas, op. cit., 1977 edition, 
gives details of foreign intervention 
in Appendix 7, 974—85; see also 
Jesus Salas, Intervencion extrajeras 
en la guerra de Espana (Madrid 
1974). 

74 D.C. Watt, 'Soviet Aid to the 
Republic', Slavonic and East 
European Review, June 1960; 
Thomas, op. cit., 981-2. 

75 Thomas, op. cit., 982 footnote 2; 
Neal Wood, Communism and 
British Intellectuals (London 
1959), 56. 



SOURCE NOTES 



809 



76 Quoted by Trythall, op. cit., 65; 
Luis de Galinsoga, Centinela del 
Occidente: Semblanza biogrdfica 
de Francisco Franco (Barcelona 
1956), 134-9. 

77 Rudolf Timmermans, General 
Franco (Ohen 1937), 135; 
Francisco Franco, Diario de una 
Bandera (Madrid 1922), 46, 179; 
Trythall, op. cit., 58. 

78 Alekandro Vicuna, Franco 
(Santiago de Chile 1956) 222-3; 
Ignacio Gonazalez, La Guerra 
nacional espagnola ante la moral y 
elderecho (Salamanca 1937); Jay 
Allen, Chicago Tribune, 29 July 
1936; Cruzada Espanola, n 84. 

79 Thomas, op. cit., Appendix 5, 971. 

80 Ibid., 974-7; Salas, op. cit., 510. 

8 1 Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway 
(Penguin 1972), 472. 

82 Thomas, op. cit., 533. 

83 Jesus Hernandez Tomas, La 
Grande Trahison (Paris 1953), 66; 
Thomas, op. cit., 650-1. 

84 Thomas, op. cit., 664 footnote 1 ; 
Manuel Azana, Obras Completas, 
4 vols (Mexico City 1966-8), iv 
867; Caballero, op. cit., 204; 
Incalecio Prieto, Convulciones de 
Espagna, 3 vols (Mexico City 
1967-9)iii220. 

85 George Orwell, Homage to 
Catalonia (London 1938), 169ff.; 
Thomas, op. cit., 65 Iff. 

86 Hernandez, op. cit., 124-6. 

87 Thomas, op. cit., 705-6; Bernard 
Crick, George Orwell: a Life 
(London 1980), 224-6. 

88 Krivitsky managed to publish his 
book, J Was Stalin's Agent, 
(London 1940) first; Hingley, 
op. cit., 268ff. 

89 Thomas, op. cit., 702-3 and 
footnote. 

90 Orlov, op. cit. 

91 Thomas, op. cit., 624-7, Appendix 
8, 986-91; Vincente Talon, Arde 
Guernica (Madrid 1970); Herbert 
Southworth, La Destruction de 
Guernica (Paris 1975); Adolf 
Galland, The First and the Last 
(London 1957). 

92 Allen Guttmann, The Wound in 
the Heart: America and the 
Spanish Civil War (New York 
1962). 

93 Koestler, Invisible Writing. 



94 New English Weekly, 29 July, 
2 September 1937; for this 
celebrated episode, see Kingley 
Martin, Editor, 1931-1945 
(London 1968), 218; George 
Orwell, Collected Essays, etc., 
4 vols (Penguin 1970), i 333ff.; 
Crick, op. cit., 227ff. 

95 Sean Day-Lewis, C. Day-Lewis: an 
English Literary Life (London 
1980), 94, 102. 

96 Cyril Connolly, 'Some Memories' 
in Stephen Spender (ed.), W. H. 
Auden: a tribute (London 1975), 
70. 

97 Hugh Thomas, 'The Lyrical 
Illusion of Spain 1936' in Mestine 
de Courcel (ed.), Malraux: Life 
and Work (London 1976), 42-3. 

98 Carlos Baker, op. cit., 465. 

99 Martin, op. cit., 219-20. 

100 Stephen Spender, World within 
World (London 1951), 242-3. 

101 Ibid., 223. 

102 Orwell, 'Notes on the Spanish 
Militias', Collected Essays, i 
350-64. 

103 Jose Diaz de Villegas, La Guerra de 
liberacion (Barcelona 1957), 384. 

104 Thomas, op. cit., 926-7. 

105 Text of Law in Boletin Oficial del 
Estado, 13 February 1939; 
Trythall, op. cit., 141. 

106 Ciano's Diplomatic Papers, 293-4. 

107 Quoted by Max Gallo, Spain under 
Franco: a History (tr. London 
1973), 88. The figure of 193,000 is 
given in Charles Foltz, The 
Masquerade in Spain (Boston 
1948), 97; see Thomas, op. cit., 
924-5. 

108 Trythall, op. cit., 142ff. 



10 The End of Old Europe 

1 H.A.Jacobsen, Der Zweite 
Weltkrieg: Grundzuge der Politik 
und Strategic in Dokumenten 
(Frankfurt 1965), 180-1; quoted 
in Andreas Hillgruber, Germany 
and the Two World Wars (tr., 
Harvard 1981), 56-7. 

2 Notes taken by Lt-General 
Liebmann, quoted in Hillgruber, 
op. cit., 57. 

3 Rudolph Binion, Hitler among the 
Germans (New York 1976), 61-3, 
78-82. 



810 



SOURCE NOTES 



4 Hitlers Zweites Buch: Ein 
Dokument aus dem]ahre 1928 
(Stuttgart 1961); tr. as Hitler's 
Secret Book (New York 1962). 

5 Quoted in Fest, op. cit., 793. 

6 Hitlers Zweites Buch, 130. 

7 Hillgruber, op. cit., 50. 

8 Fest, op. cit., 796-7. 

9 Herbert Agar, 'Culture v. 
Colonialism in America', Southern 
Review, 1 (July 1935), 1-19. 

10 George Kennan, Memoirs, 
1925-1950 (Boston 1967), 53. 

11 C.A.MacDonald, The United 
States, Britain and Appeasement 
1936-1939 (London 1981). 

12 Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, 84. 

13 Ibid., 86; Daniel Yergin, Shattered 
Peace: the Origins of the Cold War 
and the National Security State 
(Boston 1977), 34-5. 

14 Fest, op. cit., 869. 

15 Gilbert, Churchill, w 459-62. 

16 Quoted in Montgomery Hyde, 
Carson (London 1953), 387. 

1 7 Roland Hunt and John Harrison, 
The District Officer in India 
1930-1947 (London 1980). 

18 B.R.Tomlinson, 'Foreign private 
investment in India 1920—50', 
Modern Asian Studies, xn 4 
(1978). 

19 Gilbert, op. cit., 399ff.; 480-1. 

20 Andrew Boyle, The Climate of 
Treason (London 1979), with 
corrections in Noel Annan's 
review, The Times Literary 
Supplement, 7 December 1979, 
83-4. 

21 Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian 
Science: Marxism in Britain 
1917-1933 (Cambridge 1980). 

22 Middlemas and Barnes, op. cit., 
745. 

23 Quoted in John Gross, The Rise 
and Fall of the Man of Letters 
(London 1969), 283. 

24 Gisela Lebzelter, Political 
Anti-Semitism in England 
1918-1939 (New York 1978). 

25 J.R.M.Butler, Lord Lothian 
(London 1960), 206. 

26 Viscount Templewood, Nine 
Troubled Years (London 1954), 
133. 

27 Daily Telegraph, 28 January 1935. 

28 Martin Gilbert, The Roots of 
Appeasement (London 1966), 
354-5; Barnett, op. cit., 389ff. 



29 Nicolson, Diaries, 23 March 1936. 

30 Gilbert, Churchill, v 456. 
31V. K.Krishna Menon (ed.), Young 

Oxford and War (London 1934). 

32 Barnett, op. cit., 423-4. 

33 Christopher Thorne, 'Viscount 
Cecil, the Government and the Far 
Eastern Crisis of 1931', Cambridge 
Historical Journal, xiv 

(1971), 805-26. 

34 See Donald S. Birn, The League of 
Nations Union 1918-1945 
(Oxford 1981). 

35 Letter to the Manchester 
Guardian, 26 February 1932. 

36 Michael Pugh, 'Pacifism and 
Politics in Britain 1931-1935', 
Cambridge Historical Journal, 
xxin (1980), 641-56. 

37 For an explanation (not 
justification) of the concession, see 
Paul Haggie, Britannia at Bay 
(Oxford 1981). 

38 Anthony Eden, speech, 30 January 
1941. 

39 Paul Schmidt, Hitler's Interpreter 
(tr. London 1951), 320. 

40 Barnett, op. cit., 409-10. 

41 The conference is described in 
Friedrich Hossbach, Zwischen 
Wehrmacht und Hitler 1934-1 938 
(Hanover 1949); Fest, op. cit., 800. 

42 Fest, op. cit., 809-10. 

43 See Stefan Zweig, The World of 
Yesterday (New York 1943). 

44 Jones, Life and Work of Freud , 
636ff. 

45 Barnett, op. cit., 474-5. 

46 Robert). O'Neill, The German- 
Army and the Nazi Party 
1933-1939 (London 1966), 
152-9. 

47 Peter Hoffman, Widerstand, 
Staatsstreich , Attentat: Der Kampf 
der Opposition gegen Hitler 
(Munich 1969), 83; Fest, op. cit., 
829ff., and 1174-5 notes 20-3 for 
sources. 

48 O'Neill, op. cit., 163-5. 

49 Fest, op. cit., 832-3. 

50 'Letter to Runciman', 

15 September 1938; Opera 
Omnia, xix 143. 

51 Holborn, op. cit., 780ff. 

52 Gilbert, Churchill, v 999ff. 

53 Andre Beauffre, 1 940: the Fall of 
France (tr. London 1967), 84; 
Barnett, op. cit., 526-7. 

54 Holborn, op. cit., 777. 



SOURCE NOTES 



811 



55 William Shirer, The Rise and Fall 
of the Third Reich (London 1960), 
399. 

56 Fest, op. cit., 892; Kennan, 
Memoirs 1925-1950, 108. 

57 See Franklin Reid Gannon, The 
British Press and Germany 
1936-1939 (Oxford 1971); 
Martin, Editor, 254-7. 

58 Barnett, op. cit., 560. 

59 The Times, leading article, 1 April 
1939; Gilbert, Churchill, v 
1052-3. 

60 Hillgruber, op. cit., 61-2. 

61 Ibid., 66. 

62 Barnett, op. cit., 569. 

63 Fest, op. cit., 917; Hillgruber, 
op. cit., 63. 

64 Fest, op. cit., 869. 

65 Hubertus Lupke, 'Japans 
Russlandpolitik von 1939 bis 
1941', Schriften des Instituts fur 
Asienkunde in Hamburg, x 
(Frankfurt 1962), 7-24. 

66 Fest, op. cit., 884-5; for sources 
see 1177-8, note 27. 

67 Hans Gunther Seraphim (ed.), Das 
politische Tagebuch Alfred 
Rosenbergs (Gottingen 1956), 82; 
Gustav Hilder and Alfred G. 
Meyer, The Incompatible Allies: a 
Memoir-History of the 
German-Soviet Relationship, 
1918-1941 (New York 1953), 
315. 

68 Fest, op. cit., 879-80. 

69 Albert Tarulis, Soviet Policy 
towards the Baltic States 

1 91 9-1 940 (Notre Dame 1959), 
154-5. 

70 Michael Freund, Weltgeschichte 
der Gegenwart in Dokumenten 
(Freiburg 1954-6), in 166ff. 

71 F. La Ruche, La Neutralite de la 
Suede (Paris 1953). 

72 Henri Michel, The Second World 
War (tr. London 1975), for details. 

73 A.Rossi, Deux Ans d* alliance 
germano-sovietique (Paris 1949), 
88-90; Hitler's Table-Talk (tr. 
London 1953), 8. 

74 Carl Burckhardt, Meine Danzinger 
Mission 1937-1979 (Munich 
1960), 348; quoted in Hillgruber, 
op. cit., 69. 

75 Fest, op. cit., 908; sources, 1179, 
note 7. 

76 Ibid., 906, 921-2. 



77 J.-B.Duraselle, La Decadence 
1932-1939 (Paris 1979). 

78 Dominique Leca, La Rupture de 
1940 (Paris 1979). 

79 Franqois Bedarida (ed.), La 
Strategic secrete de la Drole de 
Guerre (Paris 1979); see also 
Franqais et Britanniques dans la 
Drole de Guerre: Actes du 
Colloque Franco— Britannique de 
decembrel975 (Paris 1978). 

80 Fest, op. cit., 940, 1181 note 10; 
Helmut Heiber (ed.), Hitlers 
Lagebesprechungen (Stuttgart 
1962), 30. 

8 1 Marc Bloch, Strange Defeat 
(tr. Oxford 1949), 36-7. 

82 See Dr Pierre Renchnick in 
Medecine et Hygene (Geneva, 
September 1981). 

83 Bloch, op. cit., 28. 

84 Henri Michel, Le Proces de Riom 
(Paris 1979). 

85 Richard Griffith, Marshal Petain 
(London 1970); Judith Hughes, To 
the Maginot Line: the Politics of 
French Military Preparation in the 
1920s (Harvard 1971). 

86 Quoted in Raymond Tournoux, 
Petain et la France (Paris 1980). 

87 Quoted in Robert Aron, The Vichy 
Regime 1940-1944 (tr. London 
1958), 122. 

88 Alan Milward, The New Order 
and the French Economy (Oxford 
1970), 272-88. 

89 Trythall, op. cit., 161-3; 
Documenti Diplomatici Italiani 
9th series (Rome 1954), iv 
No. 260. 

90 Schmidt, op. cit., 191-4; Ciano's 
Diplomatic Papers, 412. 

91 Franz Haider, Kriegstagebuch: 
Tdgliche Aufzeichnungen des 
Chefs des Generalstabes des 
Heeres 1939-1942 (Stuttgart 
1962)i308. 

92 Karl Klee, Das Unternehmen 
'Seelowe' (Gottingen 1958), 
189-90. 

93 Haider, op. cit., i 375. 

94 Quoted in Hillgruber, op. cit., 
354n. 

95 Daniel Benjamin and Levis Kochin, 
'Voluntary Unemployment in 
Interwar Britain', The Banker, 
February 1979. 



812 



SOURCE NOTES 



96 A.J. Younger, Britain's Economic 
Growth 1920-1966 (London 
1967), 112. 

97 R.S.Sayers in Economic Journal, 
June 1950. 

98 Younger, op. cit., 107ff.; H. W. 
Richardson, Economic Recovery in 
Britain 1932-1939 (London 
1967). 

99 Barnett, op. cit., 482-3. 

100 SeeM.M.Postan, D. Hay and 
J.D.Scott, The Design and 
Development of Weapons (London 
1964). 

101 For Churchill's popularity in 
summer 1940, see Brian Gardner, 
Churchill in his Time: a Study in a 
Reputation 1939-1945 (London 
1968), 65-96. 

102 Carlton, op. cit., 163. 

103 Robert Rhodes James (ed.), Chips: 
the Diaries of Sir Henry Channon 
(Penguin 1967), 19 July 1940, 320. 

1 04 Cecil's aide-memoire is printed in 
Hugh Cudlipp, Publish and Be 
Damned (London 1953), 144. 

105 Winston Churchill, The Second 
World War: Their Finest Hour 
(London 1949), 567. 

106 See, for instance, Taylor, op. cit., 
629ff. and note C 648-9. 

107 Quoted in Gardner, op. cit., 69. 

108 H.Duncan Hall, North American 
Supply (London 1955), 247ff. 

109 Taylor, op. cit., 623-4, 647. 



11 The Watershed Year 

1 Erickson, op. cit., 587. 

2 G.Zhukov, The Memoirs of 
Marshal Zhukov (tr., London 
1971), 268; Kennan, Memoirs 
1925-1950, 324; Rigby, Stalin, 
57; Stalin, Collected Works, xv 3; 
Ivan Maiski in Novy Mir, Moscow 
1964, 12, 162-3. 

3 Seaton, op. cit., 95; Hingley, 
op. cit., 309; Rigby, op. cit., 55, 

4 J.K.Zawodny, Death in the Forest: 
the story of the Katyn Forest 
Massacre (London 1971), 127; 
Hilder and Meyer, op. cit., 330; 
Hingley, op. cit., 30 Iff. 

5 Margarete Buber-Neuman, Als 
Gefangene bei Stalin und Hitler: 
eine Welt im Dunkel (Stuttgart 
1958), 179. 

6 Conquest, op. cit., 449. 



7 Seaton, op. cit., 91. 

8 Akten zur deutscher auswartigen 
Politik, 1918-1945 (Bonn 

1 966- ), Series D, xi, No. 329, 
472. 

9 Fest, op. cit., 957-8; Bullock, 
op. cit., 639. 

10 Fest, op. cit., 952-5; Le Testament 
politique de Hitler, 93ff. 

1 1 Haider, op. cit., n 6. 

12 Fest, op. cit., 1104. 

13 Heinz Hohne, Canaris (tr. London 
1980). 

14 Hillgruber, op. cit., 80-1; Fest, 
op. cit., 955. 

15 For the 'Marcks Plan' see Alfred 
Philippi, Das Pripjetproblem: Eine 
Studie uber die operative 
Bedeuting des Pripjets-Gebietes fiir 
den Feldzug desjahres 1941 
(Frankfurt 1956), 69ff. 

16 Fest, op. cit., 962, 1091. 

1 7 Matthew Cooper, The German Air 
Force 1 933-1 945: an Anatomy of 
Failure (London 1981). 

18 Postan, op. cit. 

19 Erickson, op. cit., 584. 

20 Alexander Werth, Russia at War 
1 941-1 945 (London 1 964), 401 ; 
Seaton, op. cit., 271. 

21 Hillgruber, op. cit., 90. 

22 Fest, op. cit., 972. 

23 Ibid., 978. 

24 Ibid., 996. 

25 Ibid., 962. 

26 Haider, op. cit., ii 335-8. 

27 Hans-Adolf Jacobsen, The 
Kommissarbefehl and Mass 
Executions of Soviet Russian 
Prisoners of War' in Hans 
Buchheim etaL, Anatomy of the SS 
State (tr. New York 1968). 

28 Hillgruber, op. cit., 86-7. 

29 Hitler's Table-Talk, 426; Fest, 
op.cit., 1017, 1021ff. 

30 Adolf Hitler, Monologe im 
Fuhrerhauptquartier 1941-1944 
(Hamburg 1980), 54, 90, 331. 

31 Fest, op. cit., 1025. 

32 Nuremberg Document no kw 
1692; printed along with other 
relevant documents in Jacobsen, 
op. cit.; Fest, op. cit., 968-9. 

33 Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago 
(tr. London 1958), 453. 

34 Seaton, op. cit., 91. 

35 J.Stalin, War Speeches and Orders 
of the Day (London 1945), 26. 



SOURCE NOTES 



813 



36 Deutscher, Stalin, 468-9. 

37 Gustav Herling, A World Apart 
(London 1951), 59. 

38 Conquest, op. cit., 486-90. 

39 Albert Seaton, The Russo-German 
War 1 941-1 945 (London 1971), 
90. 

40 Hingley, op. cit.,318. 

41 Robert Conquest, The 
Nation-Killers: the Soviet 
Deportation of Nationalities 
(London 1970), 65, 102; Hingley, 
op. cit., 348. 

42 Deaton, Stalin as Warlord, 131-3. 

43 Ibid., 126. 

44 Ibid., 265-6. 

45 Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, 
133-4. 

46 R.J. M. Butler, Grand Strategy 
(London 1957), ii 543-4. 

47 Carlton, op. cit., 184-5. Harvey's 
uncensored Diaries are London, 
British Library, Add. MS 56398. 

48 A.J. P.Taylor, Beaverbrook 
(London 1972), 487. 

49 Churchill, War Memoirs, x 210. 

50 See F.H.Hinsley et al, British 
Intelligence in the Second World 
War (London 1981), ii. 

51 Haggie, op. cit.; Neidpath, op. cit. 

52 Nish, op. cit., 232. 

53 Ibid., 242. 

54 Ibid., 246; B. Martin, Deutschland 
und Japan in 2. Weltkrieg 
(Gottingen 1969), chapter 1. 

55 Kennan, Memoirs 1 925-1 950, 
135. 

56 Tolland, op. cit., 244. 

57 Ibid., 95. 

58 Nobutaka Ike, Japan s Decision 
for War: records of the 1941 policy 
conferences (Stanford 1967), 
133ff.; Mosley, op. cit., 215. 

59 Mosley, op. cit., 207 and footnote. 

60 Tolland, op. cit., 94, 148; Mosley, 
op. cit., 200 footnote. 

61 Barbara Teters, 'Matsuoka 
Yusuke: the diplomacy of bluff and 
gesture' in R.B.Burns and 
E.M.Bennett (eds), Diplomats in 
Crisis: United States, Chinese, 
Japanese Relations 1919-1 941 
(Oxford 1974). 

62 Tolland, op. cit., 75 footnote, 77. 

63 Robert Craigie, Behind the 
Japanese Mask (London 1945). 

64 Nish, op. cit., 235. 

65 Tolland, op. cit., 179 and footnote. 



66 R.J.C.Butow, Tojo and the 
Coming of War (Princeton 1961), 
172. 

67 Ike, op. cit., 151 footnote 36; 
Mosley, op. cit., 216-20. 

68 Mosley, op. cit., 200. 

69 Tolland, op. cit., 112. 

70 Ike, op. cit., 188. 

71 Tolland, op. cit., 133. 

72 Ibid., 47, 68 footnote. 

73 Ibid., 82. 

74 Ike, op. cit., 201. 

75 Ibid., 189-92. 

76 Mosley, op. cit., 205 footnote. 

77 Tolland, op. cit., 150 footnote. 

78 Ibid., 225, 235ff. 

79 Ike, op. cit., 233. 

80 Tolland, op. cit., 273-5. 

8 1 Martin, Deutschland und Japan, 
chapter 1. 

82 See Masatake Okumiya, Midway: 
the Battle that Doomed Japan 
(Annapolis 1955). 

83 Tolland, op. cit., 339. 

84 Hans- Adolf Jacobsen, 1939-1945: 
Der Zweite Weltkrieg in Chronik 
und Dokumenten (Darmstadt 
1961)290. 

85 Hillgruber, op. cit., 96. 



12 Superpower and Genocide 

1 George Bruce, Second Front Now: 
the Road to D-Day (London 
1979); Ian Colvin, Flight 777 
(London 1957) for Leslie Howard. 

2 Tolland, op. cit., 75-6 and 
footnote. 

3 Ibid., 441-4; Burke Davis, Get 
Yamamoto (New York 1969). 

4 Barbara Tuchman, The 
Zimmerman Telegram (New York 
1958). 

5 David Kahn, 'Codebreaking in 
World Wars i and ii: the Major 
Successes and Failures, their 
Causes and their Effects', 
Cambridge Historical Journal, 
September 1980. 

6 Richard Woytak, On the Border of 
War and Peace: Polish Intelligence 
and Diplomacy in 1939 and the 
Origins of the Ultra Secret 
(Boulder 1979). 

7 It was first revealed by 
F.W.Winterbotham, The Ultra 
Secret (London 1974), written 
from memory. 



814 



SOURCE NOTES 



8 Ralph Bennett, 'Ultra and Some 
Command Decisions', Journal of 
Contemporary History, 16 (1981), 
131-51. 

9 Vice- Admiral B.B.Schofield, 'The 
Defeat of the U-boats During 
World War Two', ibid., 1 19-29; 
P.Beesley, Very Special Intelligence 
(London 1977), 152-85; see also 
Jiirgen Rohwer and Eberhard 
Jackel (eds), Die Funkaufklarung 
und ihre Rolle in 2 Weltkrieg 
(1979), report on international 
conference held 15-18 November 
1978 on reasons for U-boat defeat. 

10 John Masterman, The 
Double-Cross System in the War of 
1939-1945 (Yale 1972). 

1 1 Edward Van Der Rhoer, Deadly 
Magic: a personal account of 
communications intelligence in 
World War Two in the Pacific 
(New York 1978); W. J. Holmes, 
Double-Edged Secrets: US Naval 
Intelligence Operations in the 
Pacific during World War Two 
(Annapolis 1979). 

12 Harold Deutsch, The Historical 
Impact of Revealing the Ultra 
Secret', US Army War College: 
Parameters, v u 3 (1978). 

13 Tolland, op. cit, 444-6. 

14 Milward, German Economy at 
War. 

15 Andreas Hillgruber, Hitlers 
Strategie: Politik und Kriegfiihrung 
1940 bis 1941 (Frankfurt 1965), 
38 footnote; Fest, op. cit., 
1179-80, note 11. 

1 6 Quoted in Seaton, Stalin as 
Warlord, 263. 

17 Fest, op. cit., 980. 

18 Ibid., 974. 

19 Tolland, op. cit., 327. 

20 Susman (ed.), op. cit. 

21 Charles Murphy, 'The Earth 
Movers Organize for War', 
Fortune, August-October 1943. 

22 Gilbert Burck, 'ge Does IT, 
Fortune, March 1942. 

23 Tolland, op. cit., 426. 

24 Ike, op. cit., xxvi; Bruce, op. cit., 
for Churchill episode. 

25 See Geoffrey Best, Humanity in 
Warfare (London 1981); and the 
article by Hans Blix in British 
Yearbook of International Law 
(London 1978). 



26 Charles Webster and Noble 
Frankland, The Strategic Air 
Offensive Against Germany, 4 vols 
(London 1961), i 323. 

27 Ibid., in 287; Taylor, English 
History 1914-45, 693. 

28 Taylor, English History, 1914-45, 
692, footnote 4. 

29 David Irving, The Destruction of 
Dresden (London 1963), 44-5; 
Martin Middlebrook, The Battle 
of Hamburg (London 1980). 

30 Irving, op. cit., 51-2, 99-100. 

31 Ibid., 154-8, 175, 142-3. 

32 Hugo Young, Brian Silcock and 
Peter Dunn, Journey to 
Tranquillity: the History of Man* s 
Assault on the Moon (London 
1969), 29-32. 

33 David Irving, The Mare's Nest 
(London 1964), 299, 306-14. 

34 Nils Bohr and J.A.Wheeler, 
Physics Review, 56 (1939), 426. 

35 Margaret Gowing, Britain and 
Atomic Energy, 1939-1945 
(London 1964), 54. 

36 See Freeman Dyson, Disturbing the 
Universe (New York 1979). 

37 Gowing, op. cit., 45-51. 

38 Ibid., 76-8. 

39 Richard Hewlett and Oscar 
Anderson, The New World 
1939-1946 (Washington dc 
1972). 

40 Stephane Groueff, Manhattan 
Project (Boston 1967), 62; Leslie 
Groves, Now It Can Be Told: the 
Story of the Manhattan Project 
(New York 1962), 107. 

4 1 Peter Pringle and James Spigelman, 
The Nuclear Barons (London 
1982), 26ff. 

42 David Holloway, 'Entering the 
Nuclear Arms Race: the Soviet 
Decision to Build the Atomic Bomb 
1939-45', Working Paper N. 9, 
Woodrow Wilson Center 
(Washington dc 1979). 

43 Strobe Talbot (ed.), Khrushchev 
Remembers: the Last Testament 
(London 1974), 60. 

44 Deborah Shapley, 'Nuclear 
Weapons History: Japan's 
Wartime Bomb-projects Revealed', 
Science, 13 January 1978. 

45 Rauschning, op. cit. 

46 Nolte, op. cit., 234. 



SOURCE NOTES 



815 



47 Mussolini, Opera Omnia, xxxi 
223. 

48 Ibid., xxxii 1-5,190. 

49 Fest, op. cit., 1031. 

50 Michael Balfour, The Origins of 
the Formula "Unconditional 
Surrender" in World War Two', 
Armed Forces and Society 
(Chicago University, Winter 1979). 

51 Hans Speidel, Invasion 1944 
(Tubingen 1961), 155. 

52 Quoted in Schmidt, op. cit. 

53 Hitler's Table-Talk, 657, 661, 666, 
684; Fest, op. cit., 1057, 1063. 

54 Fest, op. cit., 1057-9. 

55 See Hugh Trevor-Roper, Thomas 
Carlyle's Historical Philosophy', 
The Times Literary Supplement, 
26 June 1981,731-4. 

56 Quoted in Hugh Trevor- Roper, 
The Last Days of Hitler (London 
1947), 51. 

57 Albert Zollar, Hitler privat 
(Dusseldorf 1949), 150. 

58 Fest, op. at., 1069ff., 1077, 
1104-12. 

59 A.Mitscherlich and F.Mielke, The 
Death Doctors (London 1962), 
236ff.; Manvell and Fraenkel, 
Himmler, 87ff.; Holborn, op. cit., 
811. 

60 Manvell and Fraenkel, Himmler, 
117. 

61 Fest, op. cit., 1011. 

62 Manvell and Fraenkel, Himmler, 
118-19. 

63 Ibid., 120-2. 

64 Borkin, op. cit., 122-3. 

65 For a selection see Raul Hilberg 
(ed.), Documents of Destruction: 
Germany and Jewry 1 933-1 945 
(New York 1971), and his 
Destruction of the European Jews 
(New York 1961). 

66 Martin Gilbert, Final Journey: the 
Fate of the Jews in Nazi Europe 
(London 1979), 69-70. 

67 Quoted from Gerald Reitlinger, 
The Final Solution (London 1953). 

68 Gilbert, Final Journey, 77-8. 

69 Speer, op. cit., 302-4. 

70 Ibid., 368 note 23. 

71 See Benjamin B. Ferencz, Less than 
Slaves: Jewish Forced Labor and 
the Quest for Compensation 
(Harvard 1981). 



72 Trial of the Major War Criminals 
before the International Military 
Tribunal, ed. L.D.Egbert, 42 vols 
(Nuremberg 1947-9), I 245. 

73 Borkin, op. cit., 1 1 1-27. 

74 Gilbert, Final Journey, 78. 

75 Manvell and Fraenkel, Himmler, 
91. 

76 Ibid., 104-11. See also 
Mitscherlich and Mielke, op. cit. 

77 Manvell and Fraenkel, Himmler, 
Appendix b, 252-3. 

78 Ibid., 136-7, 196-7. 

79 Gilbert, Final Journey, 70; Luba 
Krugman Gurdus, The Death 
Train (New York 1979). 

80 See, for a discussion of this aspect, 
Rainer C. Baum, The Holocaust 
and the German Elite: Genocide 
and National Suicide in Germany 
1871-1945 (London 1982). 

8 1 Gerald Reitlinger, The SS: Alibi of 
a Nation, 1922-1945 (London 
1956), 377. 

82 Maurice Raisfus, Lesjuifs dans la 
Collaboration: L'UGIF 
1941-1944 (Paris 1981). 

83 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. 
Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews 
(New York 1981). 

84 Martin Gilbert, Auschwitz and the 
Allies (London 1981), 267-70. 

85 Quoted in ibid. 

86 John Wheeler-Bennett and 
Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance 
of Peace: the Political Settlement 
after the Second World War (New 
York 1972), 146-8, 166; 
Alexander Werth, Russia at War 
1941-1 945 (New York 1 965), 
267-8. 

87 Aaron Goldman, 'Germans and 
Nazis: the controversy over 
"Vansittartism" in Britain during 
the Second World War', Journal of 
Contemporary History, 14 (1979), 
155-91. 

88 Manvell and Fraenkel, Himmler, 
157, 169-70, 266 footnote 20. 

89 Borkin, op. cit., 135-56. 

90 Figures from Ferencz, Less than 
Slaves. 

91 Tolland, op. cit., 499 footnote. 

92 James, op. cit., 322. 

93 Tolland, op. cit., 477-8. 

94 James, op. cit., 246-7, 321, 396. 



816 



SOURCE NOTES 



95 Ibid., 299; Tolland, op. cit., 468. 

96 Tolland, op. cit., 469-71, 

97 James, op. cit., 246—7. 

98 Ibid, 293. 

99 Lansing Lamont, Day of Trinity 
(New York 1965), 235. 

100 For the bomb decision, see Martin 
Sherwin, A World Destroyed: the 
Atomic Bomb and the Grand 
Alliance (New York 1975), chapter 
8. 

101 Tolland, op. cit., 756. 

102 Calculation of Professor Shogo 
Nagaoka, First curator of the Peace 
Memorial in Hiroshima, Tolland, 
op. cit., 790 footnote. 

103 James, op. cit., 328; Shapley, 
op. cit. 

104 Tolland, op. cit., 813 footnote. 

105 Text in R.J.C.Butow,/apd« s 
Decision to Surrender (Stanford 
1954)248. 

106 Beaseley, op. cit., 277-8. 

107 See the International Military 
Tribunal for the Far East, 
Proceedings, 3 May 1946 to 
16 April 1946, Judgement, 
November 1948, Tokyo. 

108 James, op. cit., 259-60. 

109 Philip R. Pi ccigallo, The Japanese 
on Trial: Allied War Crimes 
Operations in the East 1 945-1 951 
(Austin 1979), 27. 

110 Ibid., 23, for dissenting opinions. 

111 Quoted in Mosley, op. cit. 

112 Samuel Eliot Morrison, History of 
the US Naval Operations in World 
War Two: vn Aleutians, Gilberts 
and Marshalls (Washington DC 
1951). 

113 Tolland, op. cit., 677 footnote. 

114 Sherwin, op. cit., 302. 

115 Poole, op. cit., 130. 

116 James, op. cit., 335-40. 

117 Nicholas Bethell, The Last Secret: 
Forcible Repatriation to Russia 
1944-1947 (London 1974), 5. 

118 Ibid., 8-13; Carlton, op. cit., 
239-42. 

119 Ibid.; Bethell, op. cit., 57-60. 

120 Joseph Hecomovic, Tito's 
Death-Marches and Extermination 
Camps (New York 1962) 23. 

121 Bethell, op. cit., 82, 101, 131-3, 
142-3. 



13 Peace by Terror 

1 Rhodes James (ed.), op. cit., 505. 

2 Quoted in Charles Bohlen, Witness 
to History 1929-1969 (New York 
1973), 26-9. 

3 Robert Sherwood, Roosevelt and 
Hopkins,! vols (New York 1950), 
i 387-423; Adam B. Ulam, Stalin: 
the Man and his Era (New York 
1973), 539-42, 560-1. 

4 Yergin, op. cit., 54. 

5 Winston Churchill, Wartime 
Correspondence (London 1960), 
196. 

6 Cairo Conference 1943. Quoted in 
Terry Anderson, The United 
States, Great Britain and the Cold 
War 1944-1947 (Colombia 1981), 
4. 

7 Quoted in Robert Garson, The 
Atlantic Alliance, East Europe and 
the Origin of the Cold War' in 
H.C.Allen and Rogert Thompson 
(eds), Contrast and Connection 
(Athens, Ohio 1976), 298-9. 

