SOCIALISM AND NATIONAL DEFENSE
251
to wring the last drop of humiliation, after the provincial "corpora–
tive" regimes of Spain and Italy, has now been adopted by the
French parliament, which has also voted its own suicide and
handed supreme power over to the .octogenarian General Petain.
LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY has yielded to LABOR,
FAMILY, FATHERLAND. It is characteristic of the fascist
"world revolution" that the eighteenth century abstractions sound
considerably more modern than their 1940 successors.
For this new world order that is now being born is one that is
as contradictory, backward-looking and unpredictable as it is sinis–
ter. Two things only are clear. One is that the stalemate into which
world capitalism had fallen in this century, a stalemate which the
last war merely intensified, has been broken in a few weeks by the
powerful military instrument so patiently and cunningly forged
during the last seven years in Germany. And the other is that this
is
no brave new world, but a hideous distillation of all the worst
features of the old one.
1914 AND
1940
"What was our crime?" asked a French broad–
caster after the surrender.
"It
was simply a
belief in a way of life that our experience has
proved to be suddenly unadapted to the times." The great meaning
of the war is that democratic capitalism has been "suddenly"
rev_ealed to be historically outworn. Frightened at the terrible
weaknesses of the democracies, the liberals shrink from drawing
the full conclusions from recent events. The more "orthodox"
Marxists also hesitate to probe too deeply, fearful of finding in
fascism some strange new monster which will not fit into their rigid
categories.
This war seems to me to differ from the last in that it is not a
conflict between rival imperialisms of the same general order but
rather a
social
war between different kinds of systems. On this
hypothesis alone can the differences between the two wars be
explained.
The Nazis have won because they have a crushing superiority
in
armaments which the Kaiser's army did not have and which
could only be created by a radical change in the economic system.
They have won because they devised entirely new military tactics
which expressed on the battlefield the superior organization of their
