Page:The War and the Future.djvu/19

 years were those, when in the name of a false peace, of appeasement, the people were sold out to fascism. The sacrifice of Czechoslovakia at the Munich conference was the most horrible and humiliating political experience of my life, and not only I felt so, but all decent people throughout the world.

In March 1932, a year before I left Germany, I delivered a lecture in honor of Goethe's centenary at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, a speech which closed with the words: "The credit which history today still grants to a free republic, to a democratic society, this rather short-term credit, rests upon the still maintained faith that what its power lusty enemies pretend to be able to do, namely, to lead the state and its economy over into a new world, democracy also can do." This warning, which at that time, was meant for the citizens of the German republic, could today be directed toward the citizens of the entire Occidental world. If democracy has not the courage in this world and afterward to rely upon the popular forces, to see in it a real war of the people and strive toward a new, a freer, and a juster world, the world of social democracy; if, on the other hand, unmindful of its own revolutionary traditions, it allies itself with the powers of the old order, a has-been order, to avoid at any price what it calls anarchy, to subdue every revolutionary tendency; then the faith of the European people who have been oppressed by fascism, will be exhausted and all of them, Germany first, will turn toward the power of the East in whose socialism the idea of individual freedom no longer has any place.

You perceive, Ladies and Gentlemen, that I do not visualize as ideal for humanity, a socialism in which the idea of equality completely outweighs that of freedom. So I hardly can be regarded as a champion of communism. Nevertheless, I cannot help feeling that the panic fear of the Western world of the term communism, this fear by which the fascists have so long maintained themselves, is somewhat superstitions and childish and one of the greatest follies of our epoch. Communism is today die bogeyman of the bourgeoisie, exactly as social democracy was in Germany in 1880. Under Bismarck 19