"By Kinestey Manx Mr. Churchill rightly assumed that the, British are a. stubborn people, willing to stand and fight in the last ditch. But he misunderstood their feeling when he talked of this as the finest moment of our history. Our feelings are more complex than that. To talk to common people in or out of uniform is to discover that determination to de~ fend this island is coupled with a deep and almost universal bitterness that we have been reduced to such a pass, Mr. Churchill was the most eloquent of prophets during the Chamberlain Government. He warned the country in precise and energetic terms that England and France would not be able to defend themselves or their Empires if they allowed the League be destroyed and if they refused an al-Nance with Russia, It has not been difficult to be a prophet during the last five years we could fil an issue of this journal [New Statesman and Nation") with' quotations from past editorials in which we' foretold the situation in which an isolated France and Britain would face a Europe! under the domination of the Axis. The peculiar exasperation of these years of disastrous government has been just this ease of forecast. Events have moved with the ghastly precision of a classical tragedy. The rst act was the failure after the last war to) face either of the two great problems confronting mankind, the unification of Europe! fon a federal basis and the necessity for substituting a collectivist for a capitalist economy. The second stage was the perversion and then the destruction of the League, which was the tentative effort of the post-war world to find organizations which might some day tackle these problems. I need not tell that story again. The third act! came with the growing strength of Hitler: and the realization that the new Germany sought not only territorial domination, but! algo the total destruction of the ideas on which Western civilization had been built.
After the betrayal of the League as a constructive instrument fo solve the problem of Germany's relations with other countries, there was a chance of salvaging the situa~ tion by a "grand alliance" which would have prevented the German conquest and might! have prevented the war. Again, our rulers, terrified always of the common people anc of the workers, refused throughout the Spanish War and' at Munich to touch the hand of Russia and continuously sought {riendship with the enemies of our eivilization, The story of the efforts to go into partnership with the Axis Powers, the whole! tragedy of appeasement, needs no repetition. Every week, one saw more clearly that by: asking for a constructive policy for Europe, combined with resistance to the Nazi advance, we were merely ensuring, while the' Chamberlain Government was in' office, that we should get, not the policy we demanded but the war we wished to avoid. This has! een the fate of the critics of the National Government—to ask for the best and to have enough influence to produce only the worst. The war could have been prevented. Britain and France could have begun a new era in Europe, When we called for collective seeurily we were told we were warmongers when we called for a Russian alliance in order {0 resist Hitler, we got no collective ut the Iunatie guarantee of Poland Russian support! The desire 10 resist Hiller did not get vid of Mr. Chamber= lain; it simply pressed him into " guarantee: which made war certain, Even when war itself came, we yot no statement of war aims: which would have given hopes for the future. We have only obtained, even during these nine months of war, the steady refusal of those in power to face the fact that the Nazi could only be opposed effectively by whi was in effect a socialization of British economy. When finally the full extent of the incompetence and nervelessness of the Chamberlain Government was revealed in the Norwegian campaign, a popular front Government, retaining within itself too many) of ity. discredited predecessors, at length came into power; it was too late to provide! the BEF, with the tanks and aeroplanes that they needed. Only now is it beginning' to be understood how criminally ineompet~ the last Government was and some of Ministers and Civil Servants still are.
'A similar story has been repeated in one country after another. Poland provides the most to extreme example. Up to the last while the Nazi legions were thunder= ing at the gates, the State remained feudal ud absurd. No one doubted the courage of the Poles. They were so courageous that they sat sipping In the cafes ana boasting of they would do to the Germans even when the enemy erossed the frontier, for whose defence the Polish General Staff, had not thought it necessary to prepare. At the last _minutes the Government fled and the population to the defence of their capital. Miller is sai shed tears when he saw the massacre and desolation of aw. "How wicked the people must) have been," he is reputed to have said, "to That is the extreme example of a ruling class, utterly arrogant and blind, deserving its destruction but unfortunately ' carrying to destruction with it the unfortunate people whom it has misgoverned. Something similar, it less extravagant, has happened in France. There, too, the common people, the common soldiers, have been misled and betrayed by their rulers. In Britain, the public is waking up to the realities terribly late. They have been ruled by men who could neither make peace nor war, who have thrown away allies who might have helped them, and who have not prepared for the war which their policy made inevitable. It is no wonder that coup~ Ted with a readiness to resist, amongst men and women a deep and bitter anger.
Mr. Churel derful oratorical powers, and prophetic insight make time a natural leader. He has the defect that he has never understood the social forces at work. He assumed too easily that destructive or defeatist elements in every country were due to treachery. He seems to have imagined that a bugle call from Britain would at once lead to a rally of all the neutrols to our side. That was true in 1935, Tt would still to some extent have been true at Munich. It ceased utterly to-be true after the destruction of Poland, and that for two reasons. Large groups of people in the great and small nations alike have not ralied as they would have done in the past, partly because of the nature of modern war. Today men without machines are powerless and none, except the Nazis, are mad enough to fight except with reluctance. The small neutrals were not "pro-German." but sections of their governments and populations naturally preferred a German conquest to a devastating war with the help of the Allies, whose competence to help them they gravely doubted. And they doubted more than their competence, they doubted their intentions and their aims. Goebbels has made good play with gibes about the plutodemocracies fand those who have heard his gibes have Known them in part at least to be true. No Tead is given from this country that has offer-general emancipation or a unified Europe. We have left the calm of a unified Europe to the brutality of the Nazis. This is still Hitler's principal propagandist card. Until Mr. Churchill's admirable offer to France of common citizenship there has been even from this reformed Government (overworked os it is) no clear and explicit statement of war aims which would make the world believe that Britain stood for anything but its own empire, Nothing has been said to reassure people that survival, which Mr. Churchill Fightly declares to "be the one necessity, means the emancipation of the common people from the control of high finance and big Dusiness as well as the defeat of the Nazi war machine, Only one thing today seems quite clear. We must individually stand as best we may for those things to which we owe our highest allegiance. Ami of them are threatened by the Nozi regime. When Goebbels said that the Nazis exist to destroy "the principles of 1789," he spoke with precise truth. Instead of liberty, the Nazis offer slavery; instead of equality, they offer the rule of the Nordic Drutality; instead of fraternity and interna tionalism, they offer an endless series of future wars, To those ideas none of us in England can surrender whatever may happen fon the battlefield, There comes into my mind today the biblical story of the three men who were told that they would be thrown into a burning, fiery furnace unless they bowed down to false Gods. They replied: "Our God whom we serve is able {0 Geliver us from the burning, fiery furnace. But if not, be it known unto thee, © King, that we will not serve thy Gods." And we will not.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.