8 Lord Moran, Churchill: the 
Struggle for Survival, 1 940-1 944 
(London 1968), 154. 

9 John Wheeler-Bennett and 
Anthony Nicholls, The Semblance 
of Peace: the Political Settlement 
after the Second World War (New 
York 1972), 290. 

10 Anderson, op. cit., 15. 

1 1 John R.Deane, The Strange 
Alliance: the Story of American 
Efforts at Wartime Co-operation 
with Russia (London 1947), 298. 

12 LisleA.Rose, Dubious Victory: the 
United States and the End of 
World War Two (Kent, Ohio 
1973), i 6-7. 

13 Foreign Office Memo 21 March 
1944, 'Essentials of an American 
Policy'. 

14 The minute is in the Inverchapel 
Papers in the pro; see Carlton, 
op. cit., 244; Churchill, Second 
World War, vi 196-7. 

15 Diary of Sir Pierson Dixon, 
4 December 1944, quoted in 
Carlton, op. cit., 248-9; Churchill, 
Second World War, vi 252. 

16 Quoted Carlton, op. cit., 248. 

17 Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, 
Special Envoy to Churchill and 
Stalin 1941-1946 (New York 
1975), 390. 



SOURCE NOTES 



817 



18 Churchill, Second World War, vi 
337. 

19 William D.Leahy, I Was There 
(New York 1950), 315-16. 

20 Anderson, op. cit., 47. 

21 Ibid., 50. 

22 Viscount Montgomery, Memoirs 
(New York 1958), 296-7. 

23 Harry S.Truman, Memoirs, 2 vols 
(New York 1955-6), i 81-2. 

24 Omar Bradley, A Soldier's Story 
(New York 1951), 535-6; Forrest 
Pogue, George C. Marshall: 
Organizer of Victory (New York 
1973), 573-4. 

25 Thomas Campbell and George 
Herring, The Diaries of Edward 
R.StettiniusJr, 1943-1946 (New 
York 1975), 177-8. 

26 Anderson, op. cit., 69. 

27 Moran, op. cit., 305. 

28 Victor Rothwell, Britain and the 
Cold War 1941-1947 (London 
1982). 

29 Forrestal Diaries (New York 
1951), 38-40, 57. 

30 Z.Stypulkowski, Invitation to 
Moscow (London 1951). 

31 Anderson, op. cit., 75— 6. 

32 Patricia Dawson Ward, The Threat 
of Peace: James F. Byrnes and the 
Council of Foreign Ministers 
1945-6 (Kent, Ohio 1979). 

33 Yergin, op. cit., 160-1; George 
Curry, 'James F. Byrnes' in Robert 
H. Ferrell and Samuel Flagg Bemiss 
(eds), The American Secretaries of 
State and their Diplomacy (New 
York 1965). 

34 Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, 
294. 

35 Text of speech in Robert Rhodes 
James, Churchill Complete 
Speeches (London 1974), vn 
7283-96; Jerome K.Ward, 
'Winston Churchill and the Iron 
Curtain Speech', The History 
Teacher, January 1968. 

36 Leahy Diaries, 24 January, 
7 February 1946. 

37 John Morton Blun, The Price of 
Vision: the Diary of Henry A. 
Wallace (Boston 1973), 589-601; 
Yergin, op. cit., 253-4. 

38 Dean Acheson, Present at the 
Creation (New York 1969), 219; 
Yergin, op. cit., 281-2. 

39 Acheson, op. cit., 234. 



40 See 'Overseas Deficit', dated 2 May 
1947, Dalton Papers; Harry 
Bayard Price, The Marshall Plan 
and its Meaning (Cornell 1955). 

41 Yergin, op. cit., 348-50. 

42 Jean Edward Smith (ed.), The 
Papers of General Lucius D. Clay: 
Germany, 1945-1949 
(Bloomington 1974), 734-7. 

43 Yergin, op. cit., 380. 

44 Talbot (ed.) op. cit., 205. 

45 David Alan Rosenberg, 'American 
Atomic Strategy and the Hydrogen 
Bomb Decision', Journal of 
American History, June 1979; 
David Lilienthal, Atomic Energy: a 
New Start (New York 1980). 

46 W.PhillipsDavison, The Berlin 
Blockade (Princeton 1958). 

47 Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, 
354ff. 

48 Warner Schilling et aL, Strategy, 
Politics and Defence Budgets 
(Colombia 1962), 298-330. 

49 Richard Hewlett and Francis 
Duncan, Atomic Shield 
1947-1952 (Pennsylvania 1969), 
362-9. 

50 Anderson, op. cit., 184. 

51 Churchill, Second World War, vi: 
Triumph and Tragedy (London 
1954), 701. 

52 Samuel I. Rosenman (ed.), Public 
Papers and Addresses of Franklin 
D. Roosevelt: Victory and the 
Threshold of Peace 1 944-1 945 
(New York 1950), 562. 

53 Schram, op. cit., 220ff.; Tang 
Tsou, America's Failure in China 
1941-1950 ('Chicago 1963), 176ff. 

54 Schram, op. cit., 228—9; Tang 
Tsou, op. cit., 100-24. 

55 Milovan Djilas, Conversations 
with Stalin (London 1962), 182; 
Vladimir Dedijer, Tito Speaks 
(London 1953), 331. 

56 Schram, op. cit., 232-3. 

57 Wolfram Eberhard, History of 
China (4th ed., London 1977), 
344. 

58 Derk Bodde, Peking Diary: a Year 
of Revolution (tr. London 1951), 
32. 

59 Quoted in Noel Barber, The Fall of 
Shanghai: the Communist 
Takeover in 1949 (London 1979), 
42. 

60 Bodde, op. cit., 47. 



818 



SOURCE NOTES 



61 Barber, op. cit., 49-50. 

62 Ibid., 51. 

63 Tang Tsou, op. cit., 482-4, 497-8 ; 
Schram, op. cit., 245. 

64 Mao Tse-Tung, Selected Works, iv 
201-2, order of 13 February 1948. 

65 Kennan, Memoirs 1 925-1 950, 
376. 

66 Samuel Wells, The Lessons of the 
Korean War', in Francis Heller 
(ed.), The Korean War: a 25-Year 
Perspective (Kansas 1977). 

67 Duncan Wilson, Tito's Yugoslavia 
(Cambridge 1979), 50 footnote. 

68 Djilas,op. cit., 129, 141. 

69 Hingley, op. cit., 385; D.Wilson, 
op. cit., 55. 

70 D.Wilson, op. cit., 61. 

71 Ibid., 87. 

72 Robert Conquest, The Soviet 
Police System (London 1968), 41. 

73 Hingley, op. cit., 388. 

74 S.Wells, op. cit. 

75 Kennan, Memoirs, 1 925-1 950, 
490. 

76 New York Times, 3 August 1980; 
S.Wells, op. cit. 

77 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 269; China 
Quarterly, April-June 1964. 

78 Yergin, op. cit., 407; S.Wells, 
op. cit. 

79 Robert C. Tucher, 'Swollen State, 
Spent Society: Stalin's Legacy to 
Brezhnev's Russia', Foreign 
Affairs, 60 (Winter 1981-2), 
414-45. 

80 Kolakowski, op. cit., in 132-5; 
Hingley, op. cit., 380-2. 

8 1 Zhores A. Medvedev, The Rise and 
FallofT.D.Lysenko (tr. New York 
1969), 116-17. 

82 Robert Payne, The Rise and Fall of 
Stalin (London 1968), 664. 

83 Pravda, 17 February 1950, quoted 
Hingley, op. cit., 508. 

84 Rigby, Stalin, 71 ; Marc Slonim, 
Soviet Russian Literature (New 
York 1964), 289. 

85 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty 
Letters, 171, 193,197,206; 
Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 263. 

86 Robert Conquest, Power and 
Policy in the USSR (London 
1961), 100. 

87 Grey, op. cit., 453-4. 

88 Kennan, Memoirs 1 950-1 963, 
154-6. 

89 Hingley, op. cit., 404. 



90 Rigby, Stalin, 81. 

9 1 Conquest, Power and Policy, 
165-6; Rigby, Stalin, 66-7; 
Hingley, op. cit., 414. 

92 Svetlana Alliluyeva, After One 
Year, 365; Hingley, op. cit., 
393-5,416. 

93 K.P.S.Menon, The Flying Troika: 
extracts from a diary (London 
1963), 27-9. 

94 Svetlana Alliluyeva, Twenty 
Letters, 13-18. 

95 Hingley, op. cit., 424, 427. 

96 Sidney Olson, The Boom', Fortune, 
June 1946. 

97 Kennan, Memoirs 1 950-1 963 
191-2. 

98 Alan Harper, The Politics of 
Loyalty (New York 1969). 

99 Roy Cohn, McCarthy (New York 
1968), 56ff. 

100 Richard Rovere, Senator Joe 
McCarthy (London 1960), 51. 

101 Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, 
Robert Kennedy and his Times 
(Boston 1978). 

102 Edwin R.Bayley, Joe McCarthy 
and the Press (University of 
Wisconsin 1981), 66-87, 214-22. 

103 Kennan, Memoirs 1 950-1 963, 
220. 

104 Barton J. Bernstein, 'New Light on 
the Korean War', International 
History Review, 3 (1981), 256-77. 

105 Robert Griffith, The Politics of 
Fear: Joseph McCarthy and the 
Senate (Lexington 1970); Richard 
M. Fried, Men Against McCarthy 
(New York 1976). 

106 Fred I. Greenstein, 'Eisenhower as 
an Activist President: a look at new 
evidence', Political Science 
Quarterly, Winter 1979-80; 
Robert Wright, 'Ike and Joe: 
Eisenhower's White House and the 
Demise of Joe McCarthy', 
unpublished thesis (Princeton 
1979). 

107 Trohan, op. cit., 292. 

108 Emmet John Hughes, Ordeal of 
Power: a Political Memoir of the 
Eisenhower Years (New York 
1963), 329-30. 

109 Richard Nixon, Six Crises (New 
York 1962), 161. 

110 Greenstein, op. cit.; see also 
Douglas Kinnaird, President 
Eisenhower and Strategic 
Management (Lexington 1977). 



SOURCE NOTES 



819 



111 Sherman Adams, First Hand 
Report (New York 1961), 73. 

112 Trohan, op. cit., 111. 

113 Robert H. Ferrell, The Eisenhower 
Diaries (New York 1981), 230-2. 

1 14 Kennan, Memoirs 1 950-1 963, 
196. 

115 Verno A. Walters, Silent Missions 
(New York 1978), 226. 

116 See Robert A. Divine, Eisenhower 
and the Cold War (Oxford 1981). 

117 Public Papers of D wight D. 
Eisenhower 1954 (Washington 
1960), 253, 206. 

118 See Richard H. Immerman, The 
US and Guatemala 1954', 
unpublished PhD thesis (Boston 
College 1978), quoted in 
Greenstein, op. cit.; Richard 
Cotton, Nationalism in Iran 
(Pittsburg 1964). 

119 Joseph B. Smith, Portrait of a Cold 
Warrior (New York 1976), 
229-40; Schlesinger, Robert 
Kennedy, 455, 457. 

120 C.L.Sulzburger, A Long Row of 
Candles (New York 1969), 767-9. 

121 Kennan, Memoirs 1 950-1 963, 
183. 

122 Sherman Adams, op. cit., chapter 
17,360ff. 

123 See Joan Robinson, 'What has 
become of the Keynesian 
Revolution?' in Milo Keynes (ed.), 
op. cit., 140. 

124 Arthur Larsen, Eisenhower: the 
President that Nobody Knew (New 
York 1968), 34. 



14 The Bandung Generation 

1 E.L.Woodward, British Foreign 
Policy in the Second World War 
(London 1970), i xliv. 

2 16 June 1 943 ; quoted in David 
Dilks (ed.), Retreat from Power 
(London 1981), n After 1939. 

3 William Roger Louis, Imperialism 
at Bay: the United States and the 
Decolonization of the British 
Empire 1941-1 945 (Oxford 
1978). 

4 Entry in Admiral Leahy's diary, 
9 February 1945, quoted in 
Anderson, op. cit. 

5 W.K.Hancock and Margaret 
Gowing, The British War 
Economy (London 1949), 546-9. 



6 Dalton Diary, 10 September 1946. 

7 Harold Nicolson: Diaries and 
Letters 1945-1962 (London 
1968), 115-16. 

8 A.Goldberg, The Military Origins 
of the British Nuclear Deterrent', 
International Affairs, XL (1964). 

9 Edward Spiers, The British 
Nuclear Deterrent: problems, 
possibilities', in Dilks, op. cit., n 
183-4. 

10 M. H. Gowing, Independence and 
Deterrence, Britain and Atomic 
Energy 1945-52, 2 vols (London 
1974), I 131. 

11 Ibid., 182-3. 

12 Ibid., 406. 

13 Dilks, op. cit., n 161. 

14 For end of war statistics see James, 
op. cit. 

15 Ibid., 251-3. 

16 Robert Rhodes James, Memoirs of 
a Conservative: J. C. C.Davidon 's 
Letters and Papers 1910-1937 
(London 1969), 390. 

17 John Wheeler-Bennett, King 
George vi: his Life and Times 
(London 1958), 703. 

18 Ved Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and 
his Apostles (New York 1976), 
33ff. 

19 Ibid., 13-16. 

20 Ibid., 44. 

21 Ibid., 56. 

22 Orwell, Collected Essays, etc., iv 
529. 

23 Quoted in Sarvepalli Gopal, 
Jawaharlal Nehru: a biography 
(London 1965), i 38-9. 

24 Ibid., 79, 98, 236; Leonard Woolf, 
Downhill All the Way (London 
1967), 230. 

25 Speech by Nehru at Ootacamund, 
1 June 1948; Gopal, op. cit., n 
308. 

26 Richard Hughes, Foreign Devil 
(London 1972), 289-92. 

27 Richard Hough, Mountbatten 
(London 1980), 216. 

28 R.Jeffrey, The Punjab Boundary 
Force and the problem of order, 
August 1947', Modern Asian 
Studies (197 '4), 491-520. 

29 M.Masson, Edwina Mountbatten 
(London 1958), 206-7. 

30 Gopal, op. cit., ii 13. 



820 



SOURCE NOTES 



3 1 Penderal Mood, Divide and Quit 
(London 1961), gives 200,000; 
G.D.Khosla, Stern Reckoning 
(Delhi n.d.), 4-500,000; Ian 
Stephens, Pakistan (London 1963), 
500,000; M.Edwardes, Last Years 
of British India (London 1963), 
600,000. 

32 Gopal, op. cit., n21,42. 

33 Letter from Nehru to Krishna 
Menon, 24 August 1949. 

34 Walter Lippmann in Herald 
Tribune, 10 January 1949; 
Acheson, op. cit., 336; Christian 
Science Monitor, 26 October 
1949; Manchester Guardian, 
26 May 1954; W.Johnson (ed.), 
The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson 
(Boston 1973), in 181. 

35 Nehru, letter dated 9 June 1951. 

36 Gopal, op. cit., 311. 

37 Letter from Nehru to 
Rajagopalachari, 3 July 1950; 
cable to President Nasser, 

31 October 1956; cable to 
J.F.Dulles, same date. 

38 Quoted Gopal, op. cit., n246. 

39 S.Dutt, With Nehru at the Foreign 
Office (Calcutta 1977), 177. 

40 Letter from Nehru to Ernest Bevin, 
20 November 1950. 

41 Gopal, op. cit., n 194-5, 227. 

42 J.K.Galbraith, A Life in Our Times 
(London 1981), chapter 27, 420ff. 

43 Keith Irvine, The Rise of the 
Coloured Races (London 1972), 
540ff.;G.McT.Kahin, The 
Asian-African Conference, 
Bandung (Ithaca 1956). 

44 J.D.Legge, Sukarno: A Political 
Biography (London 1972), 264-5. 

45 Richard Wright, The Colour 
Curtain (London 1965), 15. 

46 Harry J. Benda, 'Christian Snouck 
Hurgronje and the Foundation of 
Dutch Islamic Policy in Indonesia', 
Journal of Modern History, xxx 
(1958), 338-47. 

47 E.H.Kossman, The Low 
Countries, 1780-1940 (Oxford 
1978),672ff. 

48 See Sukarno's book, The Birth of 
PantjaSila (Djakarta 1950). 

49 D.S.Lev, The Transition to Guided 
Democracy: Indonesia Politics 
1957-1959 (Ithaca 1966). 

50 For slogans, see Legge, op. cit., 
288-90, 324, 332-3, 359 and 
passim. 



51 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 322. 

52 Legge, op. cit., 387; John Hughes, 
The End of Sukarno (London 
1968), 44. 

53 J.R.Bass, The pki and the 
attempted coup", Journal ofSE 
Asian Studies, March 1970; for 
critical bibliography of the coup 
see Legge, op. cit., 390 footnote 
45. 

54 Hughes, op. cit., chapter 16. 

55 Howard M. Sachar, Britain Leaves 
the Middle East (London 1974), 
391. 

56 Petroleum Times, June 1948; Oil 
Weekly, 6 March 1944. 

57 Forrestal Diaries, 356-7. 

58 Sachar, op. cit., 395. 

59 Churchill, Second World War, iv 
952. 

60 Sachar, op. cit., 442. 

6 1 Chaim Weizmann, Trial and Error 
(Philadelphia 1949), ii 437. 

62 Yehudah Bauer, From Diplomacy 
to Resistance: a History of Jewish 
Palestine 1939-1945 (Philadelphia 
1970), 230. 

63 Sachar, op. cit., 447. 

64 New York Post, 21 May 1946. 

65 Nicholas Bethell, The Palestine 
Triangle: the struggle between the 
British, the Jews and the Arabs, 
1935-1948 (London 1979), 
254-5. 

66 Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 
261ff., based on records released in 
1978. 

67 Jerusalem Post, 1 August 1947. 

68 Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 
243-4. 

69 Jon and David Kimche, Both Sides 
of the Hill: Britain and the 
Palestine War (London 1960), 
21-2. 

70 Bauer, op. cit., 230. 

7 1 The Jewish Case for the 
Anglo-American Committee of 
Inquiry on Palestine (Jerusalem 
1947), 6-7, 74-5. 

72 Joseph Schechtman, The US and 
the Jewish State Movement (New 
York 1966), 110. 

73 Quoted in Alfred Steinberg, The 
Man from Missouri: the life and 
times of Harry S. Truman (New 
York 1952), 301. 

74 Truman, Memoirs, n 135. 

75 Petroleum Times, June 1948. 

76 Forrestal Diaries, 324, 344, 348. 



SOURCE NOTES 



821 



77 Howard Sachar, 'The Arab— Israeli 
issue in the light of the Cold War', 
Sino-Soviet Institute Studies 
(Washington dc), 1966,2. 

78 Sachar, Europe Leaves the Middle 
East, 546-7. 

79 Ibid.,518ff. 

80 Kimche, op. cit., 60. 

81 Netanel Lorch, The Edge of the 
Sword: Israel's War of 
Independence 1947-1948 
(New York 1961), 90. 

82 David Horowitz, State in the 
Making (New York 1953), 232-5. 

83 Rony E. Gabbay, A Political Study 
of the Arab-Jewish Conflict 
(Geneva 1959), 92-3. 

84 Sachar, Europe Leaves the Middle 
East, 550-1; Walid Khalidi, 'Why 
Did the Palestinians Leave?', 
Middle East Forum, July 1955; 
Erkine B. Childers, The Other 
Exodus', Spectator, 12 May 
1961. Arab League instructions 
were printed in Al-Kayat 
(Lebanon, 30 April, 5—7 May 
1948). 

85 Colonial Office transcript (co 733 
477) quoted in Bethell, The 
Palestine Triangle, 355. 

86 Walter Pinner, How Many Arab 
Refugees? (New York 1959), 3-4. 

87 Sachar, op. cit., 191; for 
distribution of Jewish exodus, see 
Martin Gilbert, The Arab-Israeli 
Conflict: its History in Maps 
(London 1974), 50. 

88 Jon Kimche, Seven Fallen Pillars 
(London 1954), 46. 

89 Francis Williams: A Prime Minister 
Remembers (London 1961), 
175-6. 

90 Bethell, The Palestine Triangle, 
358. 

91 Sachar, Europe Leaves the Middle 
East, 51. 

92 For an incisive portrait by a 
fellow-Muslim ruler see 
Mohammed Ahmed Mahgoub, 
Democracy on Trial: Reflections 
on Arab and African Politics 
(London 1974). 

93 Constantine Zurayak, The 
Meaning of the Disaster (Beirut 
1956), 2. 



94 For the dam project see 

P. K. O'Brien, The Revolution in 
Egypt's Economic System (London 
1966) and Tom Little, High Dam 
at Aswan (London 1965). 

95 Carlton, op. cit., 416. 

96 Ibid., 389. 

97 Andre Beaufre, The Suez 
Expedition 1 956 (tr. London 
1969), 28-34; Hugh Stockwell, 
'Suez: Success or Disaster?', 
Listener, 4 November 1976. 

98 See Eden's own account in 
Memoirs: Full Circle (London 
1960); Selwyn Lloyd, Suez 1956: a 
Personal Account (London 1978). 

99 Moshe Dayan, Story of My Life 
(London 1976), 181. 

100 Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White 
House Years: Waging Peace 
1956-1961 (New York 1965), 
666-7. 

101 Carlton, op. cit., 451-3. 

102 Brian Urquhart, Hammarskjold 
(London 1973), 26. 

103 Ibid., 170, 174, 185-9. 

104 Home, op. cit. (London 1977), 
60. 

105 See Robert Aron et al., Les 
Origines de la guerre d y Alger ie 
(Paris 1962). 

106 Albert-Paul Lentin, VAlgerie des 
colonels (Paris 1958). 

107 Home, op. cit., 72. 

108 Ibid., 91-2, 101; Pierre Leulliette, 
St Michael and the Dragon 

(tr. London 1964). 

109 Home, op. cit., 132-5. 

110 C. Marighela, For the Liberation of 
Brazil (Penguin 1971). 

111 Home, op. cit., 98-9. 

112 Germaine Tillion, VAlgerie en 
1957 (Paris 1957); Vincent 
Monteil, Soldat de fortune (Paris 
1966). 

113 Jacques Soustelle, Aimee et 
Souffrante Alger ie (Paris 1956). 

114 Home, op. cit., 117-18. 

115 Albert Camus, Chroniques 
Algeriennes 1939-1958 (Paris 
1958). 

116 Home, op. cit., 187. 

117 Jacques Massu, La Vrai Bataille 
d' Alger (Paris 1971). 

118 Henri Alleg, La Question (Paris 
1958). 

119 Home, op. cit., 201. 



822 



SOURCE NOTES 



120 For examples, see J.-R.Tournoux, 
Secret d'Etat (Paris 1960); 
J.J.Servan-Schreiber, Lieutenant en 
Algerie (Paris 1957). 

121 Charles de Gaulle: Memoirs of 
Hope (tr. London 1970-1), i 12. 

122 Ibid., 15. 

123 Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des 
choses (Paris 1963). 

124 Home, op. cit., 291. 

125 De Gaulle, op. cit., 47. 

126 Home, op. cit., 376— 8. 

127 Ibid., 515-16. 

128 Ibid., 495. 

129 Ibid., 506. 

130 Mouloud Feraoun, Journal 
1955-1962 (Paris 1962). 

131 Home, op. cit., 524. 

132 Ibid., 540-3. 

133 Ibid., 537-8. 

134 De Gaulle, op. cit., i 126. 

135 Ben Bella, interview with Radio 
Monte Carlo: Daily Telegraph, 
19 March 1982. 



15 Caliban's Kingdoms 

1 Mark Amory (ed.), Letters of 
Evelyn Waugh (London 1980), 
517. 

2 James, op. cit., 193. 

3 Quoted in Dorothy Pickles, French 
Politics: the First Years of the 
Fourth Republic (London 1953), 
151. 

4 Stewart Easton, The Twilight of 
European Colonialism (London 
1961). 

5 Le Monde, 21 June 1951. 

6 De Gaulle, op. cit., i 66. 

7 Ibid., 68. 

8 Quoted in Easton, op. cit. 

9 Michael Blundell, So Rough a 
Wind (London 1964). 

10 Weekend Telegraph, 12 March 
1965. 

1 1 Miles Hudson, Triumph or 
Tragedy: Rhodesia to Zimbabwe 
(London 1981), 38-9. 

12 Jean Labrique, Congo Politique 
(Leopoldville 1957), 199-219. 

13 Comnd 9109 (1918), 3, quoted in 
Barnett, op. cit., 147. 

14 Kirkman, op. cit., 15ff. 

15 For the elaboration of this theory, 
see P.A.Baran, The Political 
Economy of Growth (New York 
1957); C. Leys, Underdevelopment 



in Kenya: the Political Economy of 
Neo-Colonialism 1 964-71 
(London 1975). 

16 Quoted in Mahgoub, op. cit., 
25 Off. 

17 Tawia Adamafio, A Portrait of the 
Osagyefo, Dr Kwame Nkrumah 
(Accra 1960), 95. 

18 Mahgoub, op. cit., 284. 

19 John Rogge, The Balkanization of 
Nigeria's Federal System', Journal 
of Geography, April— May 1977. 

20 J.L.Lacroix, Industrialization au 
Congo (Paris 1966), 21ff. 

21 Easton, op. cit., 445; see also 

R. Anstey, King Leopold's Legacy: 
the Congo Under Belgian Rule 
1908-1960 (Oxford 1966). 

22 See G. Heinz and H.Donnay, 
Lumumba: the Last Fifty Days 
(New York 1969). 

23 Urquhart, op. cit., 392-3, 397. 

24 Paul-Henri Spaak, Combats 
Inacheves (Paris 1969), 244-5. 

25 Urquhart, op. cit., 385. 

26 Ibid., 507. 

27 Urquhart, op. cit., 587; Conor 
Cruise O'Brien, To Katanga and 
Back (London 1962), 286. 

28 Sunday Times, 11 October 1964. 

29 Ali Mazrui, 'Moise Tschombe and 
the Arabs, 1960-8' in Violence and 
Thought: Essays on Social Tension 
in Africa (London 1969). 

30 Wall Street Journal, 25-26 June 
1980; Patrick Marnham, Fantastic 
Invasion (London 1980), 203 note 
10. 

31 K. W. Grundy, Conflicting Images 
of the Military in Africa (Nairobi 
1968). 

32 Samuel Decalo, Coups and Army 
Rule in Africa (Yale 1976), 5-6 
and Tables 1.1 and 1.2. 

33 A point made in Shiva Naipaul, 
North of South: an African 
Journey (London 1978). 

34 African Standard, Nairobi, 

12 April 1965; quoted in Mazrui, 
op. cit., 210-11. 

35 Marvin Harris, Portugal's African 
'Wards' (New York 1958); James 
Duffy, Portuguese Africa (Harvard 
1959). 

36 Marcello Caetano, Colonizing 
Traditions: Principles and 
Methods of the Portuguese (Lisbon 
1951). 



SOURCE NOTES 



823 



37 Easton, op. cit., 506. 

38 T. R.H.Davenport, South Africa: a 
Modern History (London 1977), 
346. 

39 W.K.Hancock, Smuts (London 
1968), ii. 

40 For these sects see Bengt 
G.M.Sundkler, Bantu Prophets in 
South Africa (2nd ed. Oxford 
1961) and Zulu Zion and some 
Swazi Zionists (Oxford 1976). 

41 Davenport, op. cit., 176ff. 

42 Ibid., 207; for Native bills see 
M. Ballinger, From Union to 
Apartheid (London 1969). 

43 B.Patchai, The International 
Aspects of the South African 
Indian Question 1860-1971 
(London 1971). 

44 N. M. Stultz, Afrikaaner Politics in 
South Africa 1934-48 (London 
1974). 

45 G.D.Scholtz, Dr H.F. Verwoerd 
(London 1974). 

46 Ambrose Reeves, Shooting at 
Sharpeville (London 1961). 

47 Davenport, op. cit., 270— 1. 

48 Ibid., 296-7, with diagram of 
population growth. 

49 Ibid., 304-5. 

50 Ibid., 376 for mineral map. 

51 Wall Street Journal, 10 July 1980. 

52 Ibid., 4 August 1980. 

53 Naipaul, op. cit., 231. 

54 Richard West, The White Tribes 
Revisited (London 1978), 16ff. 

55 Naipaul, op. cit., 232-3. 

56 Quoted in Marnham, op. cit., 196. 

57 West, op. cit., 147. 

58 Marnham, op. cit., 112. 

59 Ibid., 125ff. 

60 Inside East Africa, 
August-September 1960. 

61 Sunday News (Dar es Salaam), 
26 January 1964. 

62 'One Party Government', 
Transition, December 1961. 

63 Report of the Presidential 
Commission on the Establishment 
of a Democratic One Party State, 
(Dar es Salaam 1965), 2. 

64 Lionel C\itte(ed.), One-Party 
Democracy in Tanzania (Nairobi 
1967). 

65 Mazrui, op. cit., 255ff. 

66 The Arusha Declaration and 
Tanus Policy on Socialism and 
Self-Reliance (Dar es Salaam 
1967); Marzui, op. cit., 48. 



67 Naipaul, op. cit., 144ff. 

68 Quoted ibid., 200-1. 

69 Daily Nation, Nairobi, 6 February 
1968. 

70 Ali Mazrui, 'Mini-skirts and 
Political Puritanism', Africa 
Report, October 1968. 

71 Reporter, Nairobi, 23 February 
1968. 

72 Naipaul, op. cit., 237-8. 

73 The Times, 7 October 1965. 

74 Marnham, op. cit., 199. 

75 West, op. cit., 146. 

76 Annual Register (London), 1980. 

77 Pierre Kalck, Central African 
Republic: a Failure of 
Decolonization (New York 1971). 

78 Winston Churchill, My African 
Journey (London 1908). 

79 George Ivan Smith, Ghosts of 
Kampala (London 1980), 34. 

80 Ibid., 5 Iff. 

81 West, op. cit., 24-5. 

82 Quoted Smith, op. cit., 96. 

83 Ibid., 101 for text of 
memorandum. 

84 Henry Kyemba, State of Blood 
(London 1977). 

85 Smith, op. cit., 111-12. 

86 Ibid, 124-31. 

87 Ibid., 166-7. 

88 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, A 
Dangerous Place (London 1978), 
154-5. 

89 Quoted Smith, op. cit., 181. 

90 J.J.Jordensen, Uganda: a Modern 
History (London 1981); Wadada 
Nabundere, Imperialism and 
Revolution in Uganda (Tanzania 
1981). 

91 Victoria Brittain, 'After Amin', 
London Review of Books, 

17 September 1981. 

92 For instance, Daily Telegraph, 
5 September 1981. 

93 Mazrui, Violence and Thought, 
37-9. 

94 Colin Legum et aL, Africa in the 
1980s (New York 1979). 

95 West, op. cit., 6-7. 

96 For detailed figures see New York 
Times, 11 May 1980. 

97 Marnham, op. cit., 165, 205. 

98 Ibid., 168. 

99 David Lomax, 'The civil war in 
Chad', Listener, 4 February 1982. 



824 



SOURCE NOTES 



100 Genganne Chapin and Robert 
Wasserstrom, 'Agricultural 
production and malarial 
resurgence in Central America and 
India', Nature, 17 September 
1981. 

101 New York Times, 11 May 1980. 

102 Marnham, op. cit., 240. 

103 Compiled from Annual Register 
(London 1980, 1981) and New 
York Times. 



16 Experimenting with Half Humanity 

1 Jack Chen, Inside the Cultural 
Revolution (London 1976), 
219-20. 

2 Hollander, op. cit., chapter 7, The 
Pilgrimage to China*, 278ff. 

3 Ibid., 326-30. 

4 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 249. 

5 John Gittings, The World and 
China, 1922-1 975 (London 
1974), 236. 

6 Bill Brugger, China: Liberation 
and Transformation 1 942-1 962 
(New Jersey 1981), 212. 

7 Ross Terrill, Mao: a Biography 
(New York 1980), 383. 

8 Quoted in Han Suyin, Wind in the 
Tower: Mao Tse-Tung and the 
Chinese Revolution 1949-1975 
(London 1976), 291. 

9 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 249. 

10 Schram, op. cit., 253—4. 

11 Ibid., 295. 

12 Ibid., 291. 

13 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 255. 

14 Terrill, op. cit., 53. 

15 Roger Garside, Coming Alive: 
China After Mao (London 1981), 
45. 

16 Ibid., 46-7. 

17 Robert Jay Lifton, Revolutionary 
Immortality (London 1969), 72-3. 

18 Garside, op. cit., 50. 

19 Brugger, op. cit., 44-55. 

20 Schram, op. cit., 267, footnote; see 
Jacques Guillermaz, La Chine 
Populaire (3rd ed., Paris 1964). 

21 Robert Jay Lifton, Thought 
Reform and the Psychology of 
Totalism: a Study of Brainwashing 
in China (New York 1961), 
chapter 19. 

22 Schram, op. cit., 271 footnote. 

23 Ibid., 277. 

24 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 272, 



25 Jerome A. Cohen, The criminal 
process in the People's Republic of 
China: an introduction', Harvard 
Law Review, January 1966. 

26 Editorials, Peking Review, 6, 13, 
20 September 1963. 

27 Quoted Schram, op. cit., 253. 

28 Brugger, op. cit., 174ff. 

29 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 272-8. 

30 Brugger, op. cit., 212. 

3 1 K.Walker, Planning in Chinese 
Agriculture: Socialization and the 
Private Sector 1956-62 (London 
1965), 444-5. 

32 Bill Brugger, China: Radicalism 
and Revisionism 1962-1972 (New 
Jersey 1981), 36. 

33 Ibid., 47. 

34 Roxane Witke, Comrade Chiang 
Ching (London 1977), 162. 

35 Ibid., 154; Chiang Ching confided 
at great length in Witke. 

36 Colin Mackerras, The Chinese 
Theatre in Modern Times 
(Amherst, Mass., 1975). 

37 Witke, op. cit., 383. 

38 Ibid., 158-9. 

39 Ibid., 309-10. 

40 Ibid., 312-14. 

41 Terrill, op. cit., 305 footnote. 

42 Ibid., 304-9. 

43 Witke, op. cit., 318. 

44 For the long-term origins of the 
Cultural Revolution, see Roderick 
MacFarquhar, The Origins of the 
Cultural Revolution, 1 
Contradictions Among the People 
1956-7 (London 1974). 

45 China Quarterly, 45. 

46 Terrill, Mao, 315. 

47 Witke, op. cit., 320, 356ff. 

48 Naranarayan Das, China s Hundred 
Weeds: a Study of the Anti-Rightist 
Campaign in China 1957-1958 
(Calcutta 1979); Garside, op. cit., 
69. 

