SOCIALISM AND COLD WAR
713
How will the Western people react when they are confronted
with what will seem to them a shameful and inexplicable series of
diplomatic reverses and withdrawals? There are some who will
claim that public opinion will not be stirred out of its complacency.
Why should anyone in Dusseldorf, Birmingham, Montreal or De–
troit be disturbed by the shrinking of Western world influence, pro–
vided his own standard of living is not affected?
If
the peoples of
the North Atlantic area can be assured, they say, of their material
well-being and national security, they will be only too ready to give
up the "white man's burden" and leave his civilizing mission and
world leadership to Moscow and Peking.
Personally I have sometimes been tempted by the arguments for
a Little England policy, and I have never doubted that there are a
very large number of Americans who would also be content with a
"Little America" policy.
It
is by no means irrational to hold the
view that our Western civilization has had its day, that the cultural
leadership of the world is rapidly moving eastwards and that our
role in the next hundred years is to be not the sun in the center of
the system but an unambitious outer planet, placidly rotating in the
reflected light of the new, Communist world civilization. Neverthe–
less, it would be self-deception to base our policies on the assump–
tion that the Affluent Societies of the West can so easily opt out of
their world responsibilities and surrender leadership for the sake of
material comforts.
It is far more likely that, when the trend of world development
becomes clear and the Communist victories are undeniable, a deep
revulsion will set in. Gradually our peoples will be shaken out of
their comfortable affluence. Gradually their eyes will be opened to
the threat to democratic values which for years has been concealed
from them by Governments systematically appeasing the private
profit-makers at the cost of public service and public enterprise.
And one day anger will replace complacency. There will be a return
of that sense of betrayal and that readiness to repudiate the "guilty
men" with which the British people, in November 1938, awoke to
the crimes of appeasement.
In those days, however, once the spell was broken, the
Churchillian way of salvation was blessedly clear. In 1940 Britain
had to make good the damage caused during the "years of the
