Page:The War and the Future.djvu/15

 future—for this future, for the new world of unity and cooperation for which we hope the German spirit is by no means historically unprepared and unfit. We should be psychologists enough to recognize that this monstrous German attempt at world domination, which we now see ending catastrophically, is nothing but a distorted and unfortunate expression of that universalism innate in the German character which formerly had a much higher, purer, and nobler form and which won the sympathy and admiration of the world for this important people. Power politics corrupted this universalism and turned it into evil, for whenever universalism becomes power politics then humanity must arise and defend its liberty. Let us trust that German universalism will again find the way to its old place of honor, that it will forever renounce the wanton ambition of world conquest and that it will again prove itself as world sympathy, world understanding, open-mindedness, and spiritual enrichment of the world.

Wisdom in the treatment of the defeated opponent is desirable if only because of a feeling of shared guilt. The world democracies, which in 1918 were in possession of unlimited power, failed to do anything to prevent the calamity in which we are living today. The pacification of the world through reforms and the satisfaction of human need for justice, which now preoccupy the whole world, could have been realized at that time. This would have prevented the rise of the dictators and the whole dynamic explosive philosophy of hate; but fascism, of which national socialism is a peculiar variation, is not a specialty of Germany. It is a sickness of the times, which is everywhere at home and from which no country is free. Never could the regimes of violence and fraud in Italy and Germany have maintained themselves even for a month, had they not met with a very general and disgraceful sympathy from the economically leading classes and, therefore, from the governments of the democratic countries.

I certainly would flunk an examination in Marxism. But although I know that fascism has its ideological side and must be understood as a fatal, calamitous reaction against the rationalistic humanism of the nineteenth century, I must admit 15