ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACIES

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21200, 24 August 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

ASSAULT ON DEMOCRACIES

Need For Alertness :: Danger In Apathy

(Pearl Strachan, in Christian Science Monitor)

A T THE SODA FOUNTAIN, comer of Washington and Elm Streets, they were talking about the possible invasion of American soil. They were talking in terms of armament alone. It did not occur to these talkers that in every instance of German territorial advancement the physical invasion had been but a follow-up of the original mental invasion. Invasion of the democracies began a long time ago. and the United States did not escape. Writing of Nazi aims.* in the Boston Sunday Post. Bill Cunningham wrote the other day : “What they want out of the way is our system of government, our system of thought, our tradition of personal freedom and the democratic ideal.” His remarks appeared on the heels of a speech by Archibald MacLeish, Librarian of Congress, at the annual meeting of the American Association for Adult Education, in which he said : “Unless we regain in this democracy the conviction that there are final Things For Which Democracy Will Fight —unless we recover faith in the expression of these things in words—we can leave our planes unbuilt and our battleships on paper, for we shall not need them.” There is a form of mental paralysis which the enemies of democracy have recognised as the perfect soil for sowing the dragons’ teeth of Armageddon. It is the final stage of the mental invasion. After the spreading of false ideologies, through literature, drama, film, press, radio, racial pride and prejudice, and advertising: after the terrorising of the immediate victims in the path; the drug of discouragement and apathy is employed to reduce observers to a condition of resignation. This state of mind, not resisted, means first mental, then phvsical defeat. If there ever were a time in history when those who believed in democracy needed to gird up the loins of their thinking and to carry on, with all the vigour at their disposal, the normal, constructive activities of their lives, it is now. I remember hearing Christopher Morley say, about eighteen months ago : “The peaceful-minded people today have got to think faster than the trouble-makers . . . the only way to safeguard the future of the world is to refuse to allow others to settle our future for us.” While certain ideologies opposed to democracy have appeared to oppose each other, it is well to remember that in an emergency, such as the case of Finland, democracy’s foes could more easily Overlook the Differences between them than they could the differences between each one and the democracies; that things opposed to the same thing, in the end, make common cause. Statesmen in Europe who might have dealt a blow for democracy during the Spanish rebellion realise too late how organised fear of the lesser foe betrayed them into the hands of the greater foe. In an earlier speech by Mr MacLeish I find this passage : “Those who shout that America is threatened by the Reds prevent a certain number of their fellow-citizens from considering soberly and quietly what

it is that really threatens America. . . . Those who, like myself, assert that the threat to democratic civilisation is the threat of Fascism mean that the culture of the Republic is threatened by the existence in the United States of the kind of situation which has produced Fascism elsewhere.” Education, he went on to say, is the remedy; education not “to see conspirators under the beu,” but education which would teach the people “to value the kind of life democracy makes possible.” Not all the victims of the mental invasion are consciously opposed to their own form of government. Many are simply apathetic. Many are ignorant, and their Ignorance Needs to be Dispelled. There is no such thing as harmless ignorance. La Fontaine in one of his fables tells of a lonely bear and a lonely gardener who befriended him, to the point of inviting him to share his home. All went well until, one day. as the gardener slept, the bear noticed a fly crawling on the tip of his friend’s nose. He struck at the fly and in killing it also cracked his friend’s skull. “Nothing,” concludes the poet, “is so dangerous as an ignorant friend. It is better to have an intelligent enemy.” How can people sympathise with tyranny ? One hears such bewildered questions on all sides. It is easy to understand after a few first-hand observations of the manipulation of the ignorant mind. Those nurtured in a simple faith in brotherly love are often unaware that their viewpoint is not shared by everybody else, and they are at a disadvantage. They are as perplexed as children when they discover that Japanese warriors, for example, having their own peculiar “heaven” entered through bloodshed, are utterly immune to the Sermon on the Mount. They are shocked because the wholesale slaughter of Ethiopians does not seem like murder' to their Italian neighbours. At the height of the Abyssinian invasion I wandered, one day. into a marionette show in the pushcart district of New York’s lower East Side. The drama was from Ariosto’s poems of the crusades. The exultant joy with which the ordinarily amiable audience watched the heads of Saracens rolling into the wings was a Revelation of the Attitude in which the march against the “pagans” had gone forward. The emblem of the Fascist party is the axe and the bundle of “fasces,” or faggots, which, according to the fable, must be separated before they can be chopped through. The friends of democracy, too. should have unity for their emblem: they should make their cause invulnerable to the attacks of the propagandists. They should be alert to the methods of the invaders and watch that the mental parachutists have no landing in their midst. As* the Librarian of Congress has put it, they should maintain the conviction “that there are final things for which democracy will fight,” and they should be on guard against that drug of discouragement producing the mental paralysis which is perhaps the biggest “secret” weapon of democracy’s foe.