49 Chen, op, cit., 388. 

50 Ibid., 226. 

51 Ibid., 211. 

52 Garside, op. cit., 70, 91; Witke, 
op. cit., 379; Terrill, op. cit., 315; 
Chen, op. cit., 226ff. 

53 Chen, op. cit., 221-4. 

54 Anita Chan, et al., 'Students and 
class warfare: the social roots of 
the Red Guard conflict in 
Guangzhon (Canton)', China 
Quarterly, 83, September 1980. 



SOURCE NOTES 



825 



55 Chen, op. cit., 228-31. 

56 See Simon Leys in The Times 
Literary Supplement, 6 March 
1981,259-60. 

57 Witke, op. cit., 324-5. 

58 Witke, op. cit., 328. 

59 William Hinton, Hundred Days 
War: the Cultural Revolution at 
Tsinghua University (New York 
1972), 101-4. 

60 Terrill,op.cit.,319. 

61 Witke, op. cit., 388-90. 

62 Ibid., 435. 

63 Ibid., 391-2, 402. 

64 Parris Chang, 'Shanghai and 
Chinese politics before and after 
the Cultural Revolution' in 
Christopher Howe (ed.), Shanghai 
(Cambridge 1981). 

65 Philip Bridgham, 'Mao's Cultural 
Revolution in 1967' in Richard 
Baum and Louis Bennett (eds), 
China in Ferment (Yale 1971), 
134-5; Thomas Robinson, 'Chou 
En-lai and the Cultural Revolution 
in China' in Baum and Bennett 
(eds), The Cultural Revolution in 
China (Berkeley 1971), 239-50. 

66 Witke, op. cit., 349; Edward Rice, 
Mao's Way (Berkeley 1972), 
376-8. 

67 Far Eastern Economic Review, 
2 October 1969; Terrill, op. cit., 
321-8. 

68 Terrill, op. cit., 328-30. 

69 Chen, op. cit., 344ff.; Terrill, 
op. cit., 345 ff. 

70 Terrill, op. cit., 369; Witke, 
op. cit., 365. 

71 Terrill, op. cit., 387-90; Witke, 
op. cit., 475-6. 

72 Terrill, op. cit., 402 footnote. 

73 Ibid., 381, 420. 

74 Quoted in Ross Terrill, The Future 
of China After Mao (London 
1978), 121. 

75 Ibid., 115-17. 

76 Witke, op. cit., 472ff.; Terrill, 
China After Mao, 121-3. 

77 Daily Telegraphy January 1981, 
quoting Zheng Ming magazine. 

78 Garside, op. cit., 67ff. 

79 Ibid.,73ff. 

80 Leys, op. cit. 

81 Michael Oksenberg, 'China Policy 
for the 1980s', Foreign Affairs, 59 
(Winter 1980-1), 304-22. 

82 Guardian, 5 February 1982. 



83 M.D.Morris etal. s (eds), Indian 
Economy in the Nineteenth 
Century (Delhi 1969); 
W.J.Macpherson, 'Economic 
Development in India under the 
British Crown 1858-1947' in 
A.J. Youngson (ed.), Economic 
Development in the Long Run 
(London 1972), 126-91; Peter 
Robb, 'British rule and Indian 
"Improvement"', Economic 
History Review, xxxiv (1981), 
507-23. 

84 J.Nehru, The Discovery of India 
(London 1946). 

85 Dom Moraes, Mrs Gandhi 
(London 1980), 127. 

86 Dom Moraes, The Tempest Within 
(Delhi 1971). 

87 Moraes, Mrs Gandhi, 224. 

88 ShahidJavedBurki, Pakistan 
under Bhutto 1971-1977 (London 
1979). 

89 Moraes, Mrs Gandhi, 250. 

90 Victoria Schofield, Bhutto: Trial 
and Execution (London 1980). 

91 Moraes, Mrs Gandhi, 319. 

92 Parliamentary statement by 
Minister of State for Home Affairs, 
15 March 1981. 

93 The Times, 3 February 1981. 

94 Daily Telegraph, 2 February 1981. 

95 See, for instance, James Freeman, 
Untouchable: an Indian Life 
History (London 1980). 

96 New York Times, 20 July 1980. 

97 R.Kipling, From Sea to Sea 
(London 1899). 

98 VedMehta, Portrait of India 
(London 1970), Part vn, 362. 

99 See, for instance, Daily Telegraph, 
8 February 1982. 



17 The European Lazarus . 

1 Jacques Dumaine, Quai d'Orsay 
1945-1951 (tr. London 1958), 13. 

2 Simone de Beauvoir, Force of 
Circumstance (tr. London 1965), 
38ff. 

3 David Pryce-Jones, Paris in the 
Third Reich: A history of the 
German Occupation 1 940-1 944 
(London 1981). 

4 Bernard-Henri Levy, LTdeologie 
francaise (Paris 1981). 

5 Quoted in Herbert R. Lottman, 
Camus (London 1981 ed.), 705. 



826 



SOURCE NOTES 



6 Ibid., 322. 

7 Guillaume Hanoteau, L'Age d'or 
de St-Germain-des-Pres (Paris 
1965); Herbert Lottman, 
'Splendours and miseries of the 
literary cafe', Saturday Review, 
13 March 1963, and New York 
Times Book Review, 4 June 1967. 

8 Popper, Conjectures and 
Refutations, 363. 

9 Terence Prittie, Konrad Adenauer 
1876-1967 (London 1972), 35-6. 

10 Maria Romana Catti, De Gasperi 
uomo solo (Milan 1964), 81-2. 

1 1 Elisa Carrillo, Alcide de Gasperi: 
the Long Apprenticeship (Notre 
Dame 1965), 9. 

12 Ibid., 23. 

13 Catti, op. cit., 104-11; Carrillo, 
op. cit., 83-4. 

14 Prittie, op. cit., 224, 312. 

15 Ibid., 97. 

16 Ibid., 106-10. 

17 Lewis J. Edinger, Kurt Schumacher 
(Stanford 1965), 135-6. 

18 Arnold J. Heidenheimer, Adenauer 
and the CDU (The Hague 1960). 

19 For the speech see Leo Schwering, 
Fruhgeschichte der 
Christlich-Demokratische Union 
(Recklinghausen 1963), 190-3. 

20 Quoted in Prittie, op. cit., 171. 

21 Frank Pakenham, Born to Believe 
(London 1953), 198-9. 

22 Die Welt, 30 November 1946. 

23 Konrad Adenauer, Memoirs, 4 vols 
(tr. London 1966), 1 180-2. 

24 Aidan Crawley, The Rise of West 
Germany 1945-1972 (London 
1973), chapter 12. 

25 Walter Henkels, Gar nicht so 
Pingelig (Dusseldorf 1965), 161. 

26 Hans-Joachim Netzer (ed.), 
Adenauer und die Folgen (Munich 
1965), 159. 

27 Prittie, op. cit., 173 footnote 7. 

28 Henkels, op. cit. 

29 Prittie, op. cit., 236. 

30 Adenauer, Memoirs, n 509ff. 

3 1 Rudolf Augstein, Konrad 
Adenauer (tr. London 1964), 94. 

32 Radio broadcast, 2 July 1954; 
Prittie, op. cit., 173. 

33 Quoted in J. Galtier-Boissiere, 
Mon Journal pendant V occupation 
(Paris 1945). 

34 Philippe Bauchard, Les 
Technocrates etle pouvoir (Paris 
1966); Zeldin, op. cit., 1068-9. 



35 G.Wright, Rural Revolution in 
France (Stanford 1964), chapter 
5. 

36 Zeldin, op. cit., 687. 

37 W.D.Halls, The Youth of Vichy 
France (Oxford 1981); Zeldin, 
op. cit., 1141. 

38 Robert Aron, Histoire de 
VEpuration 3 vols (Paris 1967); 
Peter Novick, The Resistance v. 
Vichy (New York 1968). 

39 Herbert Liithy, The State of France 
(tr. London 1955), 107. 

40 Andre Rossi, Physiologie du parti 
communiste franqais (Paris 1948), 
83,431-2. 

41 Annie Kriegel, The French 
Communists: Profile of a People 
(Chicago 1972). 

42 See Herbert Liithy, 'Why Five 
Million Frenchmen Vote 
Communist', Socialist 
Commentary, December 1951, p. 
289. 

43 Quoted Liithy, State of France, 
117. 

44 Philip Williams, Politics in 
Post-War France (London 1954 
ed.), 17-19. 

45 Liithy, State of France, 123. 

46 Zeldin, op. cit., 1045ff. 

47 Jean Monnet, Memoirs (tr. London 
1978). 

48 Bulletin mensuel de statistique 
(Paris), October 1952, p. 44. 

49 Liithy, State of France, 432. 

50 Joseph Hours in Annee politique et 
economique, spring 1953. 

5 1 Quoted Liithy, op. cit., 385. 

52 Jean- Raymond Tournoux, Petain 
andde Gaulle (tr. London 1966), 
7. 

53 Zeldin, op. cit., 1121. 

54 Gaston Palewski, 'A Surprising 
Friendship: Malraux and de 
Gaulle' in Martine de Curcel (ed.), 
Malraux: Life and Work (London 
1976), 70. 

55 Ibid., 69. 

56 Goethe's Faust (Penguin Classics), 
Part i, 71. 

57 De Gaulle, speech, 17 April 1948. 

58 De Gaulle, speeches of 13 April 
1963; 22 November 1944; 

1 March 1941; 25 November 
1943; see Philip Cerny, The 
Politics of Grandeur: Ideological 
Aspects of de Gaulle's Foreign 
Policy (Cambridge 1980). 



SOURCE NOTES 



827 



59 De Gaulle, op. cit., 235. 

60 Ibid., 18. 

6 1 Quoted in Jacques Fauvet, La 
Quatrieme Republique (Paris 
1959), 64, note. 

62 David Schoenbrun, Three Lives of 
Charles de Gaulle (London 1965), 
94-5. 

63 J. R. Frears, Political Parties and 
Elections in the French Fifth 
Republic (London 1977), 18ff. 

64 De Gaulle, op. cit., 144-6. 

65 John Ardagh, The New France: a 
Society in Transition 1945-1977 
(London, 3rd ed., 1977), 31-2. 

66 Zeldin, op. cit., 625, 635—6. 

67 Ibid., 300-30. 

68 Quoted in Liithy, State of France, 
382. 

69 Albert Sorel, Europe and the 
French Revolution (tr. London 
1968), i 277ff. 

70 De Gaulle, op. cit., 173-4. 

71 Adenauer, op. cit., in 434. 

72 Text in Uwe Kitzinger, The 
European Common Market and 
Community (London 1967), 33-7. 

73 Quoted in Anthony Sampson, 
Macmillan (London 1967), 146. 

74 Prittie, op. cit., 268-9. 

75 Adenauer, op. cit., m 434. 

76 Prittie, op. cit., 268. 

77 Transcript of press conference in 
Harold Wilson, The Labour 
Government 1964-1970 (London 
1971), 392-4. 

78 For de Gaulle's vetoes, see Uwe 
Kitzinger, Diplomacy and 
Persuasion: how Britain joined the 
Common Market (London 1973), 
37-8. 

79 Rostow, World Economy, 234—5 
and Table ni-47. 

80 Kitzinger, Diplomacy and 
Persuasion, Table p. 29. 

81 Quoted in B. Simpson, Labour: the 
Unions and the Party (London 
1973), 39. 

82 A.Flanders, Trades Unions 
(London 1968); John Burton, The 
Trojan Horse: Union Power in 
British Politics (Leesburg 1979), 
48,50. 

83 Sydney and Beatrice Webb, The 
History of Trade Unionism 
(London 1920); Dicey s Law and 
Public Opinion in England 
(London 1963 ed.). 



84 BBC v. Hearn and Others (1977); 
see J.H.Bescoby and C.G.Hanson, 
'Continuity and Change in Recent 
Labour Law', National 
Westminster Bank Quarterly 
Review, February 1976; Trade 
Union Immunities (London, 
hmso, 1981), 34-101. 

85 F.W.Paish, inflation, Personal 
Incomes and Taxation', Lloyds 
Bank Review, April 1975. 

86 Geoffrey Fry, The Growth of 
Government (London 1979), 2—3; 
A.T.Peacock and J.Wiseman, The 
Growth of Public Expenditure in 
the UK (London, 2nd ed., 1967); 
M.Abramovitz and V.F.Eliasberg, 
The Growth of Public 
Employment in Great Britain 
(London 1957). 

87 J.M.Buchanan, John Burton and 
R.E.Wagner, The Consequences of 
Mr Keynes (London, Institute of 
Economic Affairs, 1978), 67 and 
Table ii, p. 34. 

88 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
ii 1-42, p. 220; League of Nations 
Statistical Yearbook 1933^ 
(Geneva 1934), Table 10. 

89 Derry, Norway, 325; P.M.Hayes, 
Quisling (Newton Abbot 1971). 

90 T.K. Derry, A History of 
Scandinavia (London 1979), 
322-4; Rostow, World Economy, 
220. 

91 E.D.Simon, The Smaller 
Democracies (London 1939); 
Marquis Childs, Sweden: the 
Middle Way (New York 1936). 

92 Derry, Scandinavia, 336—7. 

93 Christopher Hughes, Switzerland 
(London 1975), 167-72. 

94 Urs Altermatt, 'Conservatism in 
Switzerland: a study in 
anti-Modernism', Journal of 
Contemporary History, 14 (1979), 
581-610. 

95 Wall Street Journal, 23 June 1980. 

96 Kenneth Maxwell, 'Portugal under 
Pressure', New York Review of 
Books, 29 May 1975, 20-30. 

97 Tom Gallagher, 'Controlled 
Repression in Salazar's Portugal', 
Journal of Contemporary History, 
14 (1979) 385-402; for the pide 
see 'Para a Historia do Fascismo 
Portogues: a Pide', Portugal 
Informaca, June- July 1977. 



828 



SOURCE NOTES 



98 Neil Bruce, Portugal: the Last 
Empire (Newton Abbot 1975), 
108. 

99 Franco, speech at Madrid Army 
Museum, 9 March 1946, quoted in 
Trythall, op. cit. 

100 Ibid., 206. 

101 Estudios sociologicos sobre la 
situation social de Espana 1975 
(Madrid 1976). 

102 Raymond Carr and Juan Pablo 
Fusi, Spain: Dictatorship to 
Democracy '(London 1979), 195ff. 

103 Stanley Meisler, 'Spain's New 
Democracy', Foreign Affairs, 
October 1977. 

104 Carr and Fusi, op. cit., 246. 

105 Richard Clogg, A Short History of 
Modern Greece (Cambridge 1979), 
164-5. 

106 William McNeil, Metamorphosis 
of Greece since World War II 
(Chicago 1978). 

107 New York Times, 6 July 1980. 



18 America's Attempted Suicide 

1 Edgar M. Bottome, The Missile 
Gap (Rutherford, NJ. 1971). 

2 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 220 
footnote; William Safire, Before 
the Fall: an inside view of the 
pre-W atergate White House (New 
York 1975), 152-3. 

3 Pierre Salinger, With Kennedy 
(New York 1966), 51. 

4 Quoted by William F. Buckley Jr, 
'Human Rights and Foreign 
Policy', Foreign Affairs, Spring 
1980. 

5 J.F.Kennedy, Public Papers etc., 
3 vols (Washington DC 1963-4), 
I Iff. 

6 R.J.Walton, Cold War and 
Counter-revolution: the Foreign 
Policy of John F. Kennedy (New 
York 1972). 

7 Poole, op. cit., 28. 

8 Rostow, World Economy, 222ff.; 
Carlos Diaz Alejandro, Essays on 
the Economic History of the 
Argentine Republic (Yale 1970). 

9 H.S. Ferns, Argentina (London 
1969), 184ff. 

10 Claudio Veliz (ed.), The Politics of 
Conformity in Latin America 
(Oxford 1967), Appendix, 
'Successful Military Coups 
1920-1966', 278. 



11 Ferns, Argentina, 173. 

12 Walter Little, The Popular Origins 
of Peronism' in David Rock (ed.), 
Argentina in the Twentieth 
Century (London 1975). 

13 Ferns, Argentina, 190. 

14 David Rock, The Survival and 
Restoration of Peronism', in 
Argentina in the Twentieth 
Century. 

15 Martin Shermin and Peter Winn, 
The US and Cuba', Wilson 
Review, Winter 1979. 

16 Earl Smith in congressional 
testimony, Senate Judiciary 
Committee, 30 August 1960. 

17 Hugh Thomas, Cuba, or the 
Pursuit of Freedom (London 
1971), 639. 

1 8 Bias Roca, En Defensa del Pueblo 
(1945), 41-3; quoted in Thomas, 
Cuba, 736. 

19 E. Suarez Rivas, Un Pueblo 
Crucificado (Miami 1964), 18; 
quoted in Thomas, Cuba. 

20 America Libre, Bogota, 22 May 
1961; Thomas, Cuba, 811. 

21 Thomas, Cuba, 814-16. 

22 Quoted ibid., 819. 

23 For Castro, see Luis Conte Aguero, 
Fidel Castro, Psiquiatria y Politica 
(Mexico City 1968 ed.), which is 
critical; and Herbert Matthews, 
Castro: a Political Biography 
(London 1969), which is more 
favourable. 

24 Thomas, Cuba, 946. 

25 Quoted ibid., 977. 

26 For US policy to Batista and 
Castro, see Earl Smith, The Fourth 
Floor (New York 1962) and 
Communist Threat to the USA 
through the Caribbean: Hearings 
of the Internal Security 
Sub-committee, US Senate 
(Washington dc 1959-62). 

27 Smith, Fourth Floor, 60. 

28 Thomas, Cuba, 1038-44. 

29 E. Guevara, Ouevres 
Revolutionaires 1 959-1 967 (Paris 
1968), 25. 

30 Smith, Fourth Floor, 170. 

31 Thomas, Cuba, 107 Iff. 

32 Ibid., 1197. 

33 Ibid., 1202-3. 

34 Ibid., 1233-57. 

35 Ibid., 969-70. 

36 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 452. 

37 Ibid., 445. 



SOURCE NOTES 



829 



38 For J. F. Kennedy's handling of the 
Bay of Pigs, see Haynes Johnson, 
The Bay of Pigs (New York 1964) 
and Arthur Schlesinger, 

A Thousand Days (Boston 1965), 
chapters 10-11. 

39 Thomas, Cuba, 1365. 

40 Ibid., 1371. 

41 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 472; 
Readers' Digest, November 1964. 

42 Alleged Assassination Plots 
involving Foreign Leaders 
(Washington DC 1975), 14. 

43 Ibid., interim and final reports; 
Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 
chapter 21. 

44 H. S. D i nerstei n, The Making of a 
Missile Crisis (Baltimore 1976), 
156; see also Talbot (ed.), op. cit. 

45 Jean Daniel in L' Express, 
14 December 1963 and New 
Republic, 21 December 1963; 
Claude Julien, Le Monde, 

22 March 1963. 

46 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 
504-5. 

47 Ibid., 507-11. 

48 For an inside account of the missile 
crisis, see Robert Kennedy, 
Thirteen Days: a memoir of the 
Cuban Missile Crisis (New York 
1971 ed.). 

49 Quoted in Michel Tatu, Power in 
the Kremlin: from Khrushchev to 
Kosygin (New York 1969), 422. 

50 Newsweek, 28 October 1963. 

5 1 Edwin Guthman, We Band of 
Brothers (New York 1971), 26; 
Saturday Review, 15 October 
1977. 

52 Thomas, Cuba, 1414. 

53 Quoted Schlesinger, Robert 
Kennedy, 531. 

54 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 511. 

55 Quoted Schlesinger, Robert 
Kennedy, 530-1. 

56 Ibid., 523 and footnote. 

57 Thomas, Cuba, 1418. 

58 Quoted in Hollander, op. cit., 
chapter 6: 'Revolutionary Cuba 
and the discovery of the New 
World', esp. 234ff. 

59 Hugh Thomas in The Times 
Literary Supplement, 10 April 
1981,403. 

60 See Werner Von Braun and 
F.I.Ordway, History of Rocketry 
and Space-Travel (New York, 
revised ed. 1969). 



61 Quoted by Hugh Sidey, who was 
present, in his John F. Kennedy: 
Portrait of a President (London 
1%4). 

62 H, Young et al., Journey to 
Tranquillity: the History of Man's 
Assault on the Moon (London 
1969), 109-10. 

63 Quoted in Leslie H. Gelb and 
Richard K. Betts, The Irony of 
Vietnam: the System Worked 
(Washington DC 1979), 70-1. 

64 W.W.Rostow, The Diffusion of 
Power: an essay in recent history 
(New York 1972), 265. 

65 See Archimedes L.A.Patti, Why 
Viet Nam? Prelude to America's 
Albatros (University of California 
1981); but see Dennis Duncanson, 
The Times Literary Supplement, 
21 August 1981, 965. 

66 Truman, op. cit., I 14-15. 

67 Acheson, op. cit., 675—6. 

68 Acheson, National Press Club 
speech, Department of State 
Bulletin, 23 January 1950, 115f. 

69 Kennan, Memoirs 1 950-1 963, 59. 

70 D. Eisenhower, Public Papers 
(1954), 253, 306; Gelb and Betts, 
op. cit., 60. 

71 Eisenhower, press conference, 7, 
26 April 1954; Gelb and Betts, 
op. cit., 59. 

72 Eisenhower, Public Papers (1959), 
71. 

73 De Gaulle, op. cit., 256. 

74 J.F.Kennedy, Public Papers, n 90. 

75 Schlesinger, A Thousand Days, 
547. 

76 David Halberstam, The Best and 
the Brightest (New York 1972), 
135. 

77 Quoted in Henry Graff, The 
Tuesday Cabinet: Deliberation and 
Decision in Peace and War under 
Lyndon B. Johnson (New York 
1970), 53. 

78 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 104 
footnote 3 1 ; but see also Joseph C. 
Goulden, Truth is the First 
Casualty: the Gulf of Tonkin 
Affair (New York 1969), 160. 

79 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 117-18. 

80 Ibid., 120-3. 

8 1 Lyndon Johnson, Public Papers, i v 
291. 

82 Quoted in Halberstam, op. cit., 
596. 

83 Graff, op. cit., 81. 



830 



SOURCE NOTES 



84 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 135ff. 

85 Doris Kearns, Lyndon Johnson 
and the American Dream (New 
York 1976), 264. 

86 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 139-43. 

87 Guenther Lewy, 'Vietnam: New 
Light on the Question of American 
Guilt', Commentary >, February 
1978. 

88 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 214-15. 

89 Lewy, op. cit. 

90 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 171. 

91 Peter Braestrup, Big Story: How 
the American Press and TV 
Reported and Interpreted the 
Crisis ofTet 1 968 in Vietnam and 
Washington, 2 vols (Boulder 1977). 

92 John Mueller, War, Presidents and 
Public Opinion (New York 1973). 

93 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 130. 

94 William Lunch and Peter Sperlich, 
'American Public Opinion and the 
War in Vietnam', Western Political 
Quarterly, Utah, March 1979. 

95 Don Oberdorfer, Tet! (New York 
1971), 289-90. 

96 Sidney Verba et al., Vietnam and 
the Silent Majority (New York 
1970); Stephen Hess, 'Foreign 
Policy and Presidential 
Campaigns', Foreign Policy, 
Autumn 1972. 

97 Herbert Y. Shandler, The 
Unmaking of a President: Lyndon 
Johnson and Vietnam (Princeton 
1977), 226-9. 

98 Kearns, op. cit., 286, 282-3. 

99 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 
1002. 

100 Lyndon Baines Johnson, The 
Vantage Point: perspectives of the 
Presidency 1963-1969 (New York 
1971), 81. 

101 Johnson, address to University of 
Michigan, May 1964, quoted in 
Lawrence J. Wittner, Cold War 
America: from Hiroshima to 
Watergate (New York 1974), 
239-40. 

102 Johnson, Vantage Point, 322-4; 
New York Times, 10 August 1965; 
Wittner, op. cit., 247-8. 

103 Johnson, Vantage Point, 330, 
172-3. 

1 04 Office of Management and 
Budget: Federal Government 
Finances (Washington DC 1979); 
for a slightly different calculation, 



see Rostow, World Economy, 272, 
Table 1 1 1-65. 

105 Larry Berman, The Office of 
Management and Budget and the 
Presidency 1921-1979 (Princeton 
1979). 

106 Johnson, Vantage Point, 435, 
442ff., 450-1. 

107 Ibid., 87. 

108 Stanley Lebergott, Wealth and 
Want (Princeton 1975), 11-12. 

109 Daniel P. Moynihan, The Negro 
Family (New York 1965). 

110 Daniel P. Moynihan, Maximum 
Feasible Misunderstanding (New 
York 1968). 

111 Quoted by Diane Divoky, 'A Loss 
of Nerve', Wilson Review, Autumn 
1979. 

112 C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures and 
the Scientific Revolution 
(Cambridge 1959). 

113 Edward F. Denison, Sources of 
Economic Growth (New York 
1962); Fritz Machlup, The 
Production and Distribution of 
Knowledge in the United States 
(Princeton 1962). 

114 Clark Kerr, The Uses of the 
University (New York 1966). 

115 Quoted by Lewis B. Mayhew, 
Higher Education in the 
Revolutionary Decades (Berkeley 
1967), lOlff. 

116 Charles E. Finn, Scholars, Dollars 
and Bureaucrats (Washington DC 
1978), 22. 

117 On Further Examination: Report 
of the Advisory Panel on the 
Scholastic Aptitude Test score 
decline (College Entrance 
Examination Board, New York 
1977). 

118 For instance, National Institute of 
Education Compensatory 
Education Study (New York 
1978). 

119 Divoky, op. cit. 

120 Christopher Jenks, Who Gets 
Ahead? The Determinants of 
Economic Success in America 
(New York 1979). 

121 See Arnold Heertje (ed. ) , 
Schumpetefs Vision: Capitalism, 
Socialism and Democracy after 
Forty Years (Eastbourne 1981). 

122 Wittner, op. cit., 246-7. 

123 Trilling, Last Decade, 174. 



SOURCE NOTES 



831 



124 Winner, op. cit., 292. 

125 Quoted by Trilling, Last Decade, 
111. 

126 Fritz Stern, 'Reflections on the 
International Student Movement', 
The American Scholar, 40 (Winter 
1970-1), 123-37. 

127 Paul Joubert and Ben Crouch, 
'Mississippi blacks and the Voting 
Rights Act of 1965', Journal of 
Negro Education, Spring 1977. 

128 Jack Bass and Walter de Vries, The 
Transformation of Southern 
Politics (New York 1976). 

129 Quoted Schlesinger, Robert 
Kennedy, 330; see D.W.Matthews 
and J.R.Prothero, Negroes and the 
New Southern Politics (New York 
1966),240ff. 

130 Report of the National Advisory 
Commission on Civil Disorders 
(Washington dc 1968), 56. 

131 Johnson, Vantage Point, 95. 

132 Quoted in Wittner, op. cit., 283. 

133 Bohlen,op. cit.,210. 

134 Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger, The 
Imperial Presidency (Boston 
1973), 123. 

135 Thomas Cronic, The Textbook 
Presidency and Political Science', 
Congressional Record, 5 October 
1970. 

136 Wilfred Binkley, New Republic, 
18 May 1953. 

137 New York Times, 18 May 1954; 
Washington Post, 20 May 1954. 

138 Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 
169. 

139 David Broder quoted in Safire, 
op. cit., 171. 

140 Ibid., 70, 75. 

141 Wittner, op. cit., 300-1. 

142 Richard Nixon, Public Papers, 
1969 (Washington dc 1971), 371. 

143 Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 350. 

144 Safire, op. cit., 369. 

145 Ibid., 375-9. 

146 Test of Agreement in State 
Department Bulletin, 12 February 
1973; Gelb and Betts, op. cit., 350. 

147 Safire, op. cit., 117-18. 

148 Ibid., 360. 

149 Wittner, op. cit., 370-1. 

150 Quoted in Safire, op. cit., 264. 

151 Richard W. Steele, 'Franklin D. 
Roosevelt and his Foreign Policy 
Critics', Political Science Quarterly, 
Spring 1979, 22 footnote 27. 



152 Ibid., 18; Saul Alindkyjofcw L. 
Lewis (New York 1970), 238; 
Safire, op. cit., 166. 

153 Trohan, op. cit., 179; Daily 
Telegraph, 4 March 1982. 

154 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 
403ff.; Roger Blough, The 
Washington Embrace of Business 
(New York 1975). 

155 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 
311-12. 

156 Fred Friendly, The Good Guys, the 
Bad Guys and the First 
Amendment (New York 1976), 
chapter 3. 

157 Safire, op. cit., 166. 

158 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 
362ff.; Senate Select Committee 
(on) Intelligence Activities (Church 
Committee), Final Report 
(Washington 1976), n 154, in 
158-60. 

159 Trohan, op. cit., 136-7. 

160 Ibid., 326; Judith Exner, My Story 
(New York 1977). 

161 Alfred Steinberg, Sam Johnson's 
Boy (New York 1968), 671. 

162 For Johnson's misdemeanours, see 
Robert A. Caro, The Years of 
Lyndon Johnson (New York 1982 
and forthcoming). 

163 Charles Roberts, LBJ's Inner 
Circle (New York 1965), 34; 
Schlesinger, Imperial Presidency, 
221; see 'The Development of the 
White House Staff, Congressional 
Record, 20 June 1972. 

164 Safire, op. cit., 166ff. 

165 Ibid., 357. 

166 Fred Thompson, At That Point in 
Time (New York 1980). 

167 Will: the Autobiography of 

G. Gordon Liddy (London 1981), 
300. 

168 See, for instance, Maurice Stans, 
The Terrors of Justice: the untold 
side of Watergate (New York 
1979), and James Nuechterlein, 
'Watergate: towards a Revisionist 
View', Commentary, August 1979. 
Sirica provided his own account: 
John J. Sirica, To Set the Record 
Straight (New York 1979). 

169 Daily Telegraph, 15 January and 
5-6 February 1982. 

170 Anthony Lukas, Nightmare: the 
Underside of the Nixon Years 
(New York 1976), 375 ff.; Safire, 
op. cit., 292. 



832 



SOURCE NOTES 



171 Tom Bethell and Charles Peters, 
'The Imperial Press', Washington 
Monthly, November 1976. 

172 Lee H. Hamilton and Michael H. 
Van Dusen, 'Making the 
Separation of Powers Work', 
Foreign Affairs, Autumn 1978. 

173 Georgetown University Conference 
on Leadership, Williamsburg, 
Virginia, reported in Wall Street 
Journal, 15 May 1980. 

174 Gerald Ford, Public Papers 1975 
(Washington dc 1977), 119. 

175 State Department Bulletin, 
14 April 1975. 

176 Political Change in Wartime: the 
Khmer Krahom Revolution in 
Southern Cambodia 1970-4, 
paper given at American Political 
Science Association Convention, 
San Francisco, 4 September 1975. 

177 Ibid. 

178 Evidence collected from over 300 
refugees in camps in Thailand, 
Malaysia, France and the USA, 
October 1975-October 1976, 
printed in John Barron and 
Anthony Paul, Peace with Horror 
(London 1977), 10-31. 

179 Ibid., 66-85; New York Times, 
9 May 1974, 31 October 1977, 
13 May 1978; Washington Post, 
21 July 1977, 2, 3, 4 May and 1 
June 1978. 

180 Barron and Paul, op. cit., 136-49. 

181 Ibid.,202ff. 

182 Annual Register 1981 (London 
1982). 



19 The Collectivist Seventies 

1 New York Times, 3 1 December 
1933. 

2 Letter to Montagu Norman, 
Collected Writings of J.M.Keynes 
xxv 98-9. 

3 Rostow, World Economy, 68 
Table 1 1— 7. 

4 Ibid., 49. 

5 Richard Austin Smith, The 
Incredible Electrical Conspiracy', 
Fortune, April-May 1961. 

6 Schlesinger, Robert Kennedy, 405. 

7 Ch ris tian Scien ce Mo n it or, 

16 April 1962; Wall Street Journal, 
19 April 1962. 

8 Robert Sobell, The Last Bull 
Market: Wall Street in the 1960s 
(New York 1980). 



9 James Lorie, The Second Great 
Crash', Wall Street Journal, 2 June 
1980. 

10 Robert DeFina, Public and Private 
Expenditures for Federal 
Regulation of Business 
(Washington University, St Louis 
1977); Murray L. Weidenbaum, 
Government Power and Business 
Performance (Stanford 1980). 

11 Weidenbaum, op. cit. 

12 Edward F. Denison in Survey of 
Current Business (US Department 
of Commerce, Washington dc), 
January 1978. 

13 Denison, Survey of Current 
Business, August 1979 (Part n); 
and his Accounting for Slower 
Economic Growth: the United 
States in the 1970s (Washington 
dc 1980). 

14 R.A.Maidment, The US Supreme 
Court and Affirmative Action: the 
Cases of Bakka, Weber and 
Fullilove', Journal of American 
Studies, December 1981. 

15 Laurence H. Silberman, 'Will 
Lawyers Strangle Democratic 
Capitalism?', Regulation 
(Washington dc), March/April 
1978. 

16 John Osborne, White House 
Watch: the Ford Years 
(Washington dc 1977), 68. 

17 Washington Star, 16 April 1980; 
Washington Post, 18 April 1980; 
Wall Street Journal, 24 April 1980; 
Carl Cohen, 'Justice Debased: the 
Weber Decision', Commentary, 
September 1979. 

18 Richard Fry (ed.), A Banker's 
World (London 1970), 7. 

19 Speech, International Monetary 
Conference, London, 1 1 June 
1979; quoted in Anthony 
Sampson, The Money Lenders: 
Bankers in a Dangerous World 
(London 1981), chapter 7, 106ff., 
describes the origin of the 
Euro-dollar system. 

20 Geoffrey Bell, The Euro-dollar 
Market and the International 
Financial System (New York 
1973). 

21 Irving Friedman, The Emerging 
Role of Private Banks in the 
Developing World (New York 
1977). 



SOURCE NOTES 



833 



22 Charles Coombs, The Arena of 
International Finance (New York 
1976), 219. 

23 Geoffrey Bell, 'Developments in 
the International Monetary System 
Since Floating', Schroders 
International, November 1980. 

24 Rostow, World Economy, 248-9. 
15 Ibid., 260-1 and Table in-59. 

26 Ibid., 254-5. 

27 J. B. Kelly, Arabia, the Gulf and the 
West (London 1980). 

28 Teddy Kollek, 'Jerusalem', Foreign 
Affairs, July 1977. 

29 P. J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and his 
Generation (London 1978). 

30 Ruth First, Libya; the Elusive 
Revolution (Harmondsworth 
1974), 201-4. 

3 1 Henry Kissinger, Years of 
Upheaval (London 1982). 

