National Defense: The Case for
Socialism
Dwight Macdonald
I.
Death of a World
IT
IS HARD
TO
REALIZE
it is only two months since the Reichswehr
crossed the Dutch border. In those sixty days, the pattern of West·
ern society and culture as we have known it since the Great French
Revolution a century and a half ago, has been dissolving into new
and bewildering and terrible shapes. A great many things most of
us had come to think eternal now seem to be obsolete: parlia·
meqtary democracy ... the gold standard . . . the British Empire
... Paris.
"Paris," said the Nazi, Rosenberg, two days after the city was
occupied by the Reichswehr, "was the center of mental confusion
that pervaded all Europe. This center of unlimited agitation
against the rebirth of the European nations, which thought of
nothing else but to plunge the world into chaos with the spiritual
and political falsification of words, is no\V firmly in the hands of
National Socialist Germany. This means the disinfection of a
source of illness...." Beneath the clumsy, turgid phrases so typi·
cal of this misbegotten Nazi "revolution" one can see that Rosen·
berg has intuitively seized the symbolic significance of Paris, for
a century and a half the center of the most advanced European
cultural and political consciousness, being occupied by the armies
of victorious National Socialism.
A year and a half ago I wrote here:
"If
France goes fascist,
we shall be saying goodbye to Western culture in all seriousness
and for a long time to come." And in the same editorial, I quoted
our Paris correspondent: "Daladier bears a more sinister resem·
blance to one Heinrich Bruning than to the Napoleon Bonaparte he
apparently fancies himself to be." The fears then expressed have
been only too well realized. An authoritarian constitution written
by the third-rate political intriguer, Laval, and modelled, as though
250
