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PARTISAN REVIEW
Democracies took a long time to catch up to him. It was a full
eighteen months before any Democratic leader was able to formu·
late any
positive
war aims. Daladier talked of "a war to put an
end to a regime of force, rapine and prey." Chamberlain declared
that the first war aim was to defeat the enemy and his "aggressive,
bullying mentality," after which Britain would create "a new
Europe," details unspecified. Pressed in Parliament in the fall of
1940 for a statement of war aims, Churchill replied he was unwill–
ing "to go beyond the very carefully considered general statement
which already has been made"-i.e., Chamberlain's statement.
Finally, on January 6, 1941, Roosevelt outlined his famous
"four freedoms": freedom of speech-"everywhere in the world";
freedom of religion-"everywhere in the world"; freedom from
want and freedom from fear, also "everywhere in the world."
If
Roosevelt represents in this war "the conscience of the world," as
Wilson did in the last, it is because of two notes struck here: (1)
democratic universality, as expressed in the rhetorical iteration of
"everywhere in the world"; (2) "freedom from want," a projec–
tion of New Deal ideology on a world scale. In making the first
official statement on war aims for the Churchill Government,
Anthony Eden significantly followed Roosevelt's lead, building his
whole speech around the "four freedoms," which he quoted in full
as expressing "the keynote of our purposes."
(N. Y. Times,
May
30, 1941)*
The decay of world capitalism since the last war is revealed
in the detail that the Atlantic Charter devotes three of its eight
points to this "freedom from want" theme, which is not even men–
tioned in Wilson's Fourteen Points. In 1918 Wilson was able to
assume the health and desirability of the capitalist economic sys–
tem; the disease, he thought, could be cured by political reforms
only-self-determination of nations, League of Nations. The world
could believe him in 1918, which is why the Fourteen Points were
''the greatest victory of the last war." Today this belief in a purely
political
solution under capitalism is no longer possible, and so the
*The purely defensive note still appears, however. Thus only a few weeks before
Wallace made his "People's Century" speech, President Roosevelt, after inviting sug·
gestions, officially gave a name to this war- not "the People's War," not "the Battle
of the Four Freedoms," but- "the Survival War." This alternation between optimism
and pessimism, positive and negative is typical of the present Democratic regimes,
which maintain themselves by balancing one ideology against another, one class
against another, mediating between irreconcilables. The result in the field of war
aims is a bewildering medley of Survival War, neo·imperialism, and People's Century.