32 Martin Gilbert, The Arab-Israel 
Conflict (London 1974), 97. 

33 Quoted in Poole, op. cit., 247; 
Scott Sagan, 'The Yom Kippur 
Alert', Foreign Policy, Autumn 
1979. 

34 Kissinger, op. cit. 

35 Rostow, World Economy, 295. 

36 Ibid., 290-5. 

37 Charles R. Morris, The Cost of 
Good Intentions: New York City 
and the Liberal Experiment (New 
York 1980), 234. 

38 House Banking Committee: 
International Banking Operations, 
hearings (Washington dc 1977), 
719. 

39 Quoted in Sampson, The Money 
Lenders, 126-7. 

40 Seth Lipsky, The Billion Dollar 
Bubble (Hong Kong 1978). 

41 Wall Street Journal, 25-26 June 
1980. 

42 Bruce Palmer (ed.), Grand Strategy 
for the 1980s (Washington dc 
1979), 5. 

43 Annual Defence Department 
Report, Financial Year 1977 
(Washington dc 1977), section v. 

44 Osborne, op. cit., xxxiii. 

45 Ibid., 32. 

46 Paula Smith: 'The Man Who Sold 
Jimmy Carter', Duns Review 
(New York), August 1976. 

47 Robert W. Tucker, 'America in 
Decline: the Foreign Policy of 
"Maturity"', Foreign Affairs, 58 
(Autumn 1979), 450-84. 



48 Papers by Judith Reppy and Robert 
Lyle Butterworth in Symposium on 
American Security Policy and 
Policy-Making, Policy Studies 
Journal, Autumn 1979. 

49 Quoted by Jeane Kirkpatrick, 
'Dictatorships and Double 
Standards: a Critique of US 
Policy', Commentary, November 
1979. 

50 Michael A. Ledeen and William H. 
Lewis, 'Carter and the Fall of Shah: 
the Inside Story', Washington 
Quarterly, Summer 1980, 15ff. 

5 1 Quoted in Thomas L. Hughes: 
'Carter and the Management of 
Contradictions', Foreign Policy, 31 
(Summer 1978), 34-55; Simon 
Serfaty, 'Brzezinski: Play it Again, 
Zbig', Foreign Policy, 32 (Autumn 
1978), 3-21; Elizabeth Drew, 
'Brzezinski', New Yorker, 1 May 
1978; and Kirkpatrick, op. cit. 

52 See Robert Legvold, 'The Nature 
of Soviet Power', Foreign Affairs, 
56 (Autumn 1977), 49-71. 

53 Quoted in Ronald Hingley, The 
Russian Secret Police (London 
1970), 222. 

54 Robert Payne, The Rise and Fall of 
Stalin (London 1968), 718-19. 

55 Kolakowski, op. cit., in 
'Destalinization'. 

56 For the coup, see Michel Tatu, 
Power in the Kremlin (tr. London 
1969); Hingley, Russian Secret 
Police, 43-5. 

57 Helene Carrere d'Encausse, Le 
Pouvoir Confisque: Gouvernants 
et Gouvernes en URSS (Paris 
1981). 

58 Quoted in Robert C. Tucker, 
'Swollen State, Spent Society: 
Stalin's Legacy to Brezhnev's 
Russia', Foreign Affairs, 60 
(Winter 1981-2), 414-25. 

59 See cia, A Dollar Comparison of 
Soviet and US Defence Activities 
1967-1977 (Washington dc 
January 1978); Les Aspin, 'Putting 
Soviet Power in Perspective', A EI 
Defense Review (Washington dc), 
June 1978. 

60 National Foreign Assessment 
Center, Handbook of Economic 
Statistics 1979 (Washington dc). 

61 Talbot (ed.), op. cit., 131. 



834 



SOURCE NOTES 



62 Arcadius Kahan and Blair Rible 
(eds), Industrial Labour in the 
USSR (Washington dc 1979). 

63 See Joint Economic Committee, 
Congress of the USA, Soviet 
Economy in a Time of Change 
(Washington dc 1979). 

64 See Solzhenitsyn's 'Misconceptions 
about Russia are a Threat to 
America', Foreign Affairs, 58 
(Spring 1980), 797-834. 

65 Arkhiv samizdata, Document 
Number 374, quoted in Tucker, 
op. cit. 

66 Mark Popovsky, Manipulated 
Science: the Crisis of Science and 
Scientists in the Soviet Union 
Today (tr. New York 1979), 179. 

67 See Evgeny Pashukanis, Selected 
Writings on Marxism and Law (tr. 
London 1980); Eugene Kamenka, 
'Demythologizing the Law', The 
Times Literary Supplement, 1 May 
1981,475-6. 

68 Tufton Beamish and Guy Hadley, 
The Kremlin Dilemma: the 
struggle for Human Rights in 
Eastern Europe (London 1979), 
24. 

69 Roy Medvedev, On Soviet Dissent: 
interviews with Piero Ostellino (tr. 
London 1980), 61. 

70 Ibid., 53-4. 

71 Bavel Litvinov (ed.), The Trial of 
the Four (London 1972). 

72 Beamish and Hadley, op. cit., 
216f£. 

73 Ibid., 221 ff. 

74 I.Z.Steinberg, Spiridonova: 
Revolutionary Terrorist (London 
1935), 241-2; in fact she was kept 
in the Kremlin guardroom until her 
escape in April 1919. 

75 Sidney Bloch and Peter Reddaway, 
Russia's Political Hospitals: the 
Abuse of Psychiatry in the Soviet 
Union (London 1977), 51-3. 

76 Yarkov's samizdat autobiography 
was smuggled to the West in 1970. 

77 Pravda, 24 May 1959. 

78 See the evidence of forty-four 
British psychiatrists in C. Mee 
(ed.), The Internment of Soviet 
Dissenters in Mental Hospitals 
(London 1971). 

79 Bloch and Reddaway, op. cit., 
31 Iff.; see also I.F.Stone, New 
York Review of Books, 

10 February 1972, 7-14. 



80 All are summarized in Bloch and 
Reddaway, op. cit., Appendix I, 
347-98. 

81 Ibid., 57. 

82 Abuse of Psychiatry for Political 
Repression in the Soviet Union, 
US Senate Judiciary Committee 
(Washington dc 1972). 

83 Bloch and Reddaway, op. cit., 
220-30. 

84 Medvedev, On Soviet Dissent, 
142-3. 

85 Reprints from the Soviet Press, 
30 April 1977, 22-3. 

86 Index on Censorship (London), 
No. 4 1980; Vladimir Bukovsky, 
'Critical Masses: the Soviet 
Union's Dissident Many/ 
American Spectator, August 1980; 
see also Joshua Rubenstein, Soviet 
Dissidents: their Struggle for 
Human Rights (Boston 1981). 

87 Alva M. Bowen, The Anglo- 
German and Soviet- 
American Naval Rivalries: Some 
Comparisons', in Paul Murphy 
(ed.), Naval Power and Soviet 
Policy (New York 1976). 

88 James L. George (ed.), Problems of 
Sea-Power as we approach the 21st 
Century (Washington dc 1978), 
18. 

89 Sulzberger, op. cit., 698. 

90 Gorshkov's collected articles are 
published in translation by the US 
Naval Institute (Annapolis) as Red 
Star Rising at Sea and Sea-Power 
and the State. 

91 George, op. cit., 17. 

92 Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, On 
Watch (New York 1976), 444-5. 

93 Richard Fagen, 'Cuba and the 
Soviet Union', Wilson Review, 
Winter 1979. 

94 Mahgoub, op. cit., 277. 

95 Quoted in Fagen, op. cit. 

96 Jonathan Kwitny, '"Communist" 
Congo, "Capitalist" Zaire', Wall 
Street Journal, 2 July 1980. 

97 Albert Wohlstetter (ed.), Swords 
from Ploughshares: the Military 
Potential of Civilian Nuclear 
Energy (Chicago, 1979), xm. 

98 Ibid., 17. 

99 Lawrence Scheinman, Atomic 
Policy in France under the Fourth 
Republic (Princeton 1965), 94-5. 



SOURCE NOTES 



835 



100 For Japan, see Wohlstetter, op. cit., 
chapter 5,11 1-25; Geoffrey 
Kemp, Nuclear Forces for Medium 
Powers (London 1974). 

101 Wohlstetter, op. cit., 44-5. 

102 See Claire Sterling, The Terror 
Network (New York 1981). 

103 Caroline Moorehead, Fortune's 
Hostages: Kidnapping in the 
World Today (London 1980). 

104 Christopher Dobson and Ronald 
Payne, The Carlos Complex: a 
pattern of violence (London 1977), 
30-44. 

105 For these two cases see Sterling, 
op. cit. 

106 The Most Sinister Growth 
Industry', The Times, 27 October 
1981. 

107 This argument is elaborated in Paul 
Johnson, The Seven Deadly Sins of 
Terrorism', Jerusalem Conference 
on International Terrorism, 
published by the Jonathan 
Institute, Jerusalem 1979. 

108 Moynihan, A Dangerous Place, 86. 

109 Quoted ibid., 157-8. 

110 Ibid., 197. 

111 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
n-71,285. 

112 Alfred Sauvy, VObservateur, 
14 August 1952. 

113 Carl E. Pletsch, The Three Worlds, 
or the Division of Social Scientific 
Labour, 1950-75', Comparative 
Studies in Society and History, 
October 1981. 

114 Jahangir Amuzegar, 'A Requiem 
for the North-South Conference', 
Foreign Affairs, 56 (October 
1977), 136-59. 

115 North-South: a Programme for 
Survival (Massachusetts Institute 
of Technology, March 1980). 

116 Theodore Moran, Multinational 
Corporations and the Politics of 
Dependence: Copper in Chile 
(Princeton 1974); Charles 
Goodsell, American Corporations 
and Peruvian Politics (Harvard 
1974). 

117 Lawrence Franco, 'Multinationals: 
the end of US dominance', 
Harvard Business Review, 

Nov .-Dec. 1978. 

118 'Finis for the American 
Challenge?', Economist, 
10 September 1977. 



119 TheBanker (London), June 1980; 
Sampson, The Moneylenders, 
200-2. 

120 Euromoney, July 1980; quoted by 
Sampson in The Moneylenders, 
257. 

121 World Bank estimates, December 
1981. 

122 Richard Baricuck, The 
Washington Struggle over 
Multinationals', Business and 
Society Review, Summer 1976. 

123 Paul Hollander, 'Reflections on 
Anti-Americanism in our time', 
Worldview June 1978. 

124 Marx, A Contribution to the 
Critique of Political Economy, 
quoted in Maurice Gordelier, 
'Structuralism and Marxism', in 
Tom Bottomore (ed.), Modern 
Interpretations of Marx (Oxford 
1981). 

125 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
m-68,279. 

126 Ernest Gellner, 'What is 
Structuralism?', The Times 
Literary Supplement, 31 July 1981, 
881-3. 



20 The Recovery of Freedom 

1 Published in London 1945, in 
New York 1946; see also Sunday 
Express, 21, 28 October, 4 
November 1945; David C. Smith: 
H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal 
(Yale 1986), 476ff. 

2 President Jimmy Carter, Address 
to the Nation, 16 July 1979. 

3 An exception was Adam Smith, 
who had been Professor of Moral 
Philosophy at Glasgow University, 
1752-64, though he had left 
academic life by the time he wrote 
his The Wealth of Nations, 
published in 1776. 

4 John Gribbin, Our Changing 
Universe: the New Astronomy 
(London 1976). 

5 Dr Edward Try on in Nature, 246 
(1973), 393. 

6 Wissenschaftliche Selbstbiographie 
(Leipzig 1948), quoted by Thomas 
Kuhn in A.C. Crombie (ed.), 
Scientific Change (London 1963), 
348. 



836 



SOURCE NOTES 



7 See Dr John Smythies in Nature, 
March 1991; Robert Matthews in 
the Sunday Telegraph, 17 March 
1991; and correspondence in the 
Independent, 21 and 23 March 
1991. 

8 Quotations from Ayer and Russell 
are in Bryan Magee, Modern 
British Philosophers (London 
1971). 

9 See my essay on Russell in 
Intellectuals (London 1988), 
197-224. 

10 Karl Popper, Unended Quest: an 
Intellectual Autobiography 
(London 1976). 

11 A.C Ewing, 'The linguistic theory 
of a priori propositions', 
Proceedings of the Aristotelian 
Society, xi 1939-40, 217. 

12 W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical 
Point of View (New York 1953). 

13 H. Putnam, 'Is Logic Empirical?', 
in R.S. Cohen (ed.), Boston 
Studies in the Philosophy of 
Science, v 1969. 

14 Susan Haack, Deviant Logic: 
some philosophical issues (London 
1974), xi. 

15 J. Jay Zeman, Modal Logic: the 
Lewis-modal Systems (Oxford 
1973). 

16 David Martin, The Religious and 
the Secular (London 1969). 

17 Edward Royle, Victorian Infidels 
(Manchester 1974). 

1 8 John Henry Newman, The Idea of 
a University (London 1953). 

19 Michael Bourdeaux, Gorbachev, 
Glasnost and the Gospel (London 
1990), 87-108. 

20 Vincent C. Chrypinski, 'Polish 
Catholicism and Social Change', in 
Bociurkiw et al. (eds), op. cit., 
241-59; Peter Raina, Political 
Opposition in Poland 1954-77 
(London 1978), 406ff. 

21 J.C.H. Aveling, The Jesuits 
(London 1981), 355-65. 

22 Annuario Ufficiale (Vatican City), 
1978. 

23 Peter Nichols, The Pope's 
Divisions; The Roman Catholic 
Church Today (London 1981), 
22-38. 

24 Ibid., 35ff. 



25 Edward Fashole-Like et aL, 
Christianity in Independent Africa 
(London 1979). 

26 For a comprehensive summary of 
the report see the Daily Telegraph, 
Tuesday 12 March 1991. 

27 See reports in the press for the 
week 24 February-2 March 1991, 
and Christopher Booker in the 
Sunday Telegraph, 24 February 
1991. 

28 For two views on this process see 
Ivan Vallier, Catholicism, Social 
Control and Modernization in 
Latin America (Santa Cruz 1970), 
and Edward Norman, Christianity 
in the Southern Hemisphere 
(Oxford 1981). 

29 Roger Bastide, The African 
Religions of Brazil (Baltimore 
1978); J.H. Rodrigues, Brazil and 
Africa (Berkeley 1965). 

30 Bengt G.M. Sundkler, Zulu Zion 
and Some Swasi Zionists (Oxford 
1976). 

31 For a discussion of the battle 
between Orthodox funda- 
mentalism and secularism in Israel 
see Emile Marmorstein, Heaven at 
Bay: the Jewish Kulturkampf in 
the Holy Land (Oxford 1969); see 
also Paul Johnson, A History of 
the Jews (London 1987), 546-56. 

32 For an account of the background 
see John Bulloch, Death of a 
Country: Civil War in Lebanon 
(London 1977). 

33 William Forbis, Fa// of the 
Peacock Throne (New York 
1980), 45. 

34 Kayhan Research Associates, 
Iran's Fifth Plan (Teheran 1974); 
Jahangir Amuzegar, Iran: an 
Economic Profile (Washington DC 
1977). 

35 Forbis, op. cit., 237ff. 

36 Ibid., 73-4. 

37 Grace Goodell, 'How the Shah 
De-Stabilized Himself, Policy 
Review (Washington, DC), Spring 
1981. 

38 Forbis, op. cit., 259-61. 

39 Goodell, op. cit. 

40 Forbis, op. cit., 74. 

41 Michael A. Ledeen and William H. 
Lewis, 'Carter and the Fall of the 
Shah', Washington Quarterly, 
Summer 1980. 



SOURCE NOTES 



837 



42 Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and 
Politics in Contemporary Iran: 
Clergy-State Relations in the 
Pahlavi Period (New York 1980). 

43 Figures given by the former Iran 
Bar Associations in a letter to the 
UN Secretary-General, August 
1981. 

44 See report by Amir Taheri, Sunday 
Times, 23 August 1981. 

45 Sunday Times, 6 September 1981. 

46 For Saddam Hussein's family 
background and childhood see 
John Bulloch, The Violent Boy 
from Al-Ouja', in the Independent 
on Sunday, 6 January 1991. 

47 The Times and Daily Telegraph, 
15 February 1989. 

48 For different versions of Soviet 
involvement see M.E. Yapp in The 
Times Literary Supplement, 3 July 
1981, 753, and 25 September 
1981, 1101, and Anthony Arnold, 
The Soviet Invasion of 
Afghanistan in Perspective 
(Stanford 1981), 68-71. 

49 John Griffiths, Afghanistan: Key 
to a Continent (London 1981). 

50 The Times, 21 January 1980. 

51 Daily Telegraph, 21 February 
1980. 

52 Nancy Peabody Newell and 
Richard S. Newell, The Struggle 
for Afghanistan (Cornell 1981). 

53 Quoted in Cecil Kaye, 
Communism in India, edited by 
Subodh Roy (Calcutta 1971), 272. 

54 Helene Carrere d'Encausse, 
Decline of an Empire: the Soviet 
Socialist Republics in Revolt (tr. 
New York 1979), 239. 

55 Ibid., 237, 240. 

56 Lenin, Imperialism, preface to 
1921 edition. 

57 Carrere d'Encausse, op. cit., 
122-3, and 42-3 for nationalities 
map. 

58 Ibid., 155. 

59 This was particularly true of the 
1960s and 1970s; see Brian Silver; 
'The status of national minority 
languages in Soviet education: an 
assessment of recent changes', 
Soviet Studies, 25 No. 1 (1974). 



60 Y. Bilinsky, 'Politics, Purge and 
Dissent in the Ukraine', in L. 
Kamenetsky (ed.), Nationalism 
and Human Rights: Processes of 
Modernization in the USSR 
(Colorado 1977); P. Botychnyi 
(ed.), The Ukraine in the Seventies 
(Oakville, Ontario 1975), 246; 
Carrere d'Encausse, op. cit., 
170-1, 180 (Table 37). 

61 Msksudov, op. cit.; Carrere 
d'Encausse, op. cit., 50-1. 

62 Carrere d'Encausse, op cit., 67ff. 

63 Ibid., 173-4. 

64 This was the view of John D. 
Durand, 'The Modern Expansion 
of World Population', Proceedings 
of the American Philosophical 
Society, III (June 1967), 136-59; 
but demographic projections are 
notoriously liable to error. 

65 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
1-13, 25. 

66 UN Demographic Yearbook 1971; 
Washington Post and Wall Street 
Journal, 10 July 1980. 

67 See Whitaker's Almanac for 1988, 
1989, 1990; Chronicle of the Year 
1989 (London 1990). 

68 Talbot (ed.), op cit., 120ff., 
139-43. 

69 Daily Telegraph, The Times, 17, 
18 March 1991. 

70 See 'Demographic Trends', South 
Africa 1989-90, Official 
Yearbook (Pretoria, Cape Town 
1990), 79-90. 

71 For a discussion of this and other 
aspects of South Africa's 
difficulties and their global 
significance, see Martin Schneider 
(ed.), South Africa: the Watershed 
Years (Cape Town 1991), 
especially 29ff., 42ff., 60ff., 70ff., 
136ff. 

72 Rostow, World Economy, Table 
1-15, 30. 

73 Text of constitution in H. Borton, 
Japan's Modern Century (New 
York 1955), 490-507. 

74 For a general treatment of the 
occupation, see Kazuo Kawai, 
Japan's American Interlude 
(Chicago 1960). 

75 R.P. Dore, Land Reform in Japan 
(Oxford 1959); Kurt Steiner, 
Local Government in Japan 
(Stanford 1965). 



838 



SOURCE NOTES 



76 John M. Maki, Court and 
Constitution in Japan 
(Seattle 1964). 

77 Richard Storry, The Times 
Literary Supplement, 5 September 
1980, 970; see J.W. Dower, 
Empire and Aftermath: Yoshida 
Shigeru and the Japanese 
Experience, 1878-1954 (Harvard 
1980). 

78 Andra Boltho, Japan: an 
Economic Survey (Oxford 1975), 
8 footnote; S. Kuznets, Economic 
Growth of Nations (Harvard 
1971), 30-1, 38-40. 

79 Rostow, World Economy, 275. 

80 Ezra F. Vogel, The Challenge 
from Japan', Harvard Conference 
on US Competitiveness, 25 April 
1980. 

81 J. A. A. Stockwin, Japan: Divided 
Politics in a Growth Economy 
(London 1975), 1-3. 

82 Beasley, op. cit., 286. 

83 Boltho, op. cit., 167-8. 

84 James Kirkup, Heaven, Hell and 
Hara-Kiri (London 1974), 
248-52. 

85 Quoted by Frank Gibney, The 
Ripple Effect in Korea', Foreign 
Affairs, October 1977. 

86 See Special Issue of Wilson 
Review, Autumn 1979, for 
Taiwan's spectacular progress in 
the 1960s and 1970s. 

87 Quoted by Sampson, The 
Moneylenders, 183-4. 

88 I.M.D. Little: The experience and 
causes of rapid labour-intensive 
development in Korea, Taiwan, 
Hong Kong and Singapore, and 
the possibilities of emulation', 
ILO Working Paper (Bangkok 
1979). 

89 Rostow, World Economy, 
548-51. 

90 See David Nevin, The American 
Touch in Micronesia (New York 
1977); Chronicle of the Year 1989 
(London 1990), 117. 

91 Stefan de Vylder, Allende's Chile: 
the political economy of the rise 
and fall of the Unidad Popular 
(Cambridge, Mass., 1976); Brian 
Loveman, Struggle in the 
Countryside: politics and rural 
labour in Chile, 1919-1973 
(Indiana 1976). 



92 Ian Roxborough et ai, Chile: the 
State and Revolution (London 
1977), 146-7. Allende had told me 
as far back as 1960 that he had no 
chance of winning an election 
except through a split on the 
Right, and that the result was 
likely to be high inflation and a 
middle-class revolt. 

93 Ibid., 226. 

94 Newsweek, 8 October 1973. 

95 Joseph L. Nogee and John W. 
Sloan, 'Allende's Chile and the 
Soviet Union', Journal of 
International Studies and World 
Affairs, August 1979. 

96 James Boswell, Life of Johnson n 
(London 1934), 170. 

97 W. Baer and I. Kerstenetsky (eds), 
Inflation and Growth in Latin 
America (Homewood, Illinois 
1964). 

98 Quoted in Sampson, The 
Moneylenders, 303. 

99 Daily Telegraph, 6 March 1991. 

100 Annual Review 1984 (London 
1985), 8. 

101 Annual Review 1985 (London 
1986), 8-9. 

102 Statement, House of Commons, 8 
April 1985. 

103 Hugo Young, The Iron Lady: a 
Biography of Margaret Thatcher 
(London 1989), 532-3. 

104 Norman Lamont, MP, on the 
Today Programme, BBC Radio 4, 
20 March 1991. 

105 Wilson Quarterly, Special Issue on 
Mexico, Summer 1979; Michael 
Meyer and William Sherman, The 
Course of Mexican History 
(Oxford 1979). 

106 Richard R. Fagen: The Realities 
of Mexico-American Relations', 
Foreign Affairs, July 1977. 

107 Richard R. Fagen, Labyrinths of 
Power: Political Recruitment in 
20th Century Mexico (Princeton 
1979). 

108 E.L. Ullman: 'Regional 
Development and the Geography 
of Concentration', Papers and 
Proceedings of the Regional 
Science Association, 4 (1958), 
197-8. 

109 H.S. Perloff et ai, Regions, 
Resources and Economic Growth 
(University of Nebraska 1960), 50. 



SOURCE NOTES 



839 



110 Robert Estall, The Changing 
Balance of the Northern and 
Southern Regions of the United 
States', Journal of American 
Studies (Cambridge), December 
1980. 

111 Ben J. Wattenburg: ' A New 
Country: America 1984', Public 
Opinion (Washington DC), 
Oct-Nov 1979. 

112 Ronald Reagan, An A merican 
Life: an Autobiography (New 
York 1990), 135. 

113 Ibid., 335-6. 

114 The Statesman's Yearbook 
1990-1, 1399ff, 1413. 

115 An American Life, 334 -5. 

116 Discriminate Deterrence: Report 
of the Commission on Integrated 
Long-Term Strategy (Washington 
DC 1988), 5-7. 

117 An American Life, 449-51. 

118 See my article in the Observer, 30 
October 1983. 

119 An American Life, 517-8. 

120 For the events which led up to the 
S-20s and Cruise deployment, see 
Jonathan Haslam: The Soviet 
Union and the Politics of Nuclear 
Weapons in Europe, 1969-77 
(Cornell UP 1990). 

121 An American Life, 234-5. 

122 For a general discussion of the US 
rearmament programme as it 
evolved in the 1980s see the 
account by Reagan's Defence 
Secretary, Caspar Weinberger, 
Fighting For Peace (New York 
1990). 

123 See Paul Johnson, 'Europe and the 
Reagan Years', and Robert W. 
Tucker, 'Reagan's Foreign Policy', 
in 'America and the World, 
1988-9', a special issue of Foreign 
Affairs, 68 (1989). 

124 An American Life, 568-70, which 
gives the key passages from the 
Orlando speech. 

125 No personal biography of the 
Soviet leader has been published 
and details of Gorbachev's life 
proved difficult to obtain; some 
were published in the Sunday 
Correspondent colour supplement, 
25 February 1990. 



126 For details of the changes in 
Russia during the 1980s, see 
Geoffrey Hosking, The 
Awakening of the Soviet Union 
(Harvard 1990), who shows that 
some of the changes began before 
Gorbachev. 

127 For an overall view of this subject 
see Thane Gustafson, Crisis and 
Plenty: the Politics of Soviet 
Energy under Brezhnev and 
Gorbachev (Princeton 1989). 

128 Reagan's detailed personal 
account of the Geneva meeting is 
in An American Life, 633-41. 

129 For contrasting views see 'The 
American 1980s: Disaster or 
Triumph: a Symposium', special 
issue of Commentary, September 
1990; see also Larry Berman (ed.), 
Looking Back on the Reagan 
Presidency (Baltimore 1990), and 
W.G. Hyland, The Cold War is 
Over (New York 1990). 

130 To the author; this was also 
Margaret Thatcher's view. 

131 An American Life, 639. 

132 The Telegraph reporter was the 
author's eldest son, Daniel 
Johnson. 

133 From Marx-Engels Werke (East 
Berlin 1956-68), iii 569-71. 

134 For the Ceausescu regime, see 
Edward Behr, Kiss the Hand You 
Cannot Bite (London 1991); John 
Sweeney, The Life and Evil Times 
ofNicolae Ceaucescu (London 
1991). 

135 This figure, like most others 
connected with recent Romanian 
events, is unreliable; Sweeney, op. 
cit., believes no more than fifty 
were shot. 

136 Ibid. 

137 See, for instance, 'The End of the 
Honeymoon', Daily Telegraph, 25 
March 1991. 

138 Reported on the bbc Money 
Programme, 10 March 1991. 

139 See M.E. Porter, The Competitive 
Advantage of Nations (New York 
1990). 

140 For the events leading up to the 
war, see John Bulloch and Harvey 
Morris, Saddam's War: the origins 
of the Kuwait conflict and the 
international response (London 
1991). 



840 



SOURCE NOTES 



141 For details and dates of the events 
leading up to the Iraqi invasion, 
and the Allied response, see the 
following special newspaper 
supplements: London Times, 16 
January 1991; Daily Mail, 1 
March 1991; Daily Telegraph, 2 
March 1991; Sunday Telegraph, 3 
March 1991. 

142 The major ground components of 
the Allied force were: United 
States 320,000; United Kingdom 
25,000; Saudi Arabia 40,000; 
Syria 12,000; France 10,000; 
Egypt 35,000. 

143 Figures vary and must be regarded 
as estimates until official war 
histories are published; I have 
taken these from the Daily 
Telegraph supplement of 2 March 
1991. 

144 For these and other figures see 
Chronicle of the Twentieth 
Century, 1294-5. 

145 For various examples see David 
Israelson, Silent Earth: the Politics 
of Survival (Ontario 1990), esp. 
227-50. 

146 Sarah Johnson in the Sunday 
Telegraph, 4 February 1991. 



147 Conor Cruise O'Brien: 'Devaluing 
the University', London Times, 5 
March 1991; David Lehman, 
Signs of the Times: De construction 
and the Fall of Paul de Man ( New 
York 1991). 

148 See Dinesh D'Sousa, Illiberal 
Education: The Politics of Race 
and Sex on Campus (New York 
1991). 

149 Martin Fletcher in the Times, 16 
March 1991. 

150 James Watson, The Double Helix: 
being a personal account of the 
discovery of the structure of una 
(New York 1977). 

151 Franklin Portugal and Jack Cohen, 
A Century of dna: a history of the 
discovery of the structure and 
function of the genetic substance 
(Massachusetts Institute of 
Technology 1977). 

152 Nicholas Wade, The Ultimate 
Experiment: man-made evolution 
(New York 1977). 

153 Nature, 17 September 1981, 176. 

154 Quotations from Edward Wilson, 
Sociobiology (Harvard 1975) and 
On Human Nature (Harvard 
1979). 

155 Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man 
(London 1733-4), Ep., I, line 2. 



Index 



Abadan, 491, 713 

Abane, Ramdane, 497, 499 

Abbas, Allouah, 499 

Abbas, Ferhat, 499 

Abbott, Charles, 249 

Abdullah, King of Jordan, 486, 487 

Abstraction, 114 

Abyssinia, see Ethiopia 

Acheson, Dean; 257, 439, 440, 447-8, 474, 

626, 627, 631, 632, 637 
Action Francaise, 145, 576 
Adams, Henry, 207 
Adams, James Truslow, 222 
Adams, John Quincy, 614 
Adams, Samuel Hopkins, 218 
Adams, Sherman, 462 
Addis, Sir Charles, 235 
Addis Ababa, 321,512, 537 
Adenauer, Konrad, 279-80, 290, 577, 

579-86, 591, 593, 597-8, 599-600 
Afghanistan, 44, 717-20, 754, 757 
Africa: Christianity in, 704, 706; Islam in, 

707; population growth, 724; agriculture, 

food production, 727-8 
Afro- Asian Conference (Bandung, 1955), 

477, 480, 489-90, 511, 512, 518 
Agar, Herbert, 344 
Agnew, Spiro, 650 
Agricultural Marketing Act (US, 1929), 

243, 245 
agriculture, farming, 724-7; Russia, 725-6, 

767-8; Third World, 727 
Agriculture Acts (1920, 1923), 163 
aids, 782-3 
Ailleret, General, 504 
Ain-Abid massacre, 499 
air raids, 335-6, 349, 358, 359, 362, 

442-7, 635-6 
Aizawa, Colonel Saburo, 313 
Akhmatova, Anna, 453 
Alamein, 410 

Albania, 321, 359, 448, 762 
Aldington, Richard, 163 



Aldrich, Winthrop, 462 

Aldrin, Edwin, 630 

Alee, Warder, 779 

Aleksandrov, G.F., 453 

Algeria, 149, 151, 154, 410, 539, 542; 
Muslim population, 495-6; revolution, 
497-504, 507; atrocities and terrorism, 
497-500, 503; independence, 504-5; 
racism, 526 

Algiers, 499-504, 688 

Ali, Mohammed, 477 

All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 82; (1917) 
62, 63; (1918) 78; (1920) 79 

All-Union Congress of Soviets (1923), 77 

Alleg, Henri, 500 

Allen, Clifford, 349 

Allen, Frederick Lewis, 218 

Allende, Salvador, 737-8 

'Alliance for progress', 615 

Alsace, 21, 140, 141 

America: war corporatism, 16-17; and 
peace -settlement, 22-5, 27, 31-4; as war 
creditor, 35-6; violence in, 38; naval 
policy, 173-4; attitude to Japan, 188-9, 
203, 310, 391-3; race policy and 
xenophobia, 189, 203-7, 215; culture, 
207-9, 225-7; Prohibition, 209-12; 
corruption, 210-12, 217-18, 650-3; 
decline in radicalism, 212-16, 225; 
economy, 212, 214, 215-16, 222-6, 228, 
230-60, 456-7, 464, 613, 639-41, 
659-63, 665, 727; prosperity of 1920s, 
222-6, 228-9; spread of education, 225; 
economic crisis (1930s), 230-60; 
protectionist policy, 232, 246; 
intellectuals' reaction, 247-8, 252; 
isolationalism, 281, 310; disarmament, 
344; arms supply to Allies, 370-1; and 
Second World War, 370-1, 387, 391-5, 
398-9, 408-9, 422-6, 433-5; code- 
breaking, 398-400; nuclear weaponry, 
406-9, 424-5, 441, 442-3; attitude to 
Russia and Cold War, 432-43, 457-65, 



841 



842 



INDEX 



America (contd) 

614; commitment to Europe, 439-43, 
614; foreign and defence policy, 442-3, 
447-8, 450-1; and Far East, 443, 445, 
447-8, 450-1, 460-1, 463; confrontation 
with China, 450-1, 631; post-war 
prosperity, 456-7, 464, 613; anti- 
Communist witch-hunt, 458-61; oil 
production, 460; and Zionism, 484-5; 
universalist policy, 614- 
15, 633; and Latin America, 615-30; 
increasing confrontation with Russia, 
615, 623-8, 631; space programme, 
629-30; and Indo-China, 630-7, 653; 
high-spending legislation, 638-41; 
educational expansion, 641-3; student 
violence, 643- 

6; integration in education, 644-5; black 
violence, 645-6; media power and 
misrepresentation, 647, 649-53; new 
China policy, 648-9; renewed 
xenophobia, 649, 651-3; political 
espionage, 651-3; economic expansion, 
660; anti-business climate, 660-2; 
increased legislative power, 662-3; 
economic decline, 663-5; and arms race, 
685-6; increasing criticism of, 690-4; 
alleged imperialism, 690, 693-4; religion 
in, 704; post-war occupation of Japan, 
730-1; shifting centre of gravity, political 
changes, 747-50; defender or rule of law, 
751-3; drug abuse in, 752, 782; 
rearmament, 753-4; and Gulf War, Iraq, 
769-73; see also Latin America 

