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no stand on an alternative system), also demand totalitarian con–
trols. Long range {5 to 10 years): the third, and climactic, World
War, the final showdown between German and American imperial–
ism. This can be postponed, but it is provincial idiocy to think, as
Thomas and his KAOW seem to, that the America of 1941 could
turn its back on the world and peacefully cultivate its own back
yard. Assuming the persistence of capitalism in this country, the
left interventionists have all the better of the argument. And it is
just here that Thomas offers the same old program of peaceful,
respectable, 'evolutionary' progress whose last pretensions were
shattered in 1914.
5.
To support the Roosevelt-Churchill war regimes clears the
road for fascism from within
and
blocks the organization of
an effective war effort against fas'cism outside.
The line which most of the left today favors (liberal weeklies,
top
labor bureaucracy, Committee for Democratic Action, such
ex-Marxists as Eastman, Corey and Hook) is to support the Roose–
velt-Churchill war regime as the 'lesser evil' to Hitlerism. But
hasn't the experience of the last decade shown clearly that the very
most democratic capitalism can do is
retard
the advance of fascism
{and even that only under exceptionally favorable circumstances),
and that it cannot negate or destroy fascism? Haven't we yet
learned that this is a period when the greater evil yields not to the
lesser evil, but only to the positive good? {The Briining regime
was a 'lesser evil' to fascism in its day.) By now the social system
of Churchill and Roosevelt is so incompetent to plan large-scale
production whether for war or peace, so lacking in appeal to the
masses, that it is a weapon which is breaking in the hands of those
who would turn it against Hitlerism.
The war party proclaims theirs as the only 'realistic' anti–
fascist program. They reject a revolutionary struggle for social–
ism during the war as 'Quixotic'
if
not worse. We say
thei; s
is the
unrealistic course, we say
they
are the true Don Quixotes, foolishly
dreaming of defending an antiquated way of life.*
If
the isola–
tionists are provincial, the interventionists lack a historical sense.
No deficiency could be more fatal today.
•Quixote's delusion was to over-estimate his antagonists, seeing windm:!ls as giants,
sheep as armies. His modem similars see giants as windmills and Nazis as simple
luna.tics. They show, however, as great a capacity of idealization, as
cf.
the Dulcinea
of Churchill-Roosevelt democracy, the Rosinante of the Anglo-American war machine.
