Christmas 1939: the spread of barbarism - archive

Editorial: the spread of barbarism

13 December 1939

If anybody wants to measure the effects of the rise and influence of the totalitarian philosophies of the State on the brutalisation of life, he has only to study the newspaper for a single day and then ask himself how the events there recorded would have struck a reader in the days before the Communist, Nazi, and Fascist systems had swept over Europe. A great surface of the Continent was then under the rule of authoritarian Governments, and liberals all looked forward to the day when those Governments would be changed into something better. He could never have imagined the plight into which Europe has fallen. Take only the events recorded in the last few days.

In Finland the Government that has succeeded the Tsar’s Government is engaged in a wanton invasion, and it refuses the services of the International Red Cross on the cynical pretext that its violence is not war. In Poland the scientific laboratory of one university has been dismantled and the professors of another sent to a concentration camp by a Government whose predecessor was proud of its services to science. A Jewish prison State is being set up of which a visitor to Germany so unprejudiced as Mr Villard has said that the treatment the Jews are receiving there would be condemned in any civilised country if it were applied not to human beings but to dogs or cattle. Children are taken as hostages for the docility of their parents. Populations are moved here and there at the pleasure of a single man; famine is wantonly created and spread.

All the barbarities that have disfigured man’s record in war are multiplied and organised as a system of civil life. What is terrifying in this spectacle is that it is not the result of war or of some passing emergency. It is the result of armed doctrine. Once societies succumb to the doctrine that man has no rights against the State this collapse of civilised standards is inevitable. The doctrine that Hitler preaches, that cruelty is the truest kindness, must of necessity turn the world back to barbarism, and to a barbarism infinitely worse than the barbarism of the ages when, in Hobbes’s well-known description, man’s life was nasty, brutish, and short.

Editorial: towards reconstruction

18 December 1939

The more post-war history is studied the clearer does it become that the fatal mistake made at Paris in 1919 was the failure to grasp what was happening to Europe. Famine, which had been banished from the horizon, had returned to madden and terrify great populations; disease had attacked people after people and despair had settled on their spirit. It was because the peacemakers did not realise that their first business was to restore this afflicted Europe that the peace settlement has such a disastrous history.

It is clear that vigorous economic co-operation will be essential after the war if any new peace is to have a tolerable chance. For this reason M. Reynaud’s eloquent speech last Wednesday in the Chamber of Deputies is an event of capital importance. It shows that this truth has been grasped by a French statesman who has the gift of leadership and is widely respected for his integrity, and courage.

Related: The second world war's 'phoney' beginning

In a striking article in the Figaro last week M. Wladimir d’Ormesson presses the same view. He puts it that we have to find a way of turning the millions spent on armaments to the improvement of social conditions in Europe. This is the task that defeated us twenty years ago. It is the task not merely of making peace but of healing a sick Europe. At that time there were a number of inter-Allied bodies which might have given invaluable help in peacemaking and reconstruction. Mr Wickham Steed held rightly that they should be used as a nucleus for a working League of Nations. Unhappily President Wilson extinguished all such plans by withdrawing the American representatives from those bodies.

To-day one of the most distinguished of the members of that inter-Allied service, M. Jean Monet, is the chairman of the Anglo-French co-ordinating committee, and the arrangements for financial and economic co-operation between the two countries go far beyond anything that was attempted in the last war. This is an excellent beginning, for if any scheme is ever to succeed in Europe it must start from the Western allies. But it is only a beginning, and certain things are essential to success. The Cabinet must be strengthened by the appointment of an Economic Minister; the economic conditions of the two countries must be thoroughly explored by experts; the full use must be made of the contacts established between the trade union movements of the two countries; and public opinion in both countries must be prepared for revolutionary changes. For we have in view an association that is not merely to serve the needs of the war but to become part of the life of the two peoples. If we fail in that, the task that defeated us twenty years ago will defeat us again.

This is an edited extract. Read the article in full.

Editorial: Christmas 1939

23 December 1939

It is a long time since Europe spent a Christmas unshadowed by the threat of war. Year after year we have seen the shadow growing, with its increasing menace to the basic Christian message for the season, whether that message be read in the richly extended mistranslation of the English version which offers peace and goodwill to all men without qualification or in the more precise rendering which promises peace to men of goodwill. The English message was the less logical but the more hopeful, for if peace was to depend on men of goodwill there was a marked shortage of such characters among the rulers of Germany, where violence and broken pledges, supported by the most prodigious campaign of organised calumny that has ever afflicted human annals, gave far too abundant proof that force was the only argument. Now all the more immediate hopes of sanity and good faith are shattered; Christmas brings not peace but a sword.

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Editorial: democracy and peace

27 December 1939

The pessimism that has settled on the world has clothed itself in some minds in a general theory that is particularly alarming. From the experience of the wild election of 1918 and its effect on the Peace of Versailles some historians have drawn the melancholy conclusion that a democratic society is more vindictive and rapacious than an aristocratic society when dealing with a defeated enemy. They contrast the peace made after Waterloo with the peace made more than a century later with the Central Powers and Turkey.

In one respect, indeed, the second peace was much better than the first. In 1814 and 1815 no regard at all was paid to national feeling, and territory was distributed to suit the convenience or the ambitions of the Great Powers. In comparison the treatment of the map of Europe in 1919 was liberal and humane. Mr Fisher put this well in his History of Europe

“The new political frontiers of are Wilsonian, and so drawn that three per cent only of the total population of the Continent live under alien rule. Judged by the test of self-determination, no previous European frontiers have been so satisfactory.”

Some critics are apt to forget that if Europe has paid for the vices of the Treaty of Versailles she paid for the vices of the Treaty of Vienna. We have only to recall the history of Italy and Poland, to take two countries to whose national feeling great violence was done, to see how much trouble those treaties caused in Europe.

There was, however, one important respect in which the victorious Powers in 1815 were much wiser than their successors in 1919. It is of this that historians are thinking when they draw their disturbing contrast between the two. France was treated with great generosity in 1815, whereas the defeated peoples in 1919 were harshly used. The reason for the indulgence shown to France is not obscure. The statesmen who made the Peace were afraid of the return of Napoleon or the rise of a successor, and they were therefore anxious to give the restored Bourbon house a good chance of keeping its throne. Moreover, France was represented by one of the greatest diplomatists of all history, and Talleyrand by his skill obtained a great influence over Castlereagh and Wellington.

The Allies should have seen in 1919 what the Allies had seen in 1814, that they had a special reason for treating the defeated Powers with consideration. For in the war they had distinguished between the old Government and the German people. If that distinction had been kept in mind when the Peace was made better terms would have been given to the enemy Powers because the old Governments had been dispossessed. But unhappily Germany had no Talleyrand in 1918, and the British people had felt the burden of a war of four years much more than their great-grandfathers had felt that of a war of twenty. In this atmosphere the desire for unlimited reparations drove out all generosity and wisdom, and the Allied statesmen at Paris made the mistake that Castlereagh and Wellington had avoided.