American Federation of Labor, 225, 232, 
244 

American Relief Administration, 93, 242 

Amery, Leo, 43, 162 

Amin, Hafizullah, 718-19 

Amin, Idi, 533-7, 541, 689 

Amristar massacre, 45-7, 521 

Amtorg, 260 

Anderson, Benjamin, 216 

Anderson, Sherwood, 252 

Andrew, A.P., 134 

Andropov, Yuri, 683, 754, 755 

Angka Loeu, 654-5, 656 

Anglo-German Naval Treaty (1935), 351 

Anglo-Japanese Treaty (1905), 173, 188 

Anglo-Russian Treaty of Alliance (1945), 
429 

Angola, 519, 542, 728 

Anschluss, 39, 319, 356 

Anti-Comintern Pact (1936), 321, 352, 360, 
386 

anti-Semitism, 420; Arab, 481-2; European, 
ending of, 486; French, 144, 346, 576; 
Marxist dismissal of, 128; Nazi, 133, 
278, 293, 319, 342-3; Russian, 116, 117, 
454-6; student, 127; in UN, 690; Weimar 
German, 116-22, 127, 133 



anti-Westernism, 452-3 

anti-white racism, 526-7 

Antonov Ovseenko, Vladimir, 335 

apartheid, 520, 521-4, 526, 728-9 

Apollo programme, 630 

Apostles, The, 29, 166-8, 171, 172, 347 

appeasement, 351, 354-5, 356 

'April Theses' (Lenin), 62, 89 

Arab Legion, 485 

Arab Liberation Army, 485 

Arafat, Yasser, 534, 689 

Araki, General Sadao, 189, 311 

Aref, Abdul Rahman, 666 

Argentina, 155, 616-18, 671, 750-1 

Arias, Carlos, 609 

Arias, Gino, 319 

Armenia, 766 

Arms Export Control Act (US, 1975), 653 

armaments, pre-war: Germany, 293, 294, 

297, 312, 341, 357; Japan, 312; America, 

344; France, 346; Britain, 367-8 
armaments, post-war, 442-3, 452, 685-7, 

753-4; disarmament, 757; see also 

nuclear weapons 
Armstrong, Neil, 630 
Aron, Robert, 143 

'Arusha Declaration' (1967), 529-30 
Asquith, H.H., 169 
Asquith, Raymond, 162 
assassination, political, 184-6, 298-305, 

314, 335, 398, 481-4, 497-500, 534 
assimilation policy, 496, 497 
Astor, Lady, 276 
Aswan Dam, 490 
Ataturk, Kemal, 45, 95, 138, 197 
atheism, 7, 48, 145, 701 
Atlantic Charter, 429 
atomic bomb, see nuclear weapons 
'Atoms for Peace' programme, 686 
atrocities, 318, 327-8, 335-6, 427-8, 

497-500, 531, 532-7, 572, 654-7 
Attadell, Garcia, 327 
Attlee, Clement, 467, 482, 487 
Auden, W.H., 336, 337 
Auschwitz, 304, 414, 415, 416-18, 419, 

422 
Australia, 175, 189, 732, 746 
Austria, 37, 38, 242, 278; national 

socialism in, 95; Anschluss, 319, 352-3, 

356; murdered Jews from, 415 
Austria-Hungary, 37; break-up of, 22, 24, 

38-9 
Autenticos, 619 
Avksientiev, N.D., 71 
Axelrod, Paul, 128 
Axis Pact (1940), 387, 390 
Ayer, Sir A.J., 699 
Aylwin, Patricio, 739 
Azerbaijan, 766 
Azzam Pasha, 486, 489 



INDEX 



843 



Babel, Isaac, 306 

Bach, Lydia, 81 

Bagehot, Walter, 239, 240 

Bainville, Jacques, 145, 147 

Baker, Josephine, 119 

Baker, Newton, 206 

Balabanov, Angelica, 319 

Balbo, Italo, 98-9, 103 

Baldwin, Stanley, 164, 175, 310, 349 

Balfour, A.J., 18,25,27,235 

Balfour Declaration (1917), 22, 481, 482, 486 

ballistic missiles, 405-6 

Ballod, Karl, 94 

Baltic republics, 765, 767 

Baltic -White Sea Canal, 274, 275 

Bamberg Conference (1926), 278 

Banda, Dr Hastings, 531 

Bandung Conference (1955), 477, 480, 

489-90,511,512,518 
Bangladesh, 569, 573, 574 
Bank of England, 235, 237, 669 
Banking Acts (US, 1933, 1935), 255 
Bantu Education Act (1954), 523 
Barcelona, 323, 328; in civil war, 333-4, 

335, 336, 338, 339 
Baring Maurice, 163 
Barnes, Maynard, 437 
Barnowsky, Victor, 113 
Barres, Maurice, 148 
Barthes, Roland, 695 
Baruch, Bernard, 16, 35, 88 
Basque separatists, 688 
Bataan 'death march', 428 
Batista, Fulgencio, 619, 620-2 
Bauer, Otto, 128, 153, 323 
Bauhaus, 112, 114 
Bay of Pigs operation (1961), 463, 624, 

629, 630 
'Bayeux constitution' (1946), 589, 595 
Beamish, Henry Hamilton, 348 
Beard, Charles, 228, 248 
Beaverbrook, Lord, 370, 385 
Beauvoir, Simone de, 544, 575 
Beck, Ludwig, 353, 354 
Begin, Menachem, 482, 483, 708 
Beirut, 708, 716 
Belgium, 188, 189, 415, 514-15 
Bell, Clive, 29, 167 
Below, Georg von, 126 
Belzec, 415 

Ben Bella, Ahmed, 496, 497, 505, 516 
Ben-Gurion, David, 484, 486 
Benda, Julien, 143,337 
Benelux, 448, 591 
Benes, Edouard, 235, 440 
Benin, 541, 542 
Benjamin, Walter, 284 
Bennett, General Gordon, 395 
Bentley, Elizabeth, 458 
Beraud, Henri, 142 
Berg,Alban, 8, 113, 117 



Bergner, Elisabeth, 116 

Beria, Lavrenti, 302, 409, 455, 674-5 

Berillon, Dr Edgar, 145 

Berle, Adolf, 27, 248 

Berlin, Irving, 227 

Berlin, 284, 582; as artistic world centre, 

112-13; burning of Reichstag, 285; 

Hitler's death in, 412-13; blockade, 440- 

2; Wall, 586, 760 
Bernal, J.D., 276, 348 
Bernanos, Georges, 328 
Berzin, General Jan Antonovich, 335 
Besant, Annie, 42 
Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 12, 15, 

16, 107, 108 
Bevan, Aneurin, 467 
Bevin, Ernest, 437, 466-7, 483-4 
Bhutto, Zulfikar Ali, 570, 571, 573 
Biafra, 514 

Big Bang theory, 698-9 
Bihar, 569, 572 
biology, 777-80 

Birkenhead, F.E. Smith, Lord, 221, 346 
Birmingham (Alabama), 645 
Bismarck, Otto von, 107, 108, 115, 116, 

122, 134, 140 
Black Dragon sect, 183, 185 
Blackett, P.S.M., 402, 467 
Blair, General Sir Chandos, 536 
Blech,Leo, 113 
Bleichroder, Gerson von, 116 
Blitzkrieg, 358, 359, 362, 364, 366, 377, 

379, 401 
Bliven, Bruce, 218, 259 
Bloch, Ernst, 116 
Bloch, Marc, 364 
Blomberg, General Werner von, 283, 298, 

352 
Bloomsbury Group, 29, 166-73 
Blum, Leon, 151, 346, 365, 592 
Blundell, Sir Michael, 508 
Blunden, Edmund, 163 
Blunt, Anthony, 172, 347 
Blyumkin, Yakov, 266 
Boeckler, Hans, 583, 584 
Boer Nationalists, 522, 525 
Bogota, 620 
Bohr, Nils, 407 

Bokassa, Marshal Jean Bedel, 532, 541 
Bolsheviks, 22, 52, 59, 60-5, 72, 76, 78; see 

also Communist Party; Social Democrats, 

Russian 
Bolton, Sir George, 664 
Bondi, Georg, 117 
'Bonus expeditionary force', 249-50 
Book of the Month Club, 225 
Borah, William, 258 
Boris, Roland, 587 
Bormann, Martin, 290, 292 
Born, Max, 4 
Borodin, Michael, 193, 196 



844 



INDEX 



Bose, Chandra, 469 

Bose, Rash Behari, 185 

Boston (Mass.), 211 

Botswana, 526, 542 

Bouhler, Philip, 413 

Boumendjel, Ahmed, 496 

Bourguiba, Habib, 538 

Bourne, Randolph, 14, 207 

Bowles, Chester, 624 

Bradley, General Omar, 436 

brainwashing, 548-9, 552 

Brandeis, Justice Louis, 204 

Brandt, Karl, 412 

Brandt, Willy, 335 

Brandt Report (1980), 692 

Brauchitsch, General Heinrich von, 352, 353 

Braudel, Fernand, 597, 695 

Braun, Werner Von, 629 

Brazil, 671, 673, 694, 703, 706 

Brazzaville, 501, 517 

Brazzaville Conference (1944), 507 

Brazzaville Twelve, 540 

Brecht, Bertholt, 112-13, 306, 307 

Bredow, General von, 298 

Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918), 82, 105, 
133, 342 

Bretton Woods Agreement (1944), 659, 663 

Brzezinski, Zbigniew, 674 

Brezhnev, Leonid, 302, 676-7, 678, 682, 
726, 754 

Britain: and First World War, 20-2, 28, 
30-1; aim of self-determination, 21-2, 
41-7, 508-10; and idea of League of 
Nations, 30-1, inflation, 35; violence, 38; 
war gains, 43-4; disintegration of 
Empire, 43, 45, 346-7, 468-70; failing 
alliance with France, 138-9, 147, 381-2; 
sparse investment in colonies, 155, 156; 
and colonial labour system, 158; imperial 
currency system, 161; 'lost generation' 
and war literature, 162-3; agricultural 
and industrial decay, 163-4, 170; 
economy, 164, 439, 600-4; intellectual 
life, 166-72, 347-9; concern over defence 
and security, 172-5; disarmament, 174, 
346; economic policies, 234-7; cut in air 
and naval power, 309-12, 320, 321; 
sanctions policy, 320-1; left-wing 
influence, 347-8; pacifism, 483-50; fear 
of Communism, 354; acceptance of war 
as inevitable, 356-7; and Second World 
War, 367-9, 385-6, 395-6, 399-400, 
402-4, 408; assistance to Russia, 385-6; 
code-breaking, 399-400; and mass 
bombing, 402-4; nuclear research, 408, 
467-8; and war-crimes, 430-1; no longer 
a world power, 439, 493, 599; and 
strategic arms race, 467-8; and collective 
security, 467, 468; and Middle East, 
480-4, 490-3; decolonization, 508-10; 
and EEC, 598-9, 600; economic structural 



weakness, 600-1; trade union 
dominance, 601-3; church attendance, 
704; Japanese investment in, 732-3; 
industrial disputes, 740-4; expanding 
economy in the 1980s, 744-5; Labour 
Party, 746; Cruise missiles, 753 

British Airways, 744 

British Steel, 744 

British Telecom, 744 

Brittain, Vera, 350 

Britton, Nan, 218 

Broch, Hermann, 117 

Brockdorff-Rantzau, Count von, 26-7 

Brooke, Sir Alan, 433 

Brooke, Rupert, 19, 162 

Brooks, Van Wyck, 206, 207, 252 

Bruce, David, 463 

Bruning, Heinrich, 281, 282, 295 

Bryan, William Jennings, 208, 209 

Buch, Major Walter, 293 

Buchenwald, 418 

Bukharin, Nikolai, 262, 263, 265-6, 272, 
301, 303, 307 

Bulganin, Nikolai, 675 

Bulgaria, 373, 374, 415, 434, 437, 727, 
760, 762 

Bullitt, William, 27 

Bund Wehrwolf, 124 

Bunds, 124, 125 

Biirgerblock, 605 

Burgess, Guy, 172, 247 

Burma, 154, 162, 573, 727, 736 

Burundi, 531, 541 

Bury,J.B., 13 

Busch, Fritz, 112 

Bush, President George, 752, 769, 770, 773 

bushido, 180, 181, 184, 186 

Bussche, Albert, 576 

Butler, R.A., 492 

Butler, General Smedling, 210 

Byas, Hugh, 185,318 

Byrnes, James, 437 

Bywater, Hector, 393 

Caballero, Francino Largo, 322-3, 325, 

333, 334 
Cachin, Marcel, 337 
Caillaux, Joseph, 16 
calculators, 780 
Calcutta, 573-4 
Caldwell, Erskine, 252 
Callaghan, James, 536 
Calvin, Jean, 51, 53 
Cambodia, 631, 633, 654-7 
Camelots du Rot, Les, 146 
Cameroon, 507, 541, 542 
Camp David, 708 
Campbell, W.W., 2 
camps, concentration/death/labour: Russia, 

91-2, 261, 274-5, 304-5; German, 

288-9, 304, 414-22 



INDEX 



845 



camps, prisoner-of-war: Japanese, 427-8; 

German, 428 
Camus, Albert, 143, 499, 504, 576, 577 
Canada, 175, 189 
Capone, Al, 210, 265 
car production, 142, 223, 225, 238, 731-2, 

732-3 
Carlists, 331 
'Carlos' (assassin), 688 
Carney, Admiral, 683 
Carrillo, Santiago, 325 
Carson, Sir Edward, 46 
Carson, Rachel, 661 

Carter, Jimmy, 673-4, 697, 708, 713, 748 
Casablanca Conference (1943), 411 
Casablanca Group, 540 
Castro, Fidel 620-8, 684, 685 
Catholic Church, 98, 701-4, 706; 

Mussolini's concordat with, 101, 579; 

and French schools, 143; and nationalism 

145; Spanish Republican hatred of, 

326-7; in Poland, 702, 703; and Third 

World, 703-4 
Ceausescu, Nicolae, 760-2 
Cecil, Lord Robert, 31, 41, 172, 310, 350 
ceda (Confederation Espanola de Derechas 

Autonomas), 324 
Central African Republic, 517, 532, 541 
Chad, 507, 541, 542, 707, 727 
Chadwick, Sir James, 406 
Chamberlain, Austen, 28, 29, 139, 147 
Chamberlain, B. Hall, 181 
Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 120 
Chamberlain, Joseph, 152 
Chamberlaink, Neville, 131, 321, 353, 354, 

357, 368 
Chamberlain, W.H., 70 
Chambers, Whittaker, 458 
Chamson, Andre, 337 
Chanak crisis (1922), 138 
Chang Chun-chiao, 564 
Chang Kuo Tao, 315 
Chang Tso-lin, Marshal, 195 
Chang Tsung-chang, Marshal, 195 
Chantiers de la Jeunesse, 588 
Chaplin, Charlie, 186 
Charles, Emperor of Austria, 19 
Chartier, Emile, 143 
Chase, Stuart, 248, 252, 260 
Cheka (All-Russian Extraodinary 

Commission), 67-71, 78, 80, 91 
Ch'en Tu-hsiu, 194 
Chernenko, Konstantin, 755 
Chernobyl, 756 
Cherwell, Lord, 405 
Chessman, Caryl, 643 
Chiang Ching (wife of Mao Tse-tung), 552- 

4, 555, 558-9, 561, 563-5 
Chiang Ching-kuo, General, 446 
Chiang Kai-shek, 193-6, 199, 201, 315-16, 

443-7 



Chibas, Eduardo, 620 

Chicago, 38, 247 

Chihani, Bachir, 497 

Childs, Marquis, 604 

Chile, 736-9 

China: contrast with Japan, 177-8; 
Japanese attack and demands on, 187, 
190, 201-2; decaying imperial 
government, 190-1; Republic, 191-2; 
war-lord era, 192, 195, 196-202, 445; 
search for foreign aid, 193; Communist 
aid and infiltration, 194-6, 315-16; rival 
parties and leaders, 194-7; radical reform 
by force, 196-202; recruitment of 
peasants, 198-9; banditry and slaughter, 
200-1; war with Japan, 315-18, 388; 
victim of Yalta, 430; American policy on, 
443, 444, 446, 448; renewed civil war, 
444-8; economy, 445-6, 550, 566; land 
reform, 447, 548, 549; despotic regime, 
447, 544-67; nuclear power, 451, 686; 
visitors' uncritical praise of, 544-5; social 
and mental engineering, 548-50, 552, 
555-62; 'hundred flowers' campaign, 
549; Great Leap to Communism, 550-2; 
Cultural Revolution, 552, 555-62, 565, 
566; student violence, 556, 557-61; risk 
of civil war, 560; leadership conflict and 
'Gang of Four', 564-5; 'new realism', 
566-7; and Vietnam, 631-2; dispute with 
Russia, 648, 686; new American policy 
on, 648; population, 723-4; food 
production, 725; repressive policies, 
758-9 

chlorofluorocarbons, 774, 775 

Choctow, 200 

Chomsky, Noam, 695 

Chou En-lai, 315, 316, 476, 477, 548, 550, 
558, 562, 563 

Christian Democrats: Italian, 579; German 
(cdu), 581, 582, 583 

Chu Yu-pu, 195 

Church of England, 164-5 

Churchill, Winston, 27, 271, 349, 418, 463, 
467, 533, 610; on destructive capacity of 
'educated states', 13-14, 370, 402; on 
Amritsar, 46; on Lenin, 49; attitude to 
Bolsheviks, 73-4, 75; return to gold 
standard, 164; and naval spending, 174; 
on impossibility of war with Japan, 174, 
175, 176; share speculation, 230-1; 
unheeded warnings on Hitler, 346; 
campaign against India Bill, 347, 572; on 
Munich, 355; as wartime leader, 367, 
368-71; and terror-bombing, 369-70, 
402-3, 404; and Russia, 372, 373, 
384-6; and 'unconditional surrender', 
411; and use of atomic bomb, 425; at 
Yalta, 430, 466; anxiety over Russia, 
433-5, 437-8, 466; at Teheran, 433; and 
China, 443; safeguard to Tito, 449; 



846 



INDEX 



Churchill (contd) 

agrees to Indian independence, 470, 473; 

and Palestine, 482, 488; call for United 

States of Europe, 599 
cia (Central Intelligence Agency), 463, 491, 

621, 631, 634, 650, 653 
Ciano, Count, 339, 410, 412 
Cienfuegos, Camilo, 623 
civil rights, 644-6, 662-3 
Civil Service Law (Germany, 1933), 290 
civilization: versus culture, 111-12, 

115-16, 121-2, 125-6, 136, 209; French 

attitude to, 142-3, 594 
Clark-Kerr, Sir Archibald, 434 
Claudel, Paul, 327 
Clay, General Lucius, 441 
Clean Air Act (US, 1965), 661 
Clean Water Restoration Act (US, 1966), 

661 
Clemenceau, Georges, 16, 21, 24, 26-7, 32, 

149 
Clement, Rudolf, 335 
elemental, Etienne, 142, 590 
Clifford, Clark, 637 
coal industry, in Britain, 740-3 
Coal-Mine Health and Safety Act (US, 

1969), 662 
Cockburn, Claud, 345 
Cockcroft, Sir John, 406, 407 
code-breaking, 386, 397, 398-400 
Codovilla, Vittorio, 325 
Colby, Bainbridge, 33 
Cold War, 435, 437-8, 440-3, 452, 458, 

464, 485, 489, 539, 582, 614, 632, 685, 

757, 768 
Cole, G.D.H., 348 
collective security, 349, 351, 467, 468, 613, 

671-2 
collectivization, 697; China, 548, 549; 

Russia, 92-3, 261, 266, 270-1, 524; 

Tanzania, 530; decline of, 698; in 

agriculture, 724-8 
Collins, Canon L. John, 404 
Cologne, 580, 581 

Colonial Sterling Exchange Standard, 161 
colonialism 148-62, 506; administration, 

155-6, 513; and economy, 151-3, 154, 

155, 514, 567; ephemeral impact of, 513; 

false theories of, 512-14; 'exploitation', 

157; forced labour, 158-9; industry, 

156-7; as investment, 152-3, 154, 155; 

purpose of, 151-6; racial basis for land 

apportionment, 158, 159-60; and social 

engineering, 519-24; visual aspect of, 

160-1; British, 159, 161-2; French, 148- 

51, 154, 495, 601; Nazi, 343, 380-1; 

population and, 722, 723 
Colossus electronic computer, 400 
Colour Bar Act (South Africa, 1926), 521 
COMECON, 727 
Cominform, 448, 449 



Comintern, 102, 323, 336, 337 

Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 592, 
600 

Communism: attainment believed possible 
by Khrushchev, 675; British fear of, 354; 
Chinese Great Leap towards, 550-1; 
espionage and subversion, 458-60; and 
national liberation wars, 615; South 
African suppression of, 523; and South- 
East Asia, 630-3, 636-7, 654-7; and 
totalitarianism, 277, 354, 630-3, 675, 
677-9; destruction of, in Eastern Europe, 
702, 757-8, 759-63 

Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 
52-3; supremacy of, 80-3, 675, 679, 
682-3; bureaucracy, 81, 83-4; crushing 
of opposition, 81-2; democracy stifled in, 
84; rank-and-file acclimatization to 
violence, 272; purges of, 299-308, 334; 
attempt to make more democratic, 675; 
Central Committee, 82-3, 84, 87, 262; 
266, 273; Council of Labour and 
Defence, 81; Council of People's 
Commissars, 81; Politburo, 63, 83, 84, 
87, 89, 262, 265 

Communist Party, American, 213, 250, 252 

Communist Party, British, 348 

Communist Party, Chinese, 193, 194-6, 
201,315-17,444,446, 551-2,561, 
563, 566 

Communist Party, Cuban, 619, 620, 623 

Communist Party, French, 361, 588-9, 592 

Communist Party, German, 66, 94-5, 108, 
116, 135, 278, 281, 282, 283, 286 

Communist Party, Indonesian (pki), 479-80 

Communist Party, Italian, 57, 98, 99, 579 

Communist Party, Spanish, 322, 325, 327, 
333-9 

Conant, James, 429 

'concordance democracy', 605 

Congo, 154, 158, 514-17, 518, 519, 531, 
541, 685 

Congress of Soviets, 63 

Connelly, Marc, 227 

Connolly, Cyril, 169 

Conrad, Joseph, 12-13, 86 

Conservative Party, British, 347, 368, 369, 
602, 603 

conspiracy theory, 144, 145, 146, 152 

Constituent Assembly (Russia), 64, 71-2 

constitution-making: in decolonization, 
508-9; France (Fourth Republic), 
589-90, 595; Greece, 611; Japan, 730-1; 
Spain, 609-10; Weimar Republic, 
110-11; West Germany, 583 

constitutionalism, new African states' lapse 
from, 513, 517, 534 

consumer goods, 732 

'containment' policy, 447-8, 465, 489 

Coolidge, Calvin, 35, 214, 219-21, 228-9, 
241, 258, 585 



INDEX 



847 



copec (the Conference on Christian Politics, 
Economics and Citizenship), 165 

Copland, Aaron, 227 

corporate state, growth of, 122, 126-7 

corruption: Africa, 518; America, 210-12, 
217-18, 650-3; Cuba, 619-20; India, 
570-1; Japan, 181 

Cortada, Roldan, 334, 335 

cosmology, 698-9 

Cotonou, 517 

Coutrot, Jean, 587 

Cowley, Malcolm, 252 

Cox, Professor Archibald, 643 

Craigie, Sir Robert, 390 

Cramer, Charles, 217 

Credit Anstalt, 246, 670 

credit-inflation, 233, 240, 244," 256-8 

Crick, Francis, 731 

Cripps, Sir Stafford, 404 

Croce, Benedetto, 99, 306 

Croix de Feu, 146 

Croly, Herbert, 16 

Crowe, Sir Eyre, 21, 41, 147 

Cruise missiles, 753 

Cuba, 539; US right of intervention, 616, 
619, 621-2, 624, 626-8; economy, 618- 
19, 621, 628, 684; corruption, 619-20; 
revolutionary government, 621-2; 
dictatorship, 622-3; abortive invasion of, 
624; move to Soviet, 623-4, 625, 628, 
684-5; missile crisis, 625-8; as Soviet 
satellite-mercenary, 684-5 

Culbertson, Ely, 247 

Culman, Henri, 587 

Cultural revolution (China), 545, 552, 555- 
62, 565, 566 

culture, 8-10; versus civilization, 10-12, 
115-16, 121-2, 125-6, 209; American, 
206-9, 215, 225-7; French, 143; Weimar 
German, 112-17 

currency control, 233, 235-8 

currency market, 659-60, 663-5 

Curzon, Lord, 42, 43, 138, 157, 166, 173, 
193,219 

Cyprus, 21 

Czechoslovakia: minorities, 39-40; German 
occupation, 338, 353-5, 356; murdered 
Jews from, 415; as Soviet satellite, 440, 
448; IRA supplied from, 715; end of 
Communist rule in, 760, 763 

Czestochowa, 703 

D'Abernon, Lord, 139 

Dachau, 288, 304, 418 

Dada, 9 

Daddah, Ould, 541 

Dahomey, 517 

Dai Nihon Kokusuikai, 184 

Dakar, 156 

Dako, David, 532 

Daladier, Edouard, 353, 354, 365, 592 



Dalton, Hugh, 440, 466 

Dandieu, Andre, 143 

D'Annunzio, Gabriele, 95, 96, 99 

Danquah,J.B.,511,512 

Darwin, Charles, 5, 117, 120, 778 

Darwinism, 5, 130, 208, 777-8 

Daud, Mohammed, 708 

Daudet, Leon, 145 

Daugherty, Harry, 217, 218 

David, Eduard, 108 

Davidson, J.C.C, 469 

Davies, Joseph E., 276, 307, 345, 436 

Davis, John W., 214 

Dawes, Charles, 216 

Dawes Plan, 147 

Dawson, Geoffrey, 356 

Day-Lewis, Cecil, 336 

Dayan, General Moshe, 485, 492 

De Gaulle, General Charles, 27, 192, 507, 
577, 587, 589, 590, 611, 633, 663; and 
Free French, 365; and Algeria, 501-3, 
504, 505; seizure of power, 502; 
President of Fifth Republic, 502, 
593-600; intellectualism, 593, 597; 
theory of state, 594-5; transformation of 
France, 596-7; meeting with Adenauer, 
598; antipathy to Britain, 598-600; and 
European Community, 765 

Dean, Sir Patrick, 430 

Deat, Marcel, 147 

Death's Head Units, 287 

Debs, Eugene, 17, 34, 216 

decolonization, 495-505, 506-43; 
constitutional complexities, 508; 
federation, 509-10; professional 
politicians and, 510-11, 514-15, 517, 
543; reversal of material progress, 540-1; 
see also self-determination 

Defence of the Realm Act (1914), 16 

DeGolyer, Everett, 480 

Deir Yassin massacre, 486 

Dekanozov, Vladimir, 411 

Delhi, 161 

Delors, Jacques, 764 

'democratic centralism', 77, 81 

Democratic Party, American, 214, 251, 
254, 259, 344, 460, 644, 649, 651 

Denikin, General Anton I., 73, 76, 77 

Denison, E.F., 641 

Denmark, 604, 605 

Denning, Lord, 602 

Denny, Harold, 307 

Desai, Morarji, 568, 570, 571 

Detroit, 211; black riots, 646 

Deutsch, Julius, 323 

Deutscher, Isaac, 263, 271 

Devonshire Declaration (1923), 159 

Dewey, John, 17, 208, 228 

Dez irrigation project, 712 

dgb (Deutschergewerkschaftsbund), 584 

Diaghilev, Sergei, 8, 9 



848 INDEX 

Diagne, Blaise, 150 

Diaz, Jose, 333 

Dicey, A.V., 601 

Dickinson, G. Lowes, 170 

Diederichs, Eugen, 119 

Dien Bien Phu, 590, 632 

Dietz, Howard, 227 

Dimitrov, Georgi, 323, 448 

Dinter, Artur, 120 

dissent, Russian treatment of, 680-3 

Dix, Otto, 114 

Djilas, Milovan, 81,448 

DNA research, 778-9 

Doblin, Alfred, 117 

Doi, General Akin, 316 

Dollfuss, Engelbert, 322 

Donovan, William, 437 

Dornberger, Walter, 405 

Dos Passos, John, 226, 252, 337 

Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 56, 86, 689 

Douglas, Jack, 250 

Douglas, Paul, 252 

Douhet, Giulio, 349 

Dreiser, Theodore, 226, 252 

Dresden, 112; destruction of, 404-5 

Drieu la Rochelle, Pierre, 19 

drug abuse, in America, 752, 782 

Drumont, Edouard, 144 

'Dual Mandate', 155, 513 

Dubcek, Alexander, 676 

Dubnow, Simon, 128 

DuBois, Joseph, 422 

Diihring, Eugen, 120 

Dulles, John Foster, 27, 36, 462, 463, 464, 

624 
Dunkirk, 366 
Dupuy, Maurice, 499 
Duranty, Walter, 307 
Dutch East Indies, 391, 395, 478 
Dvorak, Max, 114 
Dyadkin, Iosif, 272 
Dyer, General Reginald, 45-7 
Dyson, Sir Frank, 2 
Dzerzhinsky, Felix, 67, 68, 69 

East Asia, market forces in, 729-30, 733; 
see also individual countries 

'East Asian League', 187 

East Fulham by-election (1933), 350 

East-West division, 111 

Eastern Europe, 757-8, 759-63 

Easterners, German, 111-12, 114, 115, 
117, 122, 123, 124, 125-7, 135, 144, 
280 

Eban, Abba, 486 

Ebert, Friedrich, 110, 123, 124 

Echeverria, Luis, 747 

Eckart, Dietrich, 284 

Eckhart, Dieter, 119 

economic crisis (1930s), 230-60; credit- 
inflation, 233, 236-8, 240, 244; currency 



control, 233, 235-8; foreign loans, 
233-4; Great Crash, 231, 240-1, 
243-54; inflation, 233, 234, 236-8; 
interventionism, 234-5, 244, 245-7, 251, 
254-7; investment-trusting, 239; 
managed currency, 235, 237; margin- 
trading, 231, 239; planning, 248-9, 251, 
254-7; recovery, 254-7; stabilization, 
234, 235, 236-7; stock-eschange 
speculation, 231, 234, 239, 240; tariffs, 
232, 234 

'Economic Rights and Duties of States, UN 
Charter of (1974), 691 

'Ectopia', 661 

Eddington, Sir Arthur, 2, 3, 5, 699 

Eddy, Sherwood, 260 

Eden, Anthony, 297, 346, 351, 386, 421, 
431, 489; and Suez crisis, 490-3 

Edison, Thomas, 220, 259 

education: America, 225, 247, 641-5; 
Britain, 642; China, 552, 556, 562; 
France, 142, 143, 596; East Asia, 733 

Egypt, 44, 154, 475; hostility to Israel, 487; 
and Suez crisis, 490-5; racism, 526; 
Israeli war against, 666, 684; Yom 
Kippur War, 668; peace with Israel, 708, 
709; murder of Sadat, 710; and Gulf 
War, 772 

Ehrenburg, Ilya, 65, 421 

Eichmann, Adolf, 288, 414, 416 

Einsatzgruppen, 380, 382, 414 

Einstein, Albert, 10, 306, 407; and 
relativity, 1-5, 11, 406, 453; and 
scientific proof, 2-3, 6 

Einstein, Carl, 114 

'Eisenach Resolution' (1919), 127 

Eisenhower, Dwight D., 219, 250, 436, 
451, 599, 614, 624, 645, 650, 652; and 
Korean War, 460-1, 463; style of 
presidency, 461-4; aim to avoid war, 
463; and civilian control of military, 
463-4; economic policy, 464, 613, 629, 
640; and Suez, 490, 493, 494, 689; 
mis judgment over Vietnam, 632-3; media 
misrepresentation, 647 

Eisenstein, Sergei, 453 

Eisner, Kurt, 94, 95, 96, 108, 122 

El Glawi, Pasha of Marrakesh, 150 

electronics, 780-1 

Eliot, T.S., 9, 10, 306 

Ellis, Havelock, 6 

Emergency Banking Act (US, 1934), 254, 255 

Emergency Decree (Germany, 1933), 285 

Emergency Relief and Construction Act (US, 
1932), 245 

Employment Acts (1980, 1982), 603 

Employment Protection Acts (1975, 1979), 
602 

Enabling Act (Germany, 1933), 285, 346 
energy crisis, 665, 667-71; 'enabling state', 
746 



INDEX 



849 



energy crisis, 665, 667-71 

Engels, Friedrich, 55, 213, 270 

English Church Census, 704 

Enigma coding system, 386, 399, 400 

environment protection, 661-2, 697, 774-5 

Equal Opportunities Act (US, 1964), 639 

Equatorial Guinea, 531, 541 

Erhard, Ludwig, 583, 585 

Erlander, Tage, 604 

Espionage Act (US, 1917), 17, 204 

Estonia, 361, 765 

Ethiopia (Abyssinia), 154, 320-1, 351, 539, 

542, 685, 709, 727 
ethnic minorities, 713 
Etudiants d* Action Francaise, 146 
Eurodollar, 663-4, 670 
European (Economic) Community, 243, 

587, 590, 591, 598, 599-600, 727, 763-5 
Evans, Hiram Wesley, 204 
Evatt, H.V., 466 
Evian Agreements, 504 
evolution, 777-8 
Existentialism, 575, 576-7, 687 
Explorer 1, 629 
Expressionism, 8, 9, 114, 119 
extermination policies, 71, 92-3, 130, 133, 

261, 266, 270-1, 287, 304, 382, 384, 

413-22, 430-1, 462, 482, 499-500, 536, 

537 

Fadaev, Aleksandr, 453 

Fadiman, Clifton, 252 

Faisceau, Le> 146 

Falange, 327, 331, 334 

Falashas, 709 

Falkland Islands, 750-1 

Fall, Albert, 33, 215, 217 

family, 581, 731; 'one-parent', 781-2 

Fanon, Franz, 687 

Farben, I.G., 294, 414, 416, 417, 422 

farming, see agriculture 

Farouk, King of Egypt, 487, 488 

Fascism, 56-8, 146-7, 306; anti-Communist, 
102, 277; collapse of, 579; debt to 
Leninism, 56-8; expansion of, 98, 100-2; 
mixture of myth and violence, 96-7, 98-9; 
Mussolini's adoption of, 95-6, 97, 101-2, 
243; Nazi debt to, 319; nebulous nature, 
101-2; totalitarianism, 101, 277, 578 

