THIS QUARTER
13
nation. Furthermore, war today being so vastly more destructive in
its effects on life and property than past wars, and also being so
increasingly inconclusive and futile even in terms of power politics
-what did the last war settle?-it is all the more essential to create
powerful ideological sanctions for the slaughter. The basic sanction
of this sort is the myth of national unity, the patriotic love of
fatherland which is supposed to rise above material and individual
interests, uniting all classes in the defense of a common cultural
ideal. This nationalist sanction reached its full development in the
last half of the last century. To it our own century has added
another, one which is especially potent in liberal and intellectual
circles. This is a sort of "international patriotism," so to speak–
the idea that the world is divided between the forces of "democ–
racy" and "autocracy" (1914-1918), or, this time. "freedom" and
"fascism."
The old-fashioned nationalist arguments in favor of our par·
ticipation in the war are not particularly dangerous in liberal-labor
circles. It is the internationalist doctrine which is really seductive.
We are faced, its advocates assert, with a concrete threat to the
free institutions of Western civilization, and we cannot remain
indifferent to the
po~sible
victory of fascist Germany. Many of
them admit the last war was a doctrinal fraud, but this war, they
say,
is "different," since fascism is incomparably more threatening
than Kaiserism ever was. Some wiil even admit that the Allied
cause is tainted with imperialism, but, as Freda Kirchwey of the
Nation
recently put it: "The qualified blessings of old-fashioned
imperialism must be preserved as a bulwark against the spread of
fascist domination." Fascism is the brute fact, and all theories
must be adapted-read "perverted"-towards the great end of
its defeat.
The general idea is that the Kaiser made war for the simple
aims of what Miss Kirchwey with nostalgia calls "old-fashioned
imperialism": to get colonies, to break England's mastery of the
seas, to open up new markets; while Hitlerism has all these aims
plus another of a quite different and more sinister category: to
extend the fascist political system throughout the world. It is true
that there are still important differences between political life in
France and in Germany, but this is not because France has not yet
been conquered by Germany, but because French capitalism has
not yet reached the crisis stage of its German prototype. As we