Fashoda, 154 

Faubus, Governor Orval, 645 

Faulkner, William, 226 

Fauves, 8 

Federal Reserve Bank, 233, 235, 236, 237, 
239, 255 

federation, 509-10, 513-14; West German, 
581-2 

Feel, Captain Adolf, Jr, 429 

Feng Yu-hsiang, Marshal, 195, 201 

Feraoun, Mouloud, 504 

Fermi, Enrico, 407, 424 



Fernandez, George, 570 

Ferry, Jules, 152, 154 

Feuchtwanger, Lion, 117, 306, 307 

Field, Sir Frederick, 310 

'Fifth Column', 334 

Fiji, 736 

'Final Solution', 130, 133, 382, 413-22, 482 

Finland, 105, 361, 365, 373 

Firestone, Harvey, 220 

First Agricultural Adjustment Act (US, 1933), 
255 

First World War, 9, 11-26, 43-4, 58-62, 
72-3, 104-10, 126, 162-3, 342 

Fischer, Fritz, 106 

Fisher, H.A.L., 74 

Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 215, 222, 226 

Fiume, 95 

'Five Particulars' (Wilson), 23-4 

Five Year Plans, 260, 273 

Flandin, Pierre-Etienne, 592 

Flex, Walter, 19 

Flick, Friedrich, 422 

fln (Front de Liberation Nationale), 496, 
497-503 

Foch, Marshal, 26, 32, 74 

Foot, Michael, 350 

Tor the Protection of the German People' 
decree (1933), 284 

Forbes, Charles, 217 

Ford, President Gerald, 640, 654, 670, 672 

Ford, Henry, 220 

Fordney-MacCumber Tariff Act (1922), 232 

Foreign Minister's Conference (Moscow, 
1945), 437 

Foreign Trade and Investment Act (US, 
1971), 694 

Formosa (Taiwan), 187, 446, 448 

Forrestal, James, 437, 441, 481, 485 

Forster, E.M., 167, 169, 170 

Fortas, Abe, 257 

Foster, William Z., 252, 260 

Tour Principles' (Wilson), 23-4 

Four Year Plan (German), 291, 294 

'Fourteen Points' (Wilson), 23-4, 27, 105 

Fowler, Henry, 257, 637 

France: war corporatism, 16; post-war (1918) 
swing to Left, 18; and self-determination, 
20-1; scepticism over League, 32; inflation, 
35; war-debts, 35; and reparations, 36, 
139; occupies, Ruhr, 139; failing alliance 
with Britain, 138-9, 147, 148, 351-2; fear 
of German military revival, 138-9; post- 
war weakness, 140-2; population decrease, 
140, 141; inflation, 141, 142; economy, 
141-2, 309; as home of civilization, 142-3; 
intellectual life, 142-3, 575-7, 694-5; 
battle over culture, 143-4, 145; 
nationalism, 144-7; patriotism, 144; anti- 
Semitism, 144, 346, 576; defensive policy, 
147-8, 345-6, 563; colonialism, 148-51, 
154, 495, 501; forced disarmament, 346; 



850 



INDEX 



France {contd) 

collapse after German attack, 363-4; drift 
into Nazi camp, 365-6, 587; and Suez, 
491-5; decolonization, 495-505, 507; 
Fourth Republic recovery, 587, 589-93, 
596; constitution, 589-90; technocratic 
revolution, 590; economy, 590-3, 595-7; 
and EEC, 590-1, 598, 600; 'indicative 
planning', ^91-2; xenophobia, 592; need 
for strong state, 594-5; Fifth Republic 
constitution, 595; 'renewal', 595-8; accord 
with Germany, 598; antipathy to Britain, 
598-600; and Indo-China, 631, 633; in 
1980s, 745; and Gulf War, 771 see also 
Vichy Government 

France, Anatole, 146 

Franco, General Francisco, 323-4, 329, 330- 
2, 334, 335, 338-9, 366, 608, 608-9 

Frank, Bruno, 117, 306 

Frank, Hans, 284, 289, 321 

Frank, Waldo, 207, 260 

Frankfurt, 112 

Frankfurter, Felix, 257, 259 

Frazer, Sir James, 7 

Free French, 365 

Freeman, Joseph, 260 

Freikorps, 124, 125 

Freisler, Roland, 290, 412 

French Resistance, 588 

Freud, Sigmund, 5-10, 12, 48, 96, 353 

Frick, Wilhelm, 283, 290, 297, 298 

Friml, Rudolph, 227 

Frisch, Otto, 407 

Fritsch, Theodor, 119 

Fritsch, Baron Werner von, 352 

Frunze, M.V., 265 

Fry, Roger, 168 

Fuchs, Klaus, 458 

Fiihrerprinzip, 279 

Fulbright, William, 257, 634 

Fuller, General, J.F.C., 349 

Fuller, R. Buckminster, 4 

Fulton, Churchill speech at (1946), 437, 438 

Funk, Walther, 284, 291 

Fushun, 201 

Futurists, 8, 9, 96, 97 

Gabon, 507, 514, 517, 531 

Gadafy, Colonel Muammar, 532, 534, 538, 

667, 688, 707, 742, 752 
Gagarin, Yuri, 629 
Galbraith,J.K.,240,613 
Galen, Bishop Count, 413 
Galicia, 37, 39 
Galileo, 1, 5 
Gambia, 509 
Gamelin, General Maurice, 354, 363, 364, 

365 
Gandhi, Indira, 568-71, 715 
Gandhi, Mahatma, 42, 470-2, 474; passive 

resistance, 44, 45, 149 



Gandhi, Rajiv, 715 

Gandhi, Sanjay, 570 

Garment, Leonard, 690 

Garvin, J.L., 162 

gas chambers, 415 

Gasperi, Alcide de, 577-9 

Gauleiters, 290 

Gemlin, Otto, 118 

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade 

(GAIT), 764 

General Electric, 402, 660 

General Motors, 238 

General Strike (1926), 164, 165 

genetics, 778-80 

Geneva Accords (1954), 632, 633 

Genoa Conference (1922), 235 

genocide, 71, 304, 382, 384, 413-22, 430-1, 
482, 499-500, 536, 537 

Genyosha secret society, 183 

Georgia (USSR), 765 

Gerhardsen, Einar, 604 

German Workers' Party (later National 
Socialist Party, q.v.), 133 

Germany: wartime expansion of role of state, 
15-16; war socialism, 16, 89-90, 277, 
401; youth movements, 18; peace 
settlement, 23-8, 105-6, 108; 'war guilt', 
24, 106-8; reparations, 36, 134, 139; 
military assistance to Bolsheviks, 76; 
Marxist risings, 94-5; last months and 
defeat in First World War, 104-8; a 
republic, 104, 105, 109; territorial losses, 
106; pre-war aggressive policy, 106-7; 
'stab in the back' myth, 108-9, 111, 126, 
342; Weimar constitution, 109-11, 123, 
127, 281; divided parliament, 110-11; 
East-West division, 111-12, 114, 115, 117, 
122, 123, 124, 125-8, 133, 135, 144, 280; 
cultural life, 112-17; anti-Semitism, 
116-22, 127, 128, 133, 278, 292-3, 319, 
342-3; totalitarian drift, 122-3, 126-7, 
278-80; abortive Left risings, 123-4; army 
putsch, 124, 125; growth of political 
violence, 125, 127; politicizing of academic 
life, 125-6; nationalism, 126-7, 130-1; 
student violence, 127; currency collapse, 
134-5, 141; economic recovery, 136; 
revival as superpower, 139-40; rise of 
Nazis, 278-85; increasing violence, 278-9, 
282; Weimar economy, 280-1; end of 
Weimar Republic, 283; creation of 
totalitarian state as Third Reich, 284-91, 
295-6; as police state, 286-90; terror 
regime, 286-90, 296-9; lawlessness, 289- 
90; internal battles, 290-1, 292; 
inconsistent policies, 292-4; big business, 
293-4; economy, 294-5; rearmament, 294, 
297, 312, 341, 346, 351, 352, 357, 400; 
persecution of intelligentsia, 305-6; and 
Spanish civil war, 329; progress to war, 
341-6, 351-62; alliances, 352, 358-62; 



INDEX 



851 



Germany (contd) 
seizure of Austria and Czechoslovakia, 
352-5; lack of popular will for war, 356; 
and Second World War, 362-4, 372-82, 
386, 399-401, 403-7, 409-22; invasion of 
Russia, 372-80, 382; mass-bombing of, 
403-5; VI, V2 offensive, 405-6; 
extermination of Jews, 413-22; retribution 
problem, 422; Social Democrats, 745; 
reunification, 763 

Germany, East, 582, 586, 759-60, 763 

Germany, West, 580-6 

Gero, Erno, 334 

Gershwin, George, 227 

Gesamtkunstwerk, 113 

Gestapo, 284, 286, 290, 297, 301, 303, 346, 
353, 373 

Gestapu, 480 

Ghana, 511-13, 517, 518, 531, 541, 542, 
727 

Ghori, Emile, 481 

Gibson, Wilfrid, 163 

Gide, Andre, 8, 337, 580, 593 

Gingembre, Leon, 592 

Giolitti Giovanni, 99 

Giscard d'Estaing, Valery, 532, 692 

Gisevius, Hans, 288, 298 

Glasgow riots (1919), 38 

glasnost, 755 

Globke, Dr Hans, 290, 585 

Goebbels, Joseph, 278, 283, 284, 290, 291, 
293, 319, 321, 341, 379, 405, 412 

Goering, Hermann, 282, 283, 284-5, 286, 
289, 290, 291, 297, 298, 321, 376, 405, 
414 

Gold, Harry, 458 

Gold Coast (now Ghana), 511 

gold standard, 164, 235-6 

Goldstein Moritz, 121 

Goldwater, Barry, 634, 651 

Gollancz, Victor, 336, 421 

Golos, Jacob, 458 

Gombos, Julius, 95 

Gonzalez, Felipe, 746 

'Good Neighbour' policy, 616 

Gorbachev, Mikhail, 720 , 755-7, 759, 
765-8 

Gorenev, General Wilhelm, 109 

Gorky, Maxim, 50, 51, 88, 242, 306 

Gorshkov, Admiral, 683-4 

Gosplan, 94 

Government of India Act (1935), 469, 470 

Goya, Francisco Jose de, 339 

Gramsci, Antonio, 97, 213 

Granada, 328 

Grant, Duncan, 29 

Grant, Madesan, 203, 206 

Grau San Martin, Ramon, 619, 620, 623 

Graves, Robert, 163 

Grayson, Admiral Gary, 33 

Great Crash, 231, 240-1 



Great Depression, 40, 231, 232, 240-1, 243- 

54, 277, 295, 344, 671 
Great Leap, 545, 550-2 
Great Society, 17, 639, 643, 658 
Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 454 
Great Terror, 300-8, 335, 412 
Great War - see First World War 
Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, 187, 

389 
Greece, 439, 610-12; German occupation, 

374; murdered Jews from, 415; civil war, 

434, 611; Marshall Aid to, 440; social and 

economic progress, 611-12 
Greene, Felix, 544, 545 
Greenglass, David, 458 
Greenham Common, 753 
greenhouse effect, 774-5 
Grenada, 751-2 
Grenfell, Julian, 19, 162 
Grew, Joseph, 314, 388, 389, 393 
Grey, Rev. Herbert, 350 
Griffith, D.W., 203 
Gromyko, Andrei, 674 
Gropius, Walter, 113 
Grosz, George, 112, 115 
Group Areas Act (South Africa, 1950), 523 
Groves, General Leslie, 408, 425 
Gruber, Ruth, 483 
Guadalcanal, 402, 410, 423 
Guderian, General Heinz, 378 
Guernica, 335-6 
Guertner, Franz, 289 
Guevara, Che, 622, 627 
guilt-feelings, 11, 41, 165, 691, 692 
Guinea, 507, 532, 541 
Gujarat, 569 

Gulag Archipelago, 69, 300, 385, 452, 519 
Gulf War, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, 733, 

768-74 

Haber, Fritz, 294 

Haganah, 482, 483, 485, 487 

Haggerty, Jim, 461, 462 

Haile Selassie, 539 

Haldane,J.B.S.,348 

Haldeman, Bob, 651, 652 

Haider, General Franz, 375, 379 

Halsey, Admiral William F., 398 

Hamaguchi, Yuko, 185, 186 

Hamburg, 112; air raids on, 403 

Hamilton, W.D., 779 

Hammarskjold, Dag, 493-5, 514, 515-16, 

536, 537, 666, 689 
Hammerstein, Oscar, 227 
Hamouda, Ait, 497 
Hanfstaengel, Ernst, 137 
Hankey, Sir Maurice, 31, 41 
Hankow, 195 
Hara, Takashi, 183, 185 
Harburg, E.Y., 227 
Hardallah, David, 541, 542 



852 



INDEX 



Harden, Maximilian, 116, 125 

Harding, Warren, 34, 204, 214-19, 234, 
241, 258 

Harrer, Karl, 124 

Harriman, Averell, 435, 436 

Harriman, Henry, 249 

Harrington, Michael, 638 

Harrod, Roy, 169 

Hart, Lorenz, 227 

Harvey, Oliver, 385 

Hashimoto, General Gun, 316 

Hatch Act (US, 1939), 457 

Hauptmann, Gerhart, 113 

Havel, Vaclav, 715, 760 

Hawke, Bob, 746 

Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 226 

Hawtrey, Sir Ralph, 235, 237 

Hayek, F.A., 237 

Hays, Will, 204 

Heidegger, Martin, 143, 306, 576, 577 

Heimwehren, 95 

Held, Heinrich, 288 

Helms, Richard, 625 

Helsinki Accords (1975), 673, 680 

Hemingway, Ernest, 226, 327, 337 

Henderson, Arthur, 309 

Hermes, Andreas, 581 

Hernandez, Jesus, 333 

Herriot, Edouard, 139 

Herstalt Bank, 669 

Herter, Christian, 27 

Herzen Alexander, 677 

Hess, Rudolf, 288, 290 

Hewart, Sir Gordon, 162 

Heydrich, Reinhard, 287, 292, 298, 375, 414 

Hilferding, Rudolf, 153 

Hiller, Kurt, 8 

Himmler, Heinrich, 287-8, 292, 296, 297-8, 
304, 321, 414, 416, 418, 419, 421, 481 

Hindenburg, Field Marshal Paul von, 110, 
111, 281, 283, 284, 291, 297, 299 

Hintze, Admiral Paul von, 72 

Hirohito, Emperor of Japan, 176, 185, 388, 
390-1, 402, 425, 426 

Hiroshima, 409, 425-6 

Hiss, Alger, 257, 458 

historical determinism, 54, 129, 435, 695 

Hitler, Adolf: shock at 1918 defeat, 104; anti- 
Semitism, 122, 132-3, 278, 292, 305, 
342-3, 348; compared with Lenin, 
128-31; belief in race as revolutionary 
principle, 129, 342; romantic-artistic 
approach, 129-32, 284, 546; oratorical 
style, 131-2; political education, 132-3; 
belief in eastward expansion, 133, 136, 
287, 357, 381-2; creation of National 
Socialist Party, 133^; attempt to take over 
Bavaria, 135; imprisonment in Landsberg, 
135-7; release, 277; as authoritarian 
leader, 278, 279; support from academics 
and business, 281; underestimated by Left 



and Right, 281-2; Chancellor, 283; setting 
up of totalitarian state, 284-92, 295-6; 
eastern extermination and settlement 
policy, 287, 305, 342-3, 380-2, 413-15, 
416, 418-19, 522; inconsistent domestic 
policies, 292-3; lack of economic policy, 
293, 294; decision to rearm, 293, 294-5; 
attitude to business and industry, 293^4; 
destruction of SA leadership, 296-9, 319; 
sole master of Germany, 299; as enemy of 
intelligentsia, 306-6; admirers of, 306; 
remilitarization of Rhineland, 320, 349, 
351-2; admiration for Mussolini, 321; 
denounces treaty with Poland, 338, 357; 
programme for world domination, 341^4, 
375; race-theory, 342-3, 522; derides 
Roosevelt's proposal for non-aggression 
guarantees, 345, 358; rearmament, 346, 
351, 352, 357; apologists for, 349; faultless 
conduct of foreign and military policy, 
350-6; takes over army, 352; invades 
Austria, 353; plans invasion of 
Czechoslovakia, 353-5; Munich triumph, 
355; misinterprets Franco-British attitude, 
357; preparations for Polish 
dismemberment, 357-62; wish to avoid 
war of attrition, 358; 'gangster' pacts with 
Mussolini and Stalin, 358-62; outbreak of 
war, 362; as Generalissimo, 362^4; 
conquest of France, 364-6; failure to 
understand British determination, 366-7; 
drawn into Mediterranean war, 373^4; 
Russian campaign, 375-80, 384, 385; 
mismanagement of campaign, 378-9; lost 
control of war, 386; declares war on US, 
386-7; use of ballistic missiles, 405-6, 409; 
decision to fight to finish, 410-15; bunker 
existence and death, 412-13 

Hitler's Secret Book, 342 

Ho Chi Minh, 149, 476, 631, 632 

Ho Ying-chin, General, 316 

Hobson,J.A., 152-3, 167 

Hochschulring movement, 127 

Hoess, Rudolf, 296, 414, 415, 416 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 204 

Home Owners' Loan Act (US, 1932), 255 

homosexuality, 782 

Honecker, Erich, 759-60 

Hong Kong, 729-30, 735 

Hook, Sidney, 252 

Hoover, Herbert, 16, 214, 215, 216, 232, 
235, 238, 310, 651; and post-war relief, 
93, 242; financial and economic policy, 
234, 244-6, 256; as Wonder Boy, 229, 
242, 243; misrepresentation of, 241, 
243^, 250; contrast with Roosevelt, 251- 
4,256 

Hopkins, Harry, 257, 392, 433 

Houphouet-Boigny, Felix, 150, 527 

House, Colonel Edward, 23, 24, 27, 105 

House, Un-American Activities Committee, 



INDEX 



853 



643, 647 

Howard, Leslie, 398 

Hsing Chung Hui, 191 

Hsuchow, 446 

Hua Kuo-Feng, 563^, 565 

Huberman, Leo, 628 

Hugenberg, Alfred, 116, 281, 282, 283, 286 

Hughes, Charles Evans, 215 

Hughes, W.M., 173 

Hull, Cordell, 345, 370, 371, 392, 394 

Human Rights, Declaration on (1945), 520 

'human rights' policy, 520, 671, 680 

Humphrey, Hubert, 257 

'hundred flowers' campaign, 549, 556 

Hungary, 37, 39, 242, 373; national 

socialism in, 95; murdered Jews from, 415, 
421; Communist dictatorship, 434, 437; 
Soviet invasion, 475, 494; market system, 
727; end of Communist rule, 759, 763 

Hunter, Lord, 46 

Hurgronje, C. Snouck, 478 

Hussein, Saddam, 713-15, 769, 772, 773-4 

Husseini, Mohammed Amin al- (Grand Mufti 
of Jerusalem), 477, 481, 485-6, 497 

Hussong, Friedrich, 115 

Hutten, Ulrich von, 305 

Huxley, Aldous, 8, 168, 350 

Huxley, Julian, 276 

Hyderabad, 474 

Ibarruri, Dolores, 325 

Ibn Saud, 484 

Ickes, Harold, 392, 402 

Ikki,Kita, 184 

Immigration Act (US, 1921), 215 

Immorality Act (South Africa, 1949), 523 

Imperial Rule Assistance Association, 390 

imperialism, 40-8, 153-62; conspiracy theory 
of, 153, 154-5; as result of under- 
consumption, 152-3; American, alleged, 
690, 693-4; British, 346-7, 468-70, 473; 
French, 148-51, 154; Japanese, 173, 
186-9; Soviet, 76-7, 720-2 

independence - see decolonization; self- 
determination 

India, 41-2, 474-6; Montagu reforms, 42, 
45, 346, 469, 510; aim of self-government, 
42, 347, 510; Punjab riots, 44, 45-7; 
industry, 157; decadence and disturbance, 
346-7; progress to independence, 469-74; 
Gandhiism, 470-2; partition, 473^, 567; 
post-independence problems, 568-74; war 
with Pakistan, 569; corruption, 570, 571; 
population, 572, 724; police atrocities, 
572; economy, 573, 725; nuclear power, 
686; religious extremism, 707 

Indian Independence Act (1947), 470 

'Indian National Army', 469 

'indicative planning', 587, 591 

Indo-China, 149, 154, 391, 590; war, 631-7, 
651, 654; Communist social engineering, 



654-7 

Indonesia, 478-80, 671, 727, 736 

Indus trial Conciliation Act (South Africa, 
1925), 521 

Industrial Relations Act (1971), 602 

Industrial Workers of the World, 216 

inflation, 35, 233, 234, 236-8; American, 
233, 236-8, 660-1, 664; British, 603; 
Chilean, 737; Chinese, 445-6; French, 141, 
142; German, 134, 136; Russian, 93 

intellectual life, 6, 8-10, 698; British, 166-72; 
French, 142-3, 575-7; German, 112-16 

Inter- Allied Commission of Control, 139 

inter-tribal racism, 527-8, 534 

international brigades, 330 

International Military Tribunal (1945), 
427-8 

International Monetary Fund, 603, 659 

international money system, 281, 659, 660, 
663-5 

International Peace Campaign (Brussels, 
1937), 337 

'International War Crimes tribunal' 
(Stockholm, 1967), 635 

interventionism, economic, 234-5, 244, 
245-7,251,254-7 

Inukai, Ki Tsuyoshi, 185, 186 

Invergordon mutiny (1931), 310 

investment, and colonialism, 152-3, 154, 
155, 514 

investment-trusting, 239 

IRA (Irish Republican Army), 688, 715 

Iran, 418, 665, 673; in 'northern tier', 489; 
overthrow of Shah, 710-13; Khomeini's 
rule, 713, 716-17; war with Iraq, 713-14, 
772; agriculture, 727 

Iraq, 43, 713; nuclear weapons, 686, 714; 
war with Iran, 713-14, 772; Saddam 
Hussein's rule, 713-15; growing threat 
from, 716; agriculture, 727; Gulf War, 
768-74 

Irgun, 482, 483, 486 

Ishihara, Lieut. -Colonel Kanji, 202 

Islam, Muslims, 706-8, 709, 710, 713, 
716-17, 720 

Israel: creation of, 484-5; conflict with 
Arabs, 485-7, 489, 491-2, 494, 666; and 
Suez crisis, 491-2, 494; six-day war with 
Egypt, 666, 684; Syrian-Egyptian attack 
on, 668; Yom Kippur War, 668; as nuclear 
power, 686, 687; destroys Iraqi reactor, 
686, 714; 'racist', 690; ultra-Orthodoxy in, 
707; peace with Egypt, 708, 709; 
immigration, 709; invasion of Lebanon, 
709-10; and Gulf War, 772 

Itagaki, Seishiro, 202, 468 

Italy, 35, 56-8; Fascism in, 96-7, 98-9, 319; 
socialist attempt to take over state, 97-8; 
violence, 98-9; Fascist take-over, 90-100, 
101; renaissance, 103; collaboration with 
Germany, 319-21; invasion of Abyssinia, 



854 INDEX 

Italy (contd) 

320-1, 351; Tact of Steel', 359; defeat in 
Second World War, 410; post-war, 577, 
579 

Ito, Prince, 176, 179, 182, 185 

Ivory Coast, 507, 514, 527, 542, 727 

Iwakuro, Colonel, 389 

Iwojima, 423 

James, David, 185,427 

James, Henry, 226, 240 

Jameson, Storm, 350 

Janata Party, 569, 571 

JAP (Juventudes de Accion Popular), 324 

Japan, 14, 21, 398; naval power, 172-3, 174; 
alliance with Britain, 173^, 175, 188; 
entry into modern world, 176-8; national 
attributes, 178; revolutionary progress, 
178-9; weaknesses due to archaism, 179- 
82; lack of system of fixed law, 179-80; 
and moral relativism, 180, 181; state 
religion and ruling morality, 180-1; 
introduction of Western political 
institutions, 181-4; bastard feudalism, 182; 
totalitarianism, 183, 311-12, 317-18, 427; 
corruption, 183; secret societies, 183-5; 
political assassination, 184, 185-6; failure 
of constitutional government, 186-7; aim 
of territorial expansion, 186-90; attack 
and demands on China, 187, 190, 201-2; 
ending of alliance with Britain, 188; leaves 
League, 310; rejection of rule of law, 312; 
occupation of Manchuria, 310, 311, 313; 
warring factions, 313-14; attempted 
military coup, 314-15; disastrous war with 
China, 315-16, 318, 388; military control 
of policy, 317-18; atrocities, 318; attack 
on America, and Pacific War, 386-97, 
422-7; calamitous defeats, 396, 410, 423- 
4; irrational strategy, 423; Allied mass 
bombing of, 424, 425; atomic bombing of, 
425-6, 429; surrender, 426-7; prisoner-of- 
war camps, 427-8; trial of war criminals, 
428-9; occupation, 447, 719; reversal of 
US policy towards, 447; unlikely to join 
nuclear club, 686; population, 723; post- 
war reconstruction, 729-35, 736; 
investment in Britain, 732-3; privatization, 
745; investment in America, 749 

Japan National Essence Society, 184 

Japanese-Soviet Pact (1941), 429 

Jarahilla, Delfin, 428 

Jerusalem, 483, 666 

Jessner, Leopold, 113 

Jesuits, 703 

Jeunesses Patriotes, 146 

Jewish Agency, 482, 483 

Jewish National Home, 481-2 

Jews: conflict with Arabs, 481-2, 485-6, 
491; extermination of, 130, 133, 382, 
413-22, 482; in Poland, 39; terrorist 



groups, 482-4 

Jodl, General Alfred, 397, 400 

John xxni, Pope, 702 

John Paul n, Pope, 701, 702, 703, 704, 706 

Johnson, Hewlett, 276, 545 

Johnson, General Hugh, 16, 256 

Johnson, Lyndon, 257, 649, 650, 651, 652; 
and welfare state, 17, 638-9, 640-1; and 
Vietnam, 460, 634-8; and space 
programme, 629; high-spending illusions, 
638, 640; and civil rights, 645-6; victim of 
media, 646-7 

Johnson, Dr Samuel, 738 

Johnson-Reed Act (1924), 205 

Joliot-Curie, Frederic, 407 

Jones, Ernest, 6 

Jones, Thomas, 38, 174 

Jordan, 43, 666, 708 

Jordan, Hamilton, 674 

Joyce, James, 9-10 

Juan Carlos of Spain, 608, 609, 610 

Jung, Carl, 5, 6, 207 

Jungdeutscher Or den, 124 

Jiinger, Ernst, 19 

'Jupiter complex', 402, 404, 405 

Kadar, Janos, 759 

Kafka, Franz, 117 

Kaganovich, I. M., 302, 675 

Kagwar, Michael, 534 

Kahane, Rabbi Meir, 707 

Kahn, Otto 235 

Kahr, Gustav von, 298 

kais, 184, 189 

Kaiser, Henry, 402 

Kaiser, Jakob, 582 

Kalinim, Mikhail I., 455 

Kamejama, Kazuki, 398 

Kamenev, Lev B., 49, 59, 80, 262 , 264-5, 

266, 268, 300 
Kampf, Professor Louis, 644 
Kang Sheng, 556, 558 
Kant, Immanuel, 699-700 
Kao Kang, 549 
Kapp, Wolfgang, 124 
Karamanlis, Constantine, 611 
Kardelj, Edward, 448 
Karmal, Babrak, 718 
Kasavubu, Joseph, 515, 516 
Kashmir, 474, 568 
Katanga, 515, 539 
Katelawala, Sir John, 475 
Kato, Admiral Tomosaburo, 185 
Katyn massacre, 318, 373 
Katz, Otto, 336 
Kaunda, Kenneth, 530 
Kautsky, Karl, 52, 108 
Kawawa, Rashidi, 538 
Kazan, 681 

Keitel, General Wilhelm 352, 353, 362 
Kellen, Horace, 206 



INDEX 



855 



Kempei Tai (special police), 184 

Kennan, George, 344, 345, 356, 385, 437, 

442, 460, 462, 464, 632 

Kennedy, John R, 586, 640, 647, 650, 664; 
universalist policy, 614-15; and Cuban 
problem, 624-9; space programme, 
629-30; and Vietnam, 630, 633-4, 635; 

poverty programme, 638; and civil rights, 
645 

Kennedy, Joseph, 345, 370 

Kennedy, Robert, 459, 614, 624, 626, 627, 
650, 660 

Kenseikai party, 183 

Kenya, 517, 518, 727; race discrimination, 
159, 520, 527 

Kenyatta, Jomo, 518, 531 

Kerekou, Mathieu, 542 

Kerensky, Alexander, 21, 61, 63, 66, 92, 198 

Kern, Jerome, 227 

Kerr, Clark, 641, 642 

Ketsumedian society, 184 

Keynes, John Maynard, 29-30, 152, 356; 
and Versailles Treaty, 28-9, 30, 34, 106, 
108, 139, 348; and German financial 
policy, 134, 136; on economics as ethics, 
166; on return to gold, 164; and 
Bloomsbury Group, 167, 169, 170; and 
credit-inflation, 233, 235, 240; and 
stabilization, 235; on Hoover, 242, 244; 
and reflation by deficit finance, 255; on 
war stimulus to US economic recovery, 
257; 1945 bankruptcy report, 466, 467 

Keynesianism, 241, 248, 659, 669 

KGB (Committee of State Security), 535, 688, 
689 

Khachaturian, Aram, 453 

Khama, Seretse, 526 

Khan, Marshal Ayub, 568 

Khan, General Tikka, 569 

Khieu Samphan, 656 

Khmer Rouge, 654, 656 

Khomeini, Ayatollah, 710, 713, 716-17 

Khrushchev, Nikita, 302, 449, 451, 479, 551, 
677; criticism of Stalin, 270, 300, 372, 
441, 454, 455, 549-50; on Mao, 545, 
546; on Communist victory through 
'national liberation wars', 615; 
brinkmanship in Cuban missile crisis, 
625-7; his leadership, 675-6; attempts at 
liberalization, 675, 678, 679; ousted, 676; 
use of penal psychiatry, 681; 
'decolonization', 721; agricultural policy, 
725-6 

kibbutz movement, 488 729 

Kielce pogrom (1946), 482 

Kim II-sung, 450 

King, Cecil, 368 

King, Mackenzie, 174 

King, Martin Luther, 650 

Kingoro, Hashimoto, 189 

Kinnock, Neil, 746 



Kipling, Rudyard, 169 

Kirov, Sergei, 299-300 

Kissinger, Henry, 651, 667, 668, 669 

Klausener, Ernst 298 

Klee, Paul, 114 

Kleist-Schwenzin, Ewald von, 353 

Klerk, F.W. de, 729 

Knickerbocker, H.R., 132 

Kodo ('Imperial Way'), 315 

Koestler, Arthur, 303, 328 

Kohl, Helmut, 763 

Kokoschka, Oskar, 114 

Kokuryukai sect, 183 

Kolakowski, Leszek, 271, 728 

Kolchak, Admiral, 75 

Koltzov, Michael, 335 

Kolyma death camps, 304 

Konovalek Evhen, 335 

Konoye, Prince Fumimaro, 428 

Korea, 187; Korean War, 450-1, 452, 460-1, 

463, 493, 548, 631; South Korea, 729-30, 

735, 736 
Kornilov, General 63 
Korsah, Sir Arku, 511 
Kortner, Fritz, 116 
Kosygin, Alexei, 302, 555 
Koussevitsky, Serge, 227 
Kovarev, S.V., 304 
Krauch, Karl, 422 
Krim, Belkachem, 497 
Kristallnacht (Nov. 1938), 293 
Krivitzky, Walter, 335 

Kronstadt mutiny (1921), 79-80, 82, 93, 263 
Krupps, 139, 282, 293, 422 
Krupskaya, Nadezhda, 50, 51, 87 
Krzhizhanovskaya, Madame, 52 
Ku-Klux Klan, 203, 204, 206 
Kubota Iron and Machinery Works, 722 
Kuibyshev, V.V., 84 
kulaks, 60, 269, 270-2 
Kulturbolscbewismus, 114 
Kun, Bela, 95, 122, 242, 302 
Kuominchun,195 
Kuomintang (kmt), 192, 194-5, 196, 199, 

315-16,317,444,446, 458 
Kurchatov, Igor, 409 
Kurds, 714, 773 
Kuwait, 666, 670, 733, 768-74 
Kuznetsov, A. A., 455 
Kuznetsov, Admiral N.G., 372 
Kwajalein, 423 
Kwantung army, 202 
Kyemba, Henry, 534 
Kyemba, Teresa, 535 

La Chambre, Guy, 365 

Labour Party, British, 122, 348, 368, 436, 

601-3, 746 
Lacalle, Garcia, 337 
Lacan, Jacques, 695 
Lacoste, Robert, 500, 501 



856 INDEX 

Lae garrison, New Guinea, 428 

Lagarde, Paul de, 120 

Lagos, 540, 541 

Laidler, Harry, 260 

Lakoba, Nestor, 303 

Lammers, Dr Hans, 291, 292 

Lamont, Norman, 746 

Land Apportionment Act (S. Rhodesia, 

1930), 159 
Land and Water Act (US, 1964), 661 
Landau, Kurt, 334 
Landau, Saul, 628 
Landry, Adolphe, 588 
Lang, Cosmo Gordon, Archbishop, 350 
Lang, Fritz, 113, 131 
Langbehn, Julius, 120 
Lange, David, 746 
Lansbury, George, 348 
Lansdale, Edward, 631 
Lansing, Robert, 26, 27, 33 
Lansky, Meyer, 212 
Lanusse, General Alejandro, 618 
Lanz von Liebenfels, Jorg, 130 
Laso, 631, 633, 657, 717 
Las Vegas, 212 
Lasker-Schuler, Else, 114 
Laski, Harold, 219, 275, 348 
Lateran Treaty (1929), 579 
Latin America, 704, 705-6, 724 
Latsis, M.Y., 68, 70, 122 
Latvia, 361, 415, 765 
Laval, Pierre, 365 
Lavritskaya, Dr Elizaveta, 682 
law, rule of, 577, 697; Cuba ending of, 623; 

Japanese rejection, 312; Nazi rejection, 

289-91; Soviet replacement by plan, 679; 

Weimar Republic erosion, 123 
Lawrence, D.H., 136, 171, 207, 248 
Lawrence, T.E., 22 
Lawther, Will, 583 
Le Duan, 657 
leaders, popular, 698 
League of Nations, 103, 106, 235, 321; idea 

and creation of, 23, 28, 30-5, 170; 

Wilson's attitude to, 25, 28-9, 31-2, 33, 

34, 43; mandates, 43; British Foreign 

Office hatred of, 172; Japan leaves, 310; 

and sanctions, 320, 321; Italy leaves, 321 
League of Nations Union, 350 
Leahy, Admiral William D., 435, 438 
Lebanon, 148, 708, 709 
Lee Kuan Yew, 735-6 
Leeb, General Ritter von, 362 
Leese, Arnold Spencer, 348 
Left: German, 123-4, 125, 128, 281-2, 286; 

Spanish, 322-3, 324-8, 329, 333, 338 
Left Book Club, 336 
Leguia, Juan, 234 
Lend-Lease, 371, 384, 445 
Lenin, V.I., 9, 15, 22, 23, 117, 122, 171, 

180, 194, 198, 264, 293, 296, 701; return 



to Russia from exile, 49-50, 54, 58-9; 
background and character, 50-8; hatred of 
religion, 50-1; abstract humanitarianism, 
51; isolation from people, 52, 58; creation 
of Bolshevik faction, 52, 59, 61; and will to 
power, 52, 55, 67, 75; authoritarianism, 
52-3; on Marxism as objective truth, 53; 
not an orthodox Marxist, 54-6; his view of 
revolution, 54- 
6, 58, 85-6, 181; obsession with violence, 

55, 56, 58, 66, 121, 123, 262; and 
'proletarian consciousness', 55, 56, 57; use 
of vanguard fighters, 55, 56, 57, 63, 81, 
83, 89, 95, 134, 181; approval and envy of 
Mussolini, 57-8; anti-war policy, 58-9, 61; 
aim to oust parliamentarians, 59, 61-2, 
123; and October Revolution, 62--4; use of 
Soviets in 'dictatorship of proletariat', 62, 
63, 64, 78; take-over of power, 64-5; use 
of spurious legality, 64; control of press, 
64- 5; use of terror and oppressive police 
power, 66-71, 85-6, 687; abolition of idea 
of personal guilt, 70, 71; collective 
extermination, 70-1, 419; establishment of 
repressive regime and dictatorship, 71-85, 
622; dissolves Constituent Assembly, 71-2; 
peace treaty with Germany, 72-3; Allied 
attitude to, 73--4; support from Germany, 
76; and democratic centralism, 77, 81; and 
'voluntary union' of nationalities, 77-8; 
elimination of non-party opposition, 
78-80; placing of power in party hands, 
80-1; destruction of opposition within 
party, 81-5; concentration in himself of 
power in party, 82--4; hatred of 
democracy, 85; brain disease, 87; breach 
with Stalin, 87; death, 88; weakness and 
failure of his despotism, 88-94; and state 
control of economy, 89; and Germany's 
'state capitalism', 90; and labour force, 
90-2; and peasants, 92-3, 94, 268, 270; 
'New Economic Policy', 93; on anti- 
Semitism, 117; compared with Hitler, 
129-30, 132; and imperialism, 153, 167, 
721; on socialism in US, 213; use of penal 
psychiatry, 681; denounces middlemen, 
725 

Leningrad: Hermitage collection, 269; purges 
in, 301, 302, 455 

Leninism: African imitation of 518, 528; and 
charismatic leadership, 512; Cold War 
inherent in, 435; and colonialism, 198; 
containment of, 465; model for 
totalitarianism, 277, 675; proto-fascism, 

56, 58, 102, 277; and self-determination, 
74 

Leonov, Leonid, 454 
Leopold n of the Belgians, 158 
Lepeshinskaya, O.B., 454 
Leroy-Beaulieu, Paul, 152 
Lesotho, 542 



INDEX 



857 



Lessing, Theodor, 116 

Lever Brothers, 155 

Levi-Strauss, Claude, 695 

Levy, Bernard-Henri, 576 

Lewis, John L., 650 

Lewis, Sinclair, 224, 226 

Lewis, Wyndham, 170, 171 

Leyte, 423 

Li Ta-Chao, 194 

Li Tsung-jen, Marshal, 199 

'liberation theology', 705 

Liberia, 541, 542 

Libya, 369, 374, 526, 532, 539, 541, 667, 
715, 742, 752; see also Gadafy 

Liddy, Gordon, 652 

Lie, Trygve, 491 

Lieberman, S., 81 

Liebknecht, Karl, 95, 303 

Ligger, Walter, 211 

Lin Piao, 547, 548, 552, 554, 562 

Lindley, Sir Frances, 310 

Lippmann, Walter, 30, 206, 228, 251, 258, 
474 

Lissauer, Ernst, 121 

Literary Guild, 225 

Lithuania, 39, 361, 415, 765 

Little Rock, 645 

Litvinov, Maxim, 345, 359 

Liu Shao-chi, 552, 554, 555, 556, 558 

Liyang, 200 

Lloyd George, David, 16, 41, 43, 45, 163, 
254; and peace talks, 20, 21, 24, 27, 28, 
29, 106; and Bolsheviks, 74; and Anglo- 
Japanese alliance, 173; admirer of Hitler, 
306 

Loans to Industry Act (US, 1934), 255 

Locarno, Treaty of (1925), 147, 321 

Lodge, Henry Cabot, 32, 34, 204, 320 

logic, 699-700 

Lombroso, Cesare, 12 

London, Treaty of (1915), 21 

London and County Bank, 669 

London Naval Treaty (1930), 309, 312, 319 

Long, Leo, 172,347 

'Long March', 315, 443 

Longworth, Alice Roosevelt, 218, 219 

Lons, Herman, 118 

Lorca, Garcia, 328 

Lord, Robert, H., 27 

Lorraine, 21, 140, 141 

Lorre, Peter, 116 

Lothian, Lord, 348, 349 

Louly, Ould, 542 

Lourenco, Agostinho, 607 

Lubbe, Martinus van der, 285 

Lubeck, bombing of, 403 

Lubitsch, Ernst, 113 

Luce, Henry, 438 

Ludendorff, General Erich von, 15, 16, 24, 
49, 105, 109, 141, 342; 'war socialism', 
90, 141; scheme for politicized army, 133; 



in Hitler's Munich putsch, 135 
Ludwig, Emil, 276 
Kueger, Karl, 132-3, 578 
Lugard, Lord, 155 
Lule, Godfrey, 534 
Lumumba, Patrice, 515-16, 517 
Lunts, Dr Daniel, 682 
Luo Rui-qing, 554 
Luther, Dr Hans, 294 
Lutyens, Sir Edwin, 161 
Luwum, Archbiship Janan, 535 
Luxemburg, Rosa, 56, 66, 61, 81, 95, 128 
Lyautey, Marshal, 149, 150, 155, 161 
Lysenko, T.D., 453 

MacArthur, General Douglas, 250, 309, 447, 

451, 730 
Macaulay, Rose, 350 
MacCarthy, Desmond, 168, 170 
McCarthy, Eugene, 644 
McCarthy, Joe, 459-60, 461 
McCloy,JohnJ.,422 
McCone, John, 402 
McCormack Act (US, 1938), 457 
McGovern, George, 644, 649 
Mach, Ernst, 102, 453 
Machlup, Fritz, 641 

Macias Nguema, Francisco, 531-2, 541 
Macleod, Iain, 508 
McMahon Act (US, 1946), 467 
Macmillan, Harold, 492, 493, 508, 523, 599, 

638, 741 
McNamara, Robert, 624, 626 
McTaggart,J.E., 170 
Madagascar, 507 
Madaragia, Salvador de, 322 
Madrid, 323, 329; and civil war, 334, 338, 

339 
Mafia, 103 
Maga, Hubert, 517 
Maginot, Andre, 330 
Maginot Line, 148, 308 
Mahgoub, Mohammed Ahmed, 684 
Mailer, Norman, 628 
Maistre, Joseph de, 144 
Major, John, 746, 771 
Makarios, Archbishop, 477 
Malagasy, 507 
Malatesta, Enrico, 98 
Malawi, 526, 531, 542, 727 
Malaya, 155, 395 
Malaysia, 736 

Malenkov, Georgi, 302, 455, 675 
Mali, 528, 542 
Malik Verlag, 116 
Malloum, Felix, 538 
Malraux, Andre, 143, 307, 337, 554, 576, 

593, 648 
Malvy, Louis, 16 
Manchuria, 187, 192, 195, 445; Japanese 

occupation, 202, 310, 311, 313; 



858 



INDEX 



Manchuria {(contd) 

Communist control, 443, 446, 448 

Mandel, Georges, 151, 365 

Mandela, Nelson, 729 

Mandelstam, Osip, 306 

Manhattan Project, 408, 458 

Manhood Suffrage Act (Japan, 1925), 182 

Manila, 428 

Mann, Thomas, 8, 12, 112, 129, 284, 306 

Mantoux, Etienne, 30 

Mao Tse-tung, 191, 194, 353, 476, 567; 
collaboration with KMT, 195, 316, 317; 
parting of ways from Chiang, 196, 444; 
decision to become war-lord, 196-8; 
radical nationalism, 197, 316, 443; 
building of peasant army, 98-9, 201; as 
supreme Communist war-lord, 315-16, 
443; 'Long March', 315, 443; and Sino- 
Japanese war, 316, 317; eventual aim to 
counter-attack KMT, 317; and civil war, 
444-5; refuses coalition with Chiang, 444; 
'personality cult', 444, 550; in control of 
mainland China, 446-7; 'land reform', 
447, 548; independent nuclear programme, 
451; foreign adulation, 544-5; public 
image, 545-6; romanticism and 
theatricality, 546-8; acceptance of prospect 
of nuclear war, 546; Thoiughts of, 547, 
549; wish to speed up history, 547-9, 551; 
social and mental engineeering, 548-9, 
550-1, 552, 555-62; Great Leap to 
Communism, 550-2; Cultural Revolution, 
552, 555-62; last phase, 562-3 

Maran, Rene, 150 

Marcks, Erich, 126 

Marcks, General, 377 

Marcuse, Jacques, 473 

margin-trading, 231, 239 

Marighela, Carlos, 498 

Marinetti, Emilio, 96 

Marion, Paul, 588 

market system, 159-60, 518, 583, 591, 596, 
697-8, 738; Third World, 729-30; Pacific 
area, 735-6; Chile, 738-9; North America 
and Europe, 739-40, 745-6 

Marr, N.Y., 454 

Marrakesh, 150 

Marshall, General George, 391, 436, 439, 
440, 441 

Marshall, Thomas, 33 

Marshall Plan, 28, 242, 440, 448, 457, 579, 
582, 659, 671 

Marsui, General Iwane, 317 

Martin, Kingsley, 336, 337, 356 

Martov, Julius, 128 

Martov, Y.O., 79, 80 

Marty Andre, 333 

Marx, Groucho, 219 

Marx, Karl, 54, 57, 96, 120, 135, 212; and 
scientific proof, 6; on central dynamic of 
economic interest, 10, 48; justification of 



terror, 66; vagueness over socialist 
economy, 89; concept of 'alienation', 118; 
and Judaism, 128; on 'intellectuals', 143; 
on hidden structures of society, 695; and 
Darwinism, 778 

Marxism, 52, 119, 623, 691, 726; anti- 
Semitism derivative of, 117, 128; class 
warfare concept, 5; and fascism, 102; 
historical determinism, 54, 129, 435, 
694-5; Lenin's heresy, 54, 55, 56, 102; 
objective truth identity with, 53; and 
Structuralism, 696; survives in universities, 
698 

Masaryk, Jan, 440 

Massachusetts, 211 

Masse, Pierre, 587 

Massey, William, 43 

Massingham, H.J., 163 

Massu, General Jacques, 500, 501, 502 

Masterman, C.F.G., 163 

Matisse, Henri, 8 

Matos, Hubert, 623 

Matsuoka, Yosuke, 387, 389, 390, 391 

Matteotti, Giacomo, 100 

Matthews, Herbert, 621 

Mau Mau, 506, 520 

'Maud' Committee (1941), 407, 408 

Mauriac, Francois, 142 

Mauritania, 507, 541, 542 

Maurras, Charles, 145-7, 306, 576 

Max of Baden, Prince, 24 

Mazowiecki, Tadeusz, 702 

Mba, Leon, 517 

Means, Gardiner, 248 

Means, Gaston, 218 

Mecca, 710 

Medawar, Sir Peter, 6 

media, power of, 647, 649-53 

Medvedev, Roy, 303, 304, 305, 679, 682 

Meiji, Emperor of Japan, 176, 177 

Meiji Restoration, 177, 179, 180, 182, 185, 
187, 730 

Meir, Golda, 454, 668 

Mekhlis, Colonel-General L.Z., 383 

Melchett, Lord, 235 

Mellon, Andrew, 215, 218, 233, 244, 260, 
269 

Memel, 357 

Mencken, H.L., 206, 210, 211, 257-8 

Mendes-France, Pierre, 498, 587, 632 

Menon, K.P.S., 456 

Mensheviks, 52, 59, 62, 64, 79 

Menzhinsky, Viacheslav, 53 

Meredith, James, 645 

Metaxas, General John, 610, 611 

Mexico, 671, 694, 746-7 

Mexico City, 704 

Mezes, Dr S.E., 23 

Michaels, Roberto, 56 

micro-processors, 781 

Midway Island, 396, 397, 400, 402, 410 



INDEX 



859 



Mikhoels, Solomon, 454 

Mikoyan, Anastas, 269, 455, 625, 675 

militarism: Afro- Asian, 513, 517, 529, 

537-8; Chinese, 192-4, 198-201; 

Japanese, 181, 184, 185, 186, 188, 311- 

12, 313-18; Latin American, 616, 628 
Mill, John Stuart, 152 
Millay, Edna St Vincent, 252 
Miller, Adolph, 236 
Million Heroes, 560 
Mills, Wilbur, 640 
Milner, Lord, 43, 44 
Mines and Works Act (South Africa, 1911), 

521 
Minobe, Professor Tatsukichi, 312 
Minton, Bruce, 250 
Mises, L. von, 237 

Mitbestimmung (co-partnership), 584 
Mitchell, Charles, 239 
Mitterrand, Francois, 498, 507, 745, 771 
Mobutu, Joseph Desire, 516, 517, 531, 542 
Modernism, 8-9, 114 
Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 18, 127, 248, 

279 
Mohammed VI, Sultan, 20 
Mola, General Emilio, 322, 328, 329, 331, 

335 
Moley, Raymond, 254, 255 
Molotov, V.M., 84, 265, 269, 300 302, 359, 

372, 373, 375, 436, 437, 455, 466-7, 675 
monarchies, imperial, dissolution of, 19-20, 

40, 191-2 
monetarism, 134, 595 
Mongolia, 448 
Monnerat, Guy, 497 
Monnet, Jean 142, 243, 590-1, 597 
Monroe Doctrine, 615-16 
Montrovia Group, 540 
Montagu, Edwin, and Indian reform, 41-3, 

44,45,46,346,510 
Monteil, Vincent, 498 
Montgomery, General Bernard, 436 
Montherlant, Henri de, 19 
Moore, G.E., 167-8, 171 
'Moplah' riots (1921), 47 
moral law, dictators' contempt for, S5-6 
'Moral Majority', 706 
moral relativism, 177, 180, 201, 261, 263, 

277, 296, 299, 370, 402-3, 419, 428-9, 

535, 537, 689 
Moreau, Emile, 235, 237 
Morell, Professor Theodor, 412 
Morgan, Brig.-General J.H., 139 
Morgan, J.P., 235, 260 
Morgenthau, Henry, 392 
Mori, Hirozo, 190 
Morocco, 149-50, 155, 330, 366, 410, 526, 

541, 542 
Morozov, Dr Georgy, 682 
Morris, Leland, 387 
Morrison, Henry, 402 



Morrison, Samuel Eliot, 27 

Mortimer, Raymond, 168, 170 

Moscow: party purge in, 301, 302; German 
drive on, 378-9 

Moslem League, 473 

Mosul oilfields, 148 

Mountbatten, Lord, 468, 473 , 474 

Moussa Sadr, Imam, 709 

Moynihan, Daniel P., 640 

Mozambique, 44, 519, 526, 542, 727, 728 

MRP (Mouvement Republicain Populaire), 
589 

Muenzenberg, Willi, 336 

Muggeridge, Malcolm, 161, 276, 307 

Muhsam, Erich, 289 

Mujib Rahman, Sheikh, 569 

Mukden, 195, 447 

multinationals, 693^4, 696 

Multiple Use Act (US, 1964), 661 

Munich, 112, 133; Conference (1938), 344, 
355 

Muradelli, Vano, 453 

Murdoch, Rupert, 743^4 

Murry, J. Middleton, 350 

Musil, Robert, 286 

Mussadeq, Mohammed, 491 

Mussolini, Benito, 147, 351, 353, 366, 386, 
578-9; as Marxist heretic, 57-8; switch 
from internationalism to nationalism, 95, 
197; and radical revolution, 96; use of 
vanguard elites, 96, 181; belief in violence, 
96, 97, 98-9; formation of Fascist Party, 
95-6; in parliament, 98; determined to 
govern, 99; march on Rome, 99-100, 134; 
forms government, 100; creation of 
totalitarian state, 101-3, 126; invades 
Abyssinia, 147, 320-1, gradual corruption 
towards Right, 319-21, 323; changed 
attitude to Hitler, 321; 'Pact of Steel', 321, 
359; at Munich, 355; in Second World 
War, 364, 410; defeat and death, 410 

Myrdal, Jan, 545 

Nader, Ralph, 661 

Nadzharov, Professor Ruben, 682 

Nagane, Admiral Osami, 388, 389, 391, 392, 

402 
Nagasaki, 426 

Nagata, General Tetsuzan, 313 
Nagumo, Admiral, 394 
Namibia, 542, 728 
Nanking, 317, 328, 447 
Narayan, Jayaprakash, 569, 570 
Narkomnats (People's Commissariat of 

Nationalities), 76, 77 
Nassau Agreement (1962), 468 
Nasser, Gamal Abdul, 480, 485, 488-93, 

513, 517, 666-7 
National Association of Manufacturers (US), 

232 
National City Company, 234 



860 



INDEX 



National Civil Federation (US), 205 

National Council against Conscription, 168 

National Graphical Association, 743-4 

National Industrial Recovery Act (US, 1933),' 
256 

National Labour Relations Act (US, 1935), 
255 

National Monetary Association, 235 

'National Security Council 68' document, 442 

National Security League (US), 205 

National Socialist (Nazi) Party: origin, 124; 
success among students 127; creation of, 
133-4, 278; programme, 133; centralized 
but participatory party, 278; use of 
violence, 279, 282; as defender of 'Aryan 
order', 279; and Fiihrerprinzip, 279; 
benefit from fear of Left and 'Red Terror', 
279, 281; as second largest party in 
Reichstag, 281, 282; fall in vote, 283; key 
posts in Hitler's cabinet, 283; declared 
only legal party, 286; abandonment of rule 
of law, 289-91; exclusion from industry 
and army, 295; ruthless purge of, 296-9; 
camps system, 304-5 

National Union of Mineworkers, 740-3 

nationalism, 107; academic encouragement 
of, 126-7; black, 526-8; post-war (1918), 
20-2, 23, 36-40; religion and, 180-1; 
Afro-Asian, 513-14; American, 203-6, 
215; Chinese, 194-5, 197-9, 443; French, 
144-7, 592, 595-7; German, 278; 
Japanese, 181, 183, 186-90 

Nationalists, Boer, 522, 525 

Nationalists, Spanish, 328, 329-30, 331-2, 
339 

Native Administration Act (South Africa, 
1927), 521 

Native Affairs Act (South Africa, 1920), 521 

Native (Urban Areas) Act (South Africa, 
1923), 521 

Natives Land Act (South Africa, 1913), 521 

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 
32, 493, 672, 768 

Nauru, 736 

Navarre, 328 

Nawiasky, Professor Hans, 128 

Nazi-Soviet Pact (1939), 139, 360, 373, 375, 
387, 410, 429, 432 

Nazis - see National Socialist Party 

Ne Win, General, 573 

Needham, Joseph, 348 

Negrin Juan, 333, 334 

Neguib, General Mohammed, 485, 488 

Nehru, Jawaharlal, 47, 472-7, 512, 567, 
572 

Neibuhr, Reinhold, 252 

Nenni, Pietro, 579 

Neruda, Pablo, 276 

Netherlands, 199, 415 

Neumann, Alfred, 117 

Neurath, Baron von, 352 



Neutrality Act (US, 1935), 310, 344 

New Caledonia, 736 

New Deal, 17, 241, 255-7, 259, 344, 402 

'New Economic Planning', 93, 268 

New Frontier, 17 

'New Nationalism', 16 

New Realism, 114 

New Zealand, 43, 175, 746 

Newman, John Henry, 701 

newspapers, industrial disputes, 743-4 

Newton, Sir Isaac, cosmology of, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 

Ngo Dinh Diem, 632, 633 

Nguyen Duy Trinh, 648 

Nicaragua, 671, 685, 705 

Nichols, Robert, 19, 163 

Nicolson, Harold, 21, 23, 27, 41, 349 

Nieh Yuan-tzu, 557 

Nietzsche, Elizabeth, 132 

Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, 48, 57, 118, 
119,143,576,577,597,700 

Nigeria, 513-14, 518, 531, 541, 542 

Nigkang, 201 

Nikolaev, Leonid, 300 

Nin, Andres, 334 

Nine Power Treaty ( 1922), 188 

Nishina, Yoshio, 409, 426 

Nissho, Inoue, 184 

Nitobe, Drlnazo, 181 

Nixon, Richard, 460, 461, 613, 614, 624, 
644, 663, 664, 748; and media, 647; 
narrow presidential victory, 647-8; 
disengagement from Vietnam, 648, 653; 
China policy, 648-9; Watergate, 649-53, 
668 

Nkrumah, Kwame, 477, 511-13, 518 

nkvd (People's Commissariat of Internal 
Affairs), 91, 300, 301, 303, 304, 307, 334, 
335, 373, 681 

No-Conscription Fellowship, 168 

Noel, Conrad, 165 

Noguchni, Isamu, 4 

non-alignment, 477, 489-90, 494, 684-5, 
690, 691 

Non-Proliferation Treaty (1970), 467, 686 

Nordau, Max, 12 

Noriega, General Manuel, 752-3 

Norman, Montagu, 235-6, 237 

'North-South' concept, 692-3 

North Atlantic Treaty (1949), 442 

Northern Rhodesia, 159 

'northern tier', 489 

Norway, 363, 604-5 

Noske, Gustav, 94, 123, 124 

Novocherkassk, 679 

nuclear weapons, atomic bomb, 406-10, 
425-7, 429; America, 441, 442, 451, 468, 
674, 753-4; Russia, 442, 451, 455, 467, 
468, 674, 753; China, 451, 573, 686; H- 
bomb, 452; Britain, 467-8, 753; India, 
573, 686; Pakistan, 573, 686; Cuban 
missile crisis, 625-8; proliferation, 685-7; 



INDEX 



861 



nuclear weapons (contd) 

Israel, 686; South Africa, 686; Germany, 

686; Iraq, 686, 714; threat diminished, 

768 
Nuremberg Laws for Jews (1935), 290, 292, 

321 
Nuremberg trials (1948), 422, 588 
Nyasaland, 508 
Nyerere, Julius, 528-30, 536, 537, 538, 542 

O'Neill, Eugene, 226, 247 

OAS (Organization de I'Armee Secrete), 503, 

504 

oau (Organization of African Unity), 526, 

527, 536-8 
Obote, Milton, 533^, 537 
ogpu (United State Political Administration), 

265, 266, 272, 273, 274, 288, 301 
'Ohio Gang', 217, 218, 220, 252 
Ohlendorf, Otto, 382 
oil, 480-1, 491, 665-70, 671, 707, 713, 

714, 747, 769, 774 
Okada, Admiral Keisuke, 314 
Okhrana (secret police), 68 
Okinawa, 424 

Okuma, Count Shigenobu, 1 85 
Olivetti, Angelo, 57 
Olympio, Sylvanus, 517 
'On the Socialization of the Land' Law 

(Russia, 1918), 92 
OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting 

Countries), 667 668-9, 670 
'Operation Barbarossa', 379-81 
'Operation Decision', 425 
'Operation Musketeer', 491 
'Operation Pincher', 441 
Ophuls, Max, 113 
Oppenheimer, Robert, 407, 424 
Oran, 366, 368, 496 
Oranienburg, 418 
Orden, 124, 125 
Ordzhonikidze, G.K., 301 
Orgburo (Organization Bureau), 83, 84, 87 
Ortega, Daniel, 705 
Ortodoxos (Cuban party), 619, 620 
Orwell, George, 162, 334, 335, 336, 338, 

471 
Oshima, General Hiroshi, 396 
oss (Office of Strategic Services), 437, 458, 

631 
Outer Mongolia, 192 
Owen, Wilfred, 163 
Oxford Union, 349 
ozone layer, 774-5 

Pacific region, 730, 735, 736, 747 
pacifism, 348-50 
'Pact of Steel' (1939), 321, 359 
Page, Kirvy, 260 

Pahlevi, Reza, Shah of Persia, 45, 606, 665, 
673, 710-13 



Pakistan, 157, 686, 719; in 'northern tier', 
489; militarism, 568, 570; economy, 568, 
573; war with India, 568-9 

Pal, Radhabino, 428 

Palestine, 22, 43, 439, 481-5; limited Jewish 
immigration, 420, 482; as Jewish National 
Home 481, 484; Jewish terrorism, 482 — 3; 
American impingement on, 484; partition, 
484-5; Arab refugees, 486-7, 703 

Palme, Olaf, 715 

Palmer, Mitchell, 205, 206, 209, 212 

Panama, 752-3 

Panunzio, Vito, 101 

Papadopoulos, Colonel George, 611 

Papagos, Field Marshal, 610, 611 

Papandreou, George, 611 

Papen Franz von, 282, 283, 298, 353 

Papertin, General Viktor, 719 

Paris, Treaty of (1951), 591, 593 

parliamentary democracy: Bolshevik 
destruction of, 71-2, 132; Hitler's 
contempt for, 132; disappearance in new 
African states, 518; India, 567, 570 

Partie Populaire Francaise, 146 

Partito Popolare Trentino, 578, 579 

Pashukanis, Evgeny, 679 

Pasternak, Boris, 65, 382 

Pater, Walter, 10 

Patterson, Robert, 437 

Patti, Archimedes, 631 

Patton, General George, 250 

Pauker, K.V., 300 

Paul VI, Pope, 607, 702 

Pavlov, D.G., 383 

Peace Ballot (1934-5), 350 

Peace Conference (Paris, 1919), 25-30, 149 

Peace Corps, 615 

Peace Pledge Union, 350 

Peace Preservation Law (Japan, 1925), 183 

Pearl Harbor, 310, 390, 393-4 

Pearson Repor t (1969), 692, 693 

'peasant' novels, 118-19 

peasants: in Chinese armies, 198-200; 
collectivization of, 92-3, 261, 266, 270-1; 
and industrialization, 265; new 'attack' 
on, 93-4; and Russian Revolution, 59-63, 
88, 94, 267; and Volk movement, 118 

Pegging Act (South Africa, 1943), 552 

Peguy, Charles, 19 

Peierls, Rudolf, 407 

Peking, 195, 446, 556; Marco Polo Bridge 
'incident', 316; cultural life, 553-4, 559; 
violence in, 556-8 

Peng Chen, 553 

'People's Courts', 290 

Percival, General A.E., 395, 396 

perestroika, 156 

Perlo, Victor, 458 

Perloff, H.S., 747 

Peron, Juan, 6 1 6-1 8 

Persia (now Iran, q.v.), 154, 156 



862 



INDEX 



personal responsibility, 10, 11, 70 

Peru, 234 

Petain, Marshal Philippe, 365-6, 368, 587 

Peters, J. (' Alexander Stevens'), 458 

Petrograd Soviet, 62, 63, 65, 67 

Phalanges Universitaires, 146 

Philippines, 393, 395, 736 

Phillimore, Walter, 30-1 

philosophy, 699 

Phnom Penh, 654-5 

physics, 775 

Picasso, Pablo, 9, 336, 575 

pide (Police for the Defence of the State, 

Portugal), 607 
Pigou, A.C., 235 
Pilsudski, Marshal, 280 
Pinochet, General Augusto, 738-9 
piracy, 687-8 
Piscator, Erwin, 112, 306 
Pius x, Pope, 145 
Pius xi, Pope, 579 
pla (People's Liberation Army, China), 561, 

566 
Planck, Max, 699 
'Piatt Amendment', 616, 619 
Plekhanov, G.V., 52 
plo (Palestine Liberation Organization), 

483, 666, 687, 688, 708, 709, 710, 715 
Pohl, Karl Otto, 763 
Poincare, Raymond, 138, 139-40, 141, 

148, 345 
Point Four programme, 242, 671 
Pol Pot, 656 
Poland, 139, 140, 147, 432; creation of, 21, 

26, 27; gains from Versailles, 39, 106; 

minorities, 39; non-aggression treaty with 

Hitler, 338, 346, 357; German threat to, 

357-60; invasion, 360, 362-3; 

Nazi-Soviet division of, 373; murder of 

Jews from, 415, 418, 420; Soviet 

domination, 435; Catholicism, 701-2; 

economy, 726-7; end of Communist rule, 

759, 763 
Polenz, Wilhelm von, 119 
police-state, German creation of, 285, 

286-90 
Polisario rebels, 538, 541 
political police, 66-71 
Political Responsibilities, Law of (Spain, 

1939), 339 
Pollitt, Harry, 336 
Ponchaud, Francois, 657 
Popper, Karl, 3, 6, 37, 577, 699, 780 
'Popular Front', Communist, 316, 323, 359 
Popular Front, French, 151 
Popular Front, Spanish, 324, 325-6, 328 
Population Registration Act (South Africa, 

1950), 523 
population trends, 140-1, 188, 588, 596, 

722-4, 747-8 
Port Arthur, 187, 202, 429, 448 



Portal, Air Chief Marshal, 404 
Porter, Cole, 227 
Portillo, Jose Lopez, 747 
Portugal, 188, 189; colonial social 

engineering, 519-20; political change, 

607-8, 745-6; population, 723 
'post-capitalism', 739 
poum {Partido Obrero de Uniication 

Marxista), 325, 326, 334 
poverty problem, 638-40, 691 
Powell, Adam Clayton, 477 
Prague, 356, 357, 359 
Prieto, Indalecio, 325 
printing unions, in Britain, 743-4 
prisoners-of-war, 427-8 
privatization, 744-5 
Prohibition, 209-12 
Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act (South 

Africa, 1949), 523 
proletarian consciousness, 55, 56, 57, 135 
proletariat: dictatorship of, 78, 89, 92; as 

opposed to peasantry, 118; revolution of, 

56, 58-63, 191 
protectionism, 232, 234, 246 
Protestantism, evangelical, 705-6 
Proust, Marcel, 9-10, 145 
Provisional Government (Russia), 61, 63 
psychiatric punishment, 681-2 
psychoanalysis, 5-8 
Pyatakov, G.L., 307 

Qawukji, Fawzi al-, 485 
Quine, Willard, 700 
Quintanilla, Pepe, 337 
Quota Law (US, 1921), 205 

race, as basis for colonial land 
apportionment, 158, 159-60 

race-poisoning, 342-3 

race theories, 120, 145; Hitler's, 129, 130 

racism: of African states, 526-8, 534; anti- 
Americanism as, 694; inter-tribal, 527-8, 
534; inverted, 516; German, 145, 319, 
342-3; Israel accused of, 690; see also 
apartheid 

Radcliffe, Sir Cyril, 473 

Radek, Karl, 49, 82, 92 

Radic, Stepan, 40 

Radio Corporation of America, 239 

Raeder, Admiral Erich, 357, 374 

rainforests, destruction of, 774 

Rapallo Treaty (1922), 76, 124, 139 

Rappaport, Charles, 52-3 

Rascher, Dr Sigmund, 418 

Rathenau, Walther, 116, 127 

Rauschning, Hermann, 293, 354, 409 

Ravens bruck, 418 

Rawlings, Flight-Lieut. Jerry, 541 

Rawlinson, General Sir Henry, 75 

Read, Herbert, 163 

Reading, Lord, 162 



INDEX 



863 



Reagan, Ronald, 748-50, 751-2, 753, 754, 

757 
Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), 

245, 255 
Reddy, Snehalata, 570 
Reed, James, 34 
refugees, 719-20, 735 
Reggio Emilia, Congress of (1912), 57 
Reichenau, General von, 298 
Reinhardt, Max, 112, 113, 131 
Reiss, Erich, 117 
Relativity, Einstein's Theory of, 1-5, 11, 

406, 453, 698, 699 
religious belief: decline in, 7, 48; and 

economic patterns, 606; survival of, 

700-6 
reparations, 24, 28, 36, 134, 139 
Republican Party, American, 214, 250, 460, 

649 
Republicans, Spanish, 326-8, 329, 331, 

332, 338 
Resistance, French, 588 
Revenue Act (US, 1932), 245 
revolutionary conscience, 85-6, 181 
Reynaud, Paul, 365 
Rhineland, 21, 26; remilitarization, 320, 

349, 352 
Rhodes, Cecil, 152 
Rhodesia, 508, 509, 538 
Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 291, 359, 360, 

361,387 
Richthofen, Colonel Wolfgang von, 335 
Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 118 
Riezler, Kurt, 12, 15, 16, 107 
Right: French, 143, 346; German, 124-5, 

127, 281, 282, 283, 286; Spanish, 322, 

328-32 
Riom trials, 365, 588 
Riotous Assemblies Act (South Africa, 

1930), 521 
Rist, Charles, 236 
Rivera, Primo de, 322 
Robbins Report (1963), 642 
Robles, Gil, 324, 326 
Robles,Jose, 334, 335, 337 
Roca, Bias, 619 
Rocca, Enrico, 319 
Rockefeller, David, 544 
Rodgers, Richard, 227 
Roehm, Ernst, 133, 278 , 281, 287, 296-9 
Rogers, Will, 220 260 
Rogers, William, 648 
Romania, 21, 105, 147, 361; Russian 

invasion, 364, 373; murdered Jews from, 

415; as Soviet satellite, 434; economy, 

727; Ceausescu's regime, 760-2 
Romberg, Sigmund, 227 
Rome, Fascist march on (1922), 99-100, 

134 
Rome, Treaty of (1957), 591, 592, 599 
Rome-Berlin Axis (1936), 321, 352 



Rommel, Erwin, 374, 399, 411 

Roosevelt, Franklin, D., 241, 243, 250, 
353, 375, 389, 398, 407, 410, 424, 425, 
470, 647; on Hoover, 242; 1932 
presidential campaign, 251-3; antipathy 
between Hoover and, 250-4; credited 
with recovery from Great Depression, 
254-60, 294; economic policies, 255-8; 
legislation, 255-6; New Deal, 255-7, 
259, 344; appeal to intelligentsia, 257-8; 
attacks on him, 258-9; 1936 electoral 
victory, 259; isolationism, 310, 344; anti- 
Japanese, 317, 392; 'frivolous' handling 
of foreign policy, 344-5, 458; proposes 
non-agression guarantees, 345, 358; and 
aid to Russia, 371, 384, 385; bedazzled 
by Stalin, 386, 404, 430, 432-6, 458; 
pro-Chinese, 391-2, 443, 631; at Yalta, 
404, 430, 433; urges unconditional 
surrender, 411; lip-service to Jewish 
immigration, 420, 421; accedes to Stalin's 
demands, 430; at Teheran, 433; 
disillusioned over Stalin, 436; anti- 
Zionist, 484; 'Good Neighbour' policy, 
616; presidential skulduggery, 650, 651; 
use of tapes, 652 

Roosevelt, Theodore, 16, 214, 218, 249, 
251,258 

Rosenberg, Alfred, 284, 292, 414 

Rosenberg, Isaac, 163 

Rosenberg, Julius and Ethel, 458 

Rosenberg, Marcel, 333 

Ross, Mary, 225 

Rostovtzeff, Michael, 222 

Rothermere, Lord, 306 

Rothschild, Louis, 235 

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 783 

Royden, Dr Maude, 350 

Ruanda-Urundi, 509 

Rubottom, Roy, 621 

Rueff, Jacques, 587, 595 

Rugumayo, Edward, 534 

Ruhr, 124, 134, 141; French occupation, 
139, 147; American investment, 280 

Rumsfeld, Donald, 672 

Rushdie, Salman, 716-17 

Rusk, Dean, 614 

Russell, Bertrand, 12, 79, 168, 171-2, 264, 
349, 699 

Russia: predominance of state in Imperial 
Russia, 14-15; proportion of subject 
peoples, 20; collapse of Tsarist regime, 
21, 54; Bolshevik control of, 22; Lenin's 
return to (1917), 49-50, 54, 58-9, 60; 
Revolution, 59-70; peasantry, 59-63; 
Provisional Government, 61, 63; first All- 
Russian Congress of Soviets, 62; first and 
last true parliamentary election, 64; use 
of terror, 66-73, 88, 262-3, 266-7, 271, 
274-5, 299-308, 383-4; control of press, 
64-5; political police, 66-70, 78, 80, 91; 



864 



INDEX 



Russia (contd) 
end of rule of law and democracy, 68, 
71-2, 84-5; totalitarianism, 73, 78-94, 
277; Western attitude to, 72-6; German 
military assistance to, 76; 'union' of 
nationalities, 76-7; imperialism, 77, 
710-11; constitution (of USSR), 77-8; 
elimination of non-party opposition, 
78-80; supremacy of party, 80-1; 
economy, 86-93, 676-7, 725-6, 767-8 
universal labour service, 91-2, 274; social 
engineering, 92-3, 94, 241, 261, 266, 
270-3, 524; internal struggles, 263-5; 
destruction of peasants, 267-72; slave 
labour, 274; show-trials, 274-5, 307; 
Western credulity on, 275-7, 306-7; 
political murders and purges, 299-308, 
334; beneficiary of Sino-Japanese war, 
316-17; and Spanish Civil War, 329-30; 
pact with Germany, 360-2, 373; German 
invasion of, 372-80, 382; Great Patriotic 
War, 382-7; army purges, 383; Western 
aid to, 385-6; and war crimes, 429-31; 
war gains., 433-5; and Cold War, 435, 
437-8, 539, 614, 685; disputes with 
Yugoslavia and China, 448-51, 549-51; 
Iron Curtain, 452; witch-hunt of 
intellectuals, 453-4; and division of 
Germany, 585-6; and national liberation 
wars, 615; and Cuba, 623, 625-7, 684-5; 
space programme, 629; and Indo-China, 
631, 632; and Egypt, 666; post-Stalin 
stability, 674-85; three-tiered ruling 
class, 677-8; attempts at liberalizing, 
678-9, 682; new terror, 680; penal 
psychiatry for dissenters, 681-2; naval 
expansion, 681-2; descent on black 
Africa, 684-5; growing problems, 698; 
collapse of Communist ideology, 701; 
Jews allowed to leave, 709; and Middle 
East, 715; and Afghanistan, 717-20, 754; 
and Islam, 720; imperialism, 720-2; 
population, 722, 723; armaments, 753; 
leadership problems, 754-5; and the 
European Community, 765; internal 
problems, 765-8; end of Cold War, 768; 
and Gulf War, 770, 771 

Rutherford, Lord, 406 

Rykov, Alexei, 266, 301 

SA (Brownshirts), 124, 278, 281, 286, 287, 

290, 292; purge of, 296-8 
Saar, 21, 278; reversion to Germany, 351 
Sacco, Nicolo, 205 
Sachsenhausen, 418 
Sack, Erno, 116 

Sadat, Anwar El, 538, 667-8, 708, 710 
Said, Mohanedi, 497 
Saigon, 654 

Saito, Admiral Makoto, 185, 314 
Sakharov, Andrei, 680, 682, 690 



Sakok, Hadj, 497 

Salack, Ould, 541 

Salan, General Raoul, 503 

Salazar, Antonio, 607 

Sale of Securities Act (US, 1933), 255 

salt (Strategic Arms Limitation Talks), 

468, 673 
Salten, Felix, 116 
Salter, Sir Arthur, 235 
samurai, 181, 183, 184 
Sao Paulo, 704 
sanctions, 320-1 
Sandys, Duncan, 405 
Sansom, Sir George, 318 
'Santa Clara, Battle of (1958), 622 
Saragat, Giuseppe, 579 
Saragossa, 328 

Sarraut, Albert, 148, 150, 151 
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 143, 575-6, 687, 694 
Sassoon, Seigfried, 163, 350 
Saturn rocket, 629 
satyagraha (passive resistance), 44 
Sauckel, Fritz, 291, 417 
Saudi Arabia, 667, 670 
Saundby, Sir Robert, 404 
Sauvy, Alfred, 692 
Scargill, Arthur, 740-3 
Schacht, Dr Hjalmar, 136, 236, 291, 292, 

294, 352 
Schafer, Dietrich, 126 
Schall, Thomas, 258 
Scheidemann, Philipp, 123 
Schirach, Baldur von, 284, 321 
Schleicher, General Kurt von, 281, 282, 

283, 298 
Schmitt, Carl, 126, 279 
Schmoller, Gustav, 152 
Schnitzler, Arthur, 113, 116 
Schoenberg, Arnold, 8, 117 
Schoenfeld, Arthur, 437 
Schoepperle, Victor, 234 
Scholtz, Ernst, 280 
Schonerer, George von, 133 
Schreyer, Lothar, 114 
Schultz, Colonel Bob, 463 
Schumacher, Kurt, 580-1, 593 
Schuman, Robert, 586-7, 592 
Schumpeter, Joseph, 153, 643 
Schurman, Jacob Gould, 193 
Schuschnigg, Kurt von, 352-3 
Schwarzkopf, General Norman, 772 
science, 775; biology, 777-80; electronics, 

780-1 
Scobie, General Sir R.M., 434, 610 
Scope, John T., 208 
Scott, J. Robertson, 163 
SD (Sicherheitsdienst), 287, 297 
Second World War: steps to, 341, 350-62; 

early German success, 363-6; collapse of 

France, 364-6; British determination to 

fight on, 366-71; Mediterranean 



INDEX 



865 



Second World War (contd) 
campaign, 369, 410; mass bombing, 
369-70, 402-5, 424; American aid, 
370-1; Russian campaign, 372-80, 
382-7; Pacific War, 387, 391-7, 400, 
410, 422-6; technology and economy, 
398-410; ballistic missiles, 405-6; atomic 
bomb, 406-10, 424-7; turning point, 
410; peace offers, 410-11; conclusion, 
411-13; war crimes, 413-22, 427-31 

secret police: Chinese, 199; German, 284, 
286, 290, 297, 301, 303, 346, 353, 373; 

Russian, 67-71, 78, 80, 91, 265, 266, 272, 
273, 274, 280, 301, 675, 676, 679 

secret societies, 183-4, 191 

secularization, 700-1 

Securities and Exchange Act (US, 1934), 
255 

Sedition Act (US, 1918), 17, 204 

Seeckt, General Hans von, 124 

Segura, Archbishop Pedro, 326 

Seiyukai party, 183 

Seldte, Franz, 291 

self-determination: as war aim, 21-2, 23, 
36-7, 41-2; Afro-Asian, 511-43; 
Algerian, 495-505; Indian, 469-70, 
473-4; Jews and, 128; Leninism and, 
74_5 5 76-8 

Senegal, 507, 509, 531, 541, 542 

Senghor, Leopold, 150 

Separate Representation of Voters Act 
(South Africa, 1951), 522 

Serbsky Institute, 681 

Servan-Schreiber, Jean-Jacques, 693 

Seton- Watson, R.W., 21, 40 

Severing, Carl, 123 

Seville, 328 

Shackleton, Sir Daivd 74 

Shanghai, 195, 196, 197, 448; commune, 
560, 563-4 

Shantung, 45, 187, 195,202 

shareholding, 744-5 

Sharpeville shooting, 516, 521 

Shastri, Lai Bahadur, 568 

Shaw, George Bernard, 165-6, 275-6, 306, 
348, 349 

Shchadenko, E.A., 383 

Shelepin, Alexander, 676 

Sheppard, Rev. 'Dick', 350 

Sherman Anti-Trust Act, 16 

Sherriff, R.C., 163 

Shevardnadze, Eduard, 767 

Shevchenko, Arkady, 689 

Shigeru, Yoshida, 731 

Shinto, 180-1, 184, 188, 312 

Shinwell, Emanuel, 439 

Shmidt, General Dmitry, 301 

Shostakovich, Dmitry, 261, 262, 453 

show-trials, 274, 307, 679 

Shukairy, Ahmed, 666 

Shumilin, S.G., 267 



Siam railway, 428 

Siegel, Benjamin, 212 

Siegfried, Andre, 226 

Sierra Leone, 518 

Sihanouk, Norodom, 477 

Silesia, 26, 106 

Silvermaster, Nathan Gregory, 458 

Silvestre, Marie, 167 

Simmons, William, 203 

Simon of Wythenshawe, Lord, 604 

Simon, Sir John, 297, 346 

Sinclair, Upton, 226, 252 

Singapore, 175, 309, 310, 386, 395-6, 468, 

729-30, 735-6 
Singer, Kurt, 178 
Sinkiang, 448 

Sino-Japanese war, 288, 315-18, 352 
Sirica, Judge John, 651 
Sitwell, Osbert, 171 
Six-Day War, 666, 684 
Skelton, O.D., 174 
Skoblin, General, 301 
slave-trade, in colonialism, 519-20 
Smersh, 383 
Smilie, 'Bob', 334 
Smith, Adam, 151 
Smith, Al, 214, 251 
Smith Earl, 621 
Smith, Jess, 217 
Smith Act (US, 1940), 457 
Smoot-Hawley Act (1930), 232, 246, 280, 

310 
Smuts, Jan, 43-4, 174, 520-2, 252 
Snezhnevsky, Professor Andrei, 682 
Snow, C.P., 641 
Snyder, General Howard, 463 
Soares, Dr Mario, 745-6 
Sobell, Morton, 458 
Sobibor, 415 

Social Democrats, Danish, 604 
Social Democrats, Finnish, 604 
Social Democrats, German, 93, 94, 108, 

109, 110, 122-4, 125, 128, 135, 278, 

279, 282, 283, 286, 322; spd, 580-1, 

582, 583, 584 
Social Democrats, Italian, 579 
Social Democrats, Norwegian, 604 
Social Democrats, Russian, 52, 53, 79, 80, 

96 
Social Democrats, Swedish, 604 
Social Democrats, Swiss, 605-6 
social engineering, 94, 130, 159-60, 212, 

776-7, 783-4; collectivization, 92-3, 

261, 267-72, 287, 338-9, 380-2; 

colonialism and, 519-20, 521-4; 

extermination of Jews, 130, 133, 382, 

413-22, 482; Afghanistan, 717-20; 

China, 548, 550; Indo-China, 654-7; 

Iran, 710-13; Romania, 761 
'social market', 746 
Social Revolutionaries, 62, 64, 71, 72, 79, 



866 



INDEX 



Social Revolutionaries, {condt) 
681 

social sciences, 775-7, 779 

social welfare, 604, 605, 638-40 

Socialist Party, American, 213, 252 

Socialist Party, Austrian, 323 

Socialist Party, French, 346, 588, 589 

Socialist Party, Italian, 57, 95, 97-8, 99, 
579 

Socialist Party, Spanish (psoe), 322-4, 333 

sogat '82, 743-4 

Soil Conservation and Domestic Allotment 
Act (US, 1936), 255 

Soil Erosion Act (US, 1935), 255 

'Solidarity', 702 

Solzhenitsyn, Alexander, 70, 275, 304, 431, 
677, 679 

Somalia, 542 

Somoza, Anastasia, 673 

Soong, T.V., 193, 199 

Soper, Rev. Donald, 350 

Sorel, Albert, 597 

Sorel, Georges, 54-5, 56 

Sorge, Richard, 315, 372, 387 

Sotelo, Calvo, 326 

Soule, George, 248 

Soustelle, Jacques, 498-9 

South Africa, 43-4, 542, 690; land 
apportionment, 159; apartheid, 520, 
521-4, 526, 728-9; economy, 525; black 
nationalism, 525-6; as nuclear power, 686, 
687 

Southern Rhodesia, 159 

Soveit-German Frontier and Friendship 
Treaty !1939), 361 

Soviet Russia - see Russia 

Soviets, 62, 63, 64, 77 

Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars), 
63, 64, 65, 67, 69, 91 

Spaak, Paul-Henri, 515 

space programmes, 629-30, 698 

Spain, 154; colonialism, 154; internal Socialist 
Party strife, 322-3, 325-6; agricultural 
crisis, 323; Popular Front, 323-6; army 
putsch, 326, 333; civil war - see Spanish 
Civil War; Franco's purges, 339; neutrality 
in Second World War, 366; economic and 
political reform, 608-10; return to 
monarchy, 608, 609, 610; new constitution, 
609-10; population, 723; economy, 746 

Spanish Civil War, 321-2, 352; Catholic 
Church and, 326-7; atrocities, 327-8, 
334-6; foreign intervention, 328-30, 332; 
reasons for nationalist victory, 330-2; 
Communist take-over, 332-4, 336; civil 
war among Left, 333-4; Western 
intellectuals' concern, 336-8; ending of, 
338; casualties, 339 

Spartacists, 95, 122 

Speer, Albert, 363, 403, 405 

Spencer, Howland, 258 



Spender, Stephen, 337-8 

Spengler, Oswald, 12, 126, 279, 306 

Spiridonova, Maria, 681 

Sputnik I, 629 

SRC (State Research Centre, Uganda), 535 

ss (Schutzstaffel), 286, 287-8, 290, 296, 297, 
414,416,687 

ss-20 rockets, 753 

Stable Money League, 235 

Stael, Madame de, 597 

'stagflation', 739 

Stalin, Josef, 49, 130, 321, 348, 420, 456, 
549, 710; and Revolution, 50, 59, 63; 
Commissar for Nationalities, 76, 77, 78; 
Commissar for State Control, 83-4; 
building up of personal power, 83-4, 262; 
General Secretary of Party, 84, 261; breach 
with Lenin, 87-8; China policy, 194, 196, 
198, 316, 443, 446, 448, 450; autocracy as 
Lenin's successor, 261-2; violence and 
desire for revenge, 261, 262, 413; as 
Hitler's exemplar, 261, 272, 296, 413; 
elimination of rivals, 262-6, 268, 299-300, 
373; opportunism, 263; belief in 'revolution 
in one country', 263; rewriting of history, 
265; show-trials, 266-7; cult of personality, 
267-72; policy of terror, 271, 274-5, 296, 
299-308, 335, 373, 380, 383-4, 412, 419 , 
455, 456; creation of personal secret police, 
273; Western tributes to, 276-7, 545; purge 
of party and army, 334, 352, 412; purge of 
party and army, 300-4, 334, 352, 412; and 
Spanish Civil War, 332-3, 338; pact with 
Hitler, 359-61, 373, 376; as Hitler's 
military ally, 364; territorial gains, 364, 
373; despair at German invasion, 372; and 
Great Patriotic War, 382-6, 410; private 
army 384; Western aid to, 384-6, 404; pose 
as moderate, 386; offer to negotiate with 
Hitler, 410; Hitler's admiration for, 411; 
and German war-guilt, 421; last-minute 
declaration of war on Japan, 425, 430; 
forcing of Russian nationals' return, 430-1; 
his deluding of Roosevelt, 432-6; demands 
in Eastern Europe, 434, 440, 441; and Cold 
War, 435, 437-8, 440, 441, 452; failure of 
Yugoslav policy, 449; and Korean War, 
450, 451; break with China, 451; and Iron 
Curtain, 452; hatred of 'Westerners' and 
intellectuals, 452-4; self-apotheosis, 454; 
anti-Semitism, 454-6; death, 456 

Stalingrad, 379 

Stalinism, 277, 278; Western intellectuals' 
defence of, 275-7, 306-7; in Spanish Civil 
War, 336; repudiation of, 549 

Stamboliski, Alexander, 102 

Stanley, Oliver, 354 

Stapel, Wilhelm, 129 

'Star Wars', 754 

Stark, Admiral Harold, 391 

Stashevsky, Arthur, 333, 335 



INDEX 



867 



state, 14-18; Communist Party control of, 
80-1, 89; De Gaulle's view of, 594-5; in 
Iran, 712-13; unimportant, 738; 'enabling', 
746; loss of faith in, 783-4 
state capitalism, 90, 178 
Stavisky scandal, 146 

Steffens, Lincoln, 88, 103, 229, 252, 260, 306 
Steinbeck, John, 247 
Stenhardt, Laurence, 432, 440 
Stern Fritz, 32, 644 
Stern Gang, 482 
Sternberg, Joseph von, 113 
Sternheim, Carl, 113, 116 
Stettinius, Edward, 458 
Stevenson, Adlai, 257, 475 
Stimson, Henry, 249 
stock-exchange speculation, 231, 234, 239, 

240 
Stone, Ellery, 437 
Strachey, John, 260, 261 
Strachey, Lytton, 29, 167-9, 170, 171, 207, 

347, 350 
Strachey, St Loe, 168 
Straight, Michael Whitney, 172 
Strasser, Gregor, 278, 298 
Strasser, Otto, 293 
Straus, Oscar, 242 
Strauss, Richard, 112, 113 
Stravinsky, Igor, 8, 9, 10, 114 
Stresa Front, 319, 320, 351 
Stresemann, Gustav, 135, 279-80 
Strong, Anna Louise, 275, 276 
Strong, Benjamin, 235-6, 237, 238, 239, 280 
'Strong Reservationists', 32 
Structuralism, 695-6 
Stuart, John, 250 

student violence, 127, 556, 557, 620, 643-4 
Sturzo, Don Luigi, 578 
Suarez, Adolf o, 609, 610 
Sudan, 541, 542, 707, 727 
Suez Canal, 320, 321, 374, 488, 667, 668; 

crisis (1956), 463, 490-5, 500 
Sugiyama, General Hajime, 388, 395 
Suid-Afrikaanse Bond vir Rassestudie, 522 
Sukarno, Achmad, 477-80, 488, 513 
Sultan-Galiyev, Mirzo, 264 
Sun Chuang-fang, Marshal, 195 
Sun Yat-sen, 191, 192-4, 198, 201 
Suiter, Ramon Serrano, 331, 339 
Sung Chi-yuen, 316 
super-conductors, 781 
Suppression of Communism Act (South 

Africa, 1950), 523 
Surrealism, 9 
Suslov, Michael, 676 
Suyin, Han, 545 

Suzuki, Admiral Kantaro, 314, 426 
Sverdlov, Y.M., 72 
Swaziland, 542 

Sweden, 361, 373; economy, 604, 605 
Sweezy, Paul, 628 



Swinnerton, Frank, 170 

Switzerland, 605-6, 732 

Swope, Gerard, 16, 248 

Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), 21, 148 

syndicalism, 55, 96, 97, 191 

Syria, 148, 485, 666, 709-10, 727, 772 

Szechuan province, 201 

Szilard, Leo, 407 

Tacitus, 119,241 

Taft, Howard, 258 

Taft, Robert, 461, 464 

Taiwan (Formosa), 187, 446, 448, 729-30, 

735, 736 
Takahashi, Viscount Korekiyo, 185 
Tanaka, Baron Gi-ichi, 183 
Tanner, Jack, 583 
Tanu Youth League, 528, 530 
Tanzania (formerly Tanganyika), 43, 44, 514, 

517, 526, 528-9, 537, 541, 542, 727 
Taraki, Mur Muhammad, 718, 719 
Taranto, 369 
Tarawa Atoll, 423 
Taris, Valery, 681 
Tata, J. N., 157 
Tauber, Richard, 116 
Taylor, General Maxwell, 633-4 
Teheran Conference (1943), 433 
Teitgen, Paul, 500 
Teller, Edward, 407 
Temple, William, Archbishop, 165, 349 
'Ten Year Rule', 174,310 
Teng Hsaio-ping, 555, 556, 562, 563, 565-6 
Teresa, Mother, 574 
terror, political use of, 66-71, 85, 98-9, 123, 

184-5, 200-1, 262-3, 266-7, 271, 274-5, 

286-9, 296-300, 326-8, 497-500, 503-5, 

531, 532-7, 654-7, 675, 680-3, 687-9 
terror-bombing, 335-6, 370, 403-5, 424-7 
terrorism: international growth of, 687-9; 

Arab, 481; Jewish, 482-4; OAS, 503-4; in 

1980s, 715-16, 752 
Teschen, 39, 355 
'Tet Offensive', 636, 646 
Thailand, 736 
Thalmann, Ernst, 282 
Thatcher, Margaret, 740, 741, 742, 744-5, 

748-9, 750, 752, 753, 764, 769, 770 
Thaxted, 165 
'Third World', 476-7, 617, 619, 670, 692-3, 

727-8, 729-36 
Thomas, Norman, 213, 252 
Thompson, 'Big Bill', 210 
Thorez, Maurice, 361, 588, 589 
Thornburg, Max, 485 
'thought reform', 548-9 
Thurber, James, 247 
Thyssens, 282 
Tiananmen Square, 758-9 
Tibet, 758 
Tillion, Germaine, 498, 504 



868 



INDEX 



Tito, Marshal, 441, 448-9 

Tizard, Sir Henry, 407, 467 

Today, 743 

Todd, General, W.E., 448 

Todt, Fritz, 294, 400 

Togo, 517, 518 

Tojo, General Eiki, 390, 391, 425, 428 

Tokyo: mutiny (1935), 314-15, 316; air raid 
(1945), 424 

Toller, Ernst, 112,306 

Tombalbaye, Francis, 538 

Tomlinson Report (1956), 524 

Tomsky, M.P., 266 

Tonkin, Gulf of, 634 

Torrens, Robert, 152 

Torrio, John, 210 

torture, 303-4, 497-500, 661-2, 689 

totalitarianism: colonialism and, 519; family- 
based society versus, 581; Fascist and 
Communist forms of, 277, 354; growth of, 
14-18, 73, 78-9, 122-3, 181, 283-91, 311; 
predatory, 311; and terror regimes, 
296-308, 383-4, 409; in African states, 
528-34, 543; German, 122-3; 126-7, 133, 
278-82, 284-91, 295-6; Japanese, 181-6, 
313, 318, 427-8; Russian, 73, 78-94, 277 

Toure, Sekou, 532 

Touregs, 528 

Toyama, Mitsuru, 183, 185 

Trade Disputes Acts: (1906) 601, (1927) 602, 
(1965) 602 

Trade Union Act (1913), 602 

Trade Union and Labour Relations Acts 
(1974, 1976), 602 

trade unions: American, 255; Bolshevik take- 
over, 90-1; British, 601-3, 740-4; German, 
583-4; Japanese, 734 

transport, 223-4, 540 

Treblinka, 415 

Treitschk, Heinrich von, 126 

Tricot, Bernard, 503 

Trilling, Lionel, 10, 172, 226, 307-8, 644 

'Triton' code, 399 

Trivers, Robert, 780 

Trotsky, Leon, 51, 72, 83, 122, 128, 205, 
262, 270; on Lenin, 52, 55; as Lenin's 
principal lieutenant, 59; and Revolution, 
62-3, 65; use of force and secret police, 67, 
68, 87, 263; opposition to Brest-Litovsk, 
72; and compulsory labour, 92, 263; ousted 
by Stalin, 196; a moral relativist, 263; 
destroyed by Stalin, 263-5, 268; murder, 
265, 373; on 'British benevolence', 348; on 
Islam, 720 

Truman, Harry S., 441, 647, 650; decision to 
use atomic bom, 424-5; at Potsdam, 436; 
strong line towards Russia and 
Communism, 437, 438, 457; commitment 
to Europe, 439-40; and Korean War, 450, 
451, 452; undermining of UN Security 
Council, 450, 689; and arms-race, 452; 



pro-Zionism, 484-5; use of tapes, 652 

Tshombe, Moise, 515, 516-17 

Tsuji, Colonel Masanobu, 393 

Tsushima, 187 

Tucholsky, Kurt, 115, 116, 306 

Tugwell, Rexford, 257 

Tuker, General Sir Francis, 473 

Tukhachevsky, Marshal, 301, 375 

Tulsa race riots, 38 

Tumulty, Joseph, 33 

Tunisia, 526, 542 

Turkey, 21, 154, 179, 439; national socialism 
in, 95; Soviet pressure on, 438; Marshall 
Aid to, 440; in 'northern tier', 489 

Tzara, Tristan, 9 

UNu,477,513 

Uganda, 514, 517, 527, 533-7, 541, 542 

ujatnaa (familyhood), 530 

Ukraine, 77, 105, 722, 765-6, 767 

Ulbricht, Walter, 586 

Ullman, EX., 747 

Ultra coding system, 399-400 

Ulyanov, Alexander, 50 

unctad (UN Conference on Trade and 
Development), 692 

unemployment, 669; American, 246-7; 
British, 164, 367; German, 280, 281; 
Scandinavian, 604 

Unger, Fritz von, 19 

Union of the Democratic Centre, 609 

Union Generale des Israelites de France, 420 

Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, origin of, 
77-8 

Union of the Spanish People, 609 

United Founders Corporation, 239 

United Nations, 520; Declaration (1942), 429; 
and Korean War, 450, 493; American 
control of, 493, 689; and Suez, 494-5, 689; 
and Congo, 515-16; double standard, 516, 
536; and African states, 536, 538; Amin 
honoured by, 536, 689; commitment to 
military solutions, 538; withdrawal from 
Egypt-Israel frontier, 666; corrupt and 
demoralized, 684, 690; condemnation of 
Israel as 'racist', 690; condemnation of 
America, 690-1, 693; and Third World, 
691-2; begins to function as intended, 697, 
768; and Falklands War, 750; and Gulf 
War, 768, 770-1 

United Party, South Africa, 524 

United States of Europe, idea of, 599 

'universal labour service', 91 

universities, 698, 776-7 

Upper Volta, 517, 518, 542 

Urga, Hutuktuof, 192 

Urrutia, Judge Manuel, 622, 623 

Uttar Pradesh, 569 

VI and V2 offensive, 405-6 
Vahidi, Allameh, 713 



INDEX 



869 



Valentinov, N., 53 

VaJJadolid, 328 

Vallee, Rudy, 254 

Van Hise, Charles, 16 

Vance, Cyrus, 674 

Vandenberg, Arthur, 439 

'vanguard fighters', 55, 56, 57, 61-2, 89, 95, 
96, 134, 181, 191 

Vanzetti, Bartolomeo, 205 

Varenne, Alexandre, 149 

Varga, Jeno, 453 

Veblen, Thorstein, 241 

Veidt, Conrad, 116 

Versailles Treaty (1919), 24, 29, 32, 120, 124, 
140, 148, 173, 429, 525; imposed upon 
Germany, 26-8; US Congress refusal to 

Versailles Treaty (contd) 

ratify, 34; reparations and reprisals, 36, 
106, 134; attempted embodiment of 
principle of self-determination, 38; creation 
of more minorities, 38; dissatisfaction with, 
95; comparative generosity to Germany, 
106, 108; blamed by Germany for currency 
collapse, 135; disarmament clause, 139, 
351, 405; ultra-nationalists' denigration of, 
146; concessions to China, 187; repudiated 
by Hitler, 312, 319, 320, 341, 343, 351 

Verwoerd, H.F., 523 

Vesenkha (Supreme Council of National 
Economy), 89 

Vettard, Camille, 10 

Vichy Government, 146, 365-6, 420, 587-8 

Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, 100 

Vienna, 132-3; Congress of (1813), 17, 25 

Vietnam, 460, 463; war, 630-7, 651, 654; 
Communist victory, 654; 'unification' of 
North and South, 657 

Vigon, Colonel Juan, 335 

Vilno, 39 

violence: black, 645-6; increase in, 687-9; as 
moral necessity, 687; Nazi use of, 278-9, 
296-306, 344; in post-colonial Africa, 
537-8, 541-2; revolutionary, 55, 57, 58, 
66, 78-9, 184, 200-1, 262-3; student, 127, 
556, 557, 620, 643-4; against Weimar 
parliamentarianism, 123-5 

Viollette, Maurice, 151 

Volk movement, 118 

Volpi, Giuseppe, 103 

Volstead Act (US, 1920), 209 

Voroshilov, Marshal, 265, 300, 455 

Voting Rights Act (US, 1965), 645 

Waffen ss, 287 

Waite, Morrison Remick, 662 
Wakefield, Edward Gibbon, 151 
Walden, Herwath, 114 
Walesa, Lech, 702 
Wallace, Henry, 213, 438 
Walters, W.W., 250 
Walton, E.T.S., 406 



Wandervogel, 119 

Wang Hung-wen, 563^4 

Wang Kwang-mei, 552, 559 

Wapping, industrial dispute at, 743-4 

war criminals, trial of, 428-30 

war-debts, 28, 29, 35-6 

war-guilt, 24, 106-9 

War Powers Act (US, 1973), 653 

'war socialism', 16, 90, 141, 277, 401 

Warsaw Pact, 768 

Washington D.C., 211, 250, 269 

Washington Naval Treaty (1922), 188 

Wassermann, Jakob, 121 

Water Pollution Act (US, 1965), 661 

Watergate affair, 649, 651-2, 653 

Watson, James, 778 

Waugh, Evelyn, 162, 362, 506, 531 

Wavell, Field-Marshall Lord, 396, 473 

Webb, James, 629 

Webb, Sidney and Beatrice, 275, 276, 473, 

475, 601 
Webb, Sir William, 427 
Weber, Max, 18, 110, 123, 128 
Wedd, Nathaniel, 172 
Weill, Kurt, 113 
Weimar Constitution, 110-11 
Weiss, Ernst, 117 
Weiss, Ferdl, 132 

Weizmann, Chaim, 421, 482, 484, 488 
Welensky, Sir Roy, 162 
'welfare capitalism', 225 
Welles, Summer, 345, 619 
Wells, H.G., 13, 148, 213, 249, 276, 349, 

641, 697 
Wendel, Francois de, 142 
Werfel, Franz, 117 
Westerners, German, 111-12, 125, 136, 144, 

280 
Westinghouse, 660 
Westphalia, Peace of (1648), 17, 18 
Wheeler, J.A., 407 
White, Harry Dexter, 458, 659 
White, William, 436 
White, William Allen, 217, 218, 219 
White Russians, 75-6 
Whitehead, A.N., 3 
Whiteman, Paul, 227 
Wieland, William, 621 
Wilder, Billy, 113 
Wilder, Thornton, 226 

Wilhelm n, Kaiser, 15, 19, 104, 105, 108, 109 
Wilkie, Wendell, 647 
Williams, V.R., 454 
Williams-Ellis, Amabel, 275 
Williamson, Henry, 163 
Wilson, Edmund, 215, 222, 248, 252 
Wilson, Edward, 780 
Wilson, Harold, 602 
Wilson, Sir Henry, 45 
Wilson, Woodrow, 16, 74, 204, 232, 243, 

258; on collective brutality, 14; and 



870 



INDEX 



Wilson {contd) 

American entry into war, 22-3, 460; and 
peacemaking, 23-34, 105, 173; his 
'Fourteen Points', 23, 24, 27, 105; his 'Five 
Particulars', 23, 24; and League of Nations, 
25, 28-9, 31-2, 33, 34, 43; fatal illness, 
33-4, 205 

Windsor, Duke of, 306 

Winnipeg general strike (1919), 38 

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 168, 699 

Wohlthat, Helmuth, 358 

Wolf, Friedrich, 112, 306 

Wolfe, Thomas, 226, 248, 259 

Wolff , Ernst, 334 

Wolff, Kurt, 116 

Wolff, Theodor, 116 

Woltmann, Ludwig, 120 

Woodin, William, 254 

Woolcott, Alexander, 252 

Woolf, Leonard, 167, 168, 349, 472 

Woolf, Virginia, 171 

Workingmen's Party, America, 213 

World Bank, 659, 735, 739 

World Council of Churches, 705 

World Food Conference (1974), 691 

World Jewish Congress (1942), 420 

World Population Conference (1974), 691 

Worringer, W.R., 114 

Wright, Richard, 477 

Wriston, Walter, 664, 671 

Writers' Congress (Madrid, 1937), 337-8 

Wu Han, 555 

WuPei-fu, Marshal, 195 

Wuhan, 560 

Wurche, Ernst, 19 

Wurm, Bishop, 413 

Wynne-Edwards, V.C., 779 

Xavier, Francis, 177 

Yacef, Saadi, 499 

Yagoda, G.G., 300, 301 

Yalta Conference (1945), 404, 425, 429, 435, 

436 
Yamamoto, Count Gombei, 183 
Yamamoto, Admiral Isoroku, 389, 393, 398 
Yamashita, General Tomuyuki, 395 
Yang Chang-chi, 197 
Yani, General Abdul, 479 
Yao Teng-shan, 558 
Yarkov,Ilya, 681,682 



Yeats, W.B., 11,306 

Yeats-Brown, Major Francis, 306 

Yeltsin, Boris, 766-7 

Yen Fu, 197 

Yen Hsi-shan, General, 195, 201 

Yepishev, General Alexei, 719 

Yevdokimov, Y.G., 226, 456 

Yevtushenko, Y.A., 674 

Yezhov,N.I.,301,302 

Yom Kippur War, 668, 684 

YomeiTenno, 180 

Yoshihito, Emperor of Japan, 176 

Youlou, Fulbert, 517 

Youmans, Vincent, 227 

Young, Owen, 258 

Youth Movements, 18, 119 

Yuan Shih-kai, General, 191 

Yugoslavia, 40, 147, 373, 348; German 
occupation, 374; murdered Jews from, 415; 
Croats returned to, 431; Soviet share of, 
434; expulsion from Cominform, 441; 
defiance of Soviet, 448-9; population trend, 
723; economy, 727; break-up threatened, 
762-3 

Yukin,Ozaki, 183, 185 

Yuzonsha society, 184 

Zaire, 517, 518, 531, 539, 541, 542, 671 
Zambia, 514, 526, 542; village regrouping, 

530-1 
Zamora, Alcala, 325 
Zangwill, Israel, 203 
Zasulich, Vera, 52 
Zasyadki, A.F., 550 

Zhdanov, A.A., 302, 449, 455, 553, 556 
Zhivkov, Todor, 760 

Zhukov, Marshal G.K., 372, 384, 455, 675 
Zimbabwe, 526, 542 
Zimmerman, Arthur, 399 
Zinoviev, G.Y., 91, 93, 262, 263, 264-5, 266, 

268, 299, 300 
Zionism, 121,481-6, 522 
Zniakov, Fedor, 677 
Zollverein, 591 
Zoshchenko, Mikhail, 453 
Zorin, V.A., 440 
Zuckmayer, Carl, 113 
Zweig, Arnold, 117, 306 
Zyklon-B, 414, 415