THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POLITICAL CRITICISM THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES AND OTHER ESSAYS IN POLITICAL CRITICISM by DWIGHT MACDONALD GREENWOOD PRESS, PUBLISHERS WESTPORT, CONNECTICUT Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Macdonald, Dwight. _ The responsibility of peoples, and other essays in political criticism. Reprint of the ed. published by Gollancz, London. 1. Social sciences--Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Title. [H3 5 .M18 19 7I+] 300 7b-b&>9 ISBN 0-8371-7^78-3 © Dwight Macdonald, 195 7 Originally published in 1957 by Victor Gollancz Ltd., London Reprinted with the permission of Professor Dwight Macdonald Reprinted in 1974 by Greenwood Press, a division of Williamhouse-Regency Inc. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 74-4659 ISBN 0-8371-7478-3 Printed in the United States of America CONTENTS THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES The Responsibility of Peoples g Massacre from the Air 46 Notes on the Psychology of Killing 49 My Favourite General 62 The Responsibility of Intellectuals 67 The Germans—Three Years Later 71 With Malice toward Some 76 LOOKING AT THE WAR The Unconscious War 79 Three Worlds 85 Warsaw 89 Horror—Ours or Theirs? 99 The Bomb 103 The Pacifist Dilemma 116 “ I Choose the West” 121 THE CULTURAL FRONT Mr. Van Wyck Brooks and Kulturbolschewismus 129 Amateur J ournalism 140 The Eisenstein Tragedy 158 Alien Corn iyj POLITICAL PATHOLOGY On the Proletariat as a Revolutionary Class 179 The Death of Roosevelt 184 Totalitarian Liberalism 187 USA v. USSR 192 The Great Thaw 199 CONTENTS SAINTS 207 Gandhi 211 Dorothy Day BY TH E W AY 233 The Question of God 238 Too Big acknowledgments Most of the articles reprinted here originally appeared in Mr. Macdonald’s magazine, Politics. After such articles, the date of the issue alone is given. In other cases, the name of the magazine in which the article appeared is also given “The Responsibility of Peoples was reprinted and several of the other articles in this book were printed for the first time in The Root Is Man, The Cunningham Press, Alhambra, California, 1953- THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES We talk o f the Turks and abhor the cannibals; but may not some o f them go to heaven before some o f us; We may have civilized bodies andyet barbarous souls. We are blind to the real sights o f this world; deaf to its voice; and dead to its death. H erman M elville Germans have thought in politics what other peoples have done. Although Germany has only accompanied the development o f nations with the abstract activity o f thought, without taking an active part in the real struggles incident to this development, she has, on the other hand, shared in the suffering caused by national development with­ out sharing in its enjoyments, or their partial satisfaction. Abstract activity on the one side corresponds to abstract suffering on the other side. Consequently, one fine day Germany will find herself at the level o f European decay before she has ever stood at the level o f European emancipation. The phenomenon might be likened to a fetish- worshipper who succumbs to the diseases o f Christianity. The only liberation o f Germany that is practical or possible is a liberation motivated by the theory that declares man to be the Supreme Being o f mankind. In Germany, no brand o f serfdom can be ex­ tirpated without extirpating every kind o f serfdom. The emanci­ pation o f Germans is the emancipation o f mankind. K arl M arx (1844) Now I must say goodbye. Tomorrow mother goes into the gas chamber, and I will be thrown into the well. FROM A LETTER WRITTEN BY A CHILD IN A POLISH “ DEATH CAMP” " W e w e r e a little nervous when she was taken,” the girl’s mother said afterwards. “You never know what will happen when they start to use the electric needle. But we should not have worried. She never gave the Germans a single name or address and no one was arrested.” XO THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES The girl was a member of the French underground; she was caught by the Gestapo; she was tortured, while her mother was held in a nearby cell so she could hear her daughter’s screams; and she died. This was Europe under the Nazis: the matter-of- fact reference to torture; the technological modernity of the in­ strument; the mother’s politicalized attitude— “we should not have worried” , since “ she never gave a single name” . Some­ thing has happened to the Germans— to some of them, at least; something has happened to Europe— to some of it, at least. What is it? Who or what is responsible? What does it mean about our civilization, our whole system of values? This is the great moral question of our times, and on what our hearts as well as our heads answer to it depends largely our answer to the great practical questions. In this article, I want to consider this question as an aspect of the general problem of what my friend, Nicola Chiaromonte, calls “the responsibility of peoples” . In the last war, we believed many “ atrocity stories” which later turned out to have been propaganda. Compared to the German atrocities which are reported by the press in this war, those of 1917, however revolting in detail, were (1) quanti­ tatively negligible (rarely involving more than a score or so of alleged victims), and (2) deeds done in hot blood by individual soldiers using bayonets or guns rather than the systematic tor­ tures and massacres with specially designed instruments that are now reported. So tender was the civilian mood of those days that the British were able to arouse great indignation over the execution of Edith Cavell, who, as a spy, by all the rules of war­ fare “deserved” her fate. Today we are more tough-minded— we have to be, or go crazy, so severe are the shocks administered to our moral sensibilities, indeed to our very nervous systems, by each morning’s newspaper. Yet even so, one’s heart fails at some of the reports. The French War Crimes Commission recently estirpated that between 200,000 and 250,000 French civilians had been killed by the Germans during their occupation of France. The Commission has also assembled a museum of torture de­ vices: branding irons, pincers for pulling out fingernails, an THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES “ electrical shoe” , a steel helmet studded with screws that can slowly be tightened. Not since the Spanish Inquisition has such an array been seen. Who would have dared predict, in the 19th century, that one of the most advanced nations in Europe would employ such instruments? Marx himself might well have shrunk from the supposition. His epigram of 1844 must now be reversed: the Germans have done in politics what other peoples have up to now dared only to think. In the last war, all this could have been dismissed as propa­ ganda. But the great difference between the “ atrocity stories” of World War I and those of World War II is that the latter are as convincingly authenticated as the former were not. To disbelieve the accounts of today, one would have to assume that almost every war correspondent is a liar on a Munchausen scale, (hat various neutral observers are liars, that certain inter­ nationally known religious and charitable institutions have fabricated detailed reports. We know, also, from the Nazis’ own theories and from what they did in Germany itself that such horrors are not improbable. Let us not only accept these horrors; let us insist on them. I ,ot us not turn aside even from the greatest of all: the execution of half the Jewish population of Europe, some four million men, women, and children, in Silesian and Polish “ death factories” .* 1 n the last war, the farthest our propagandists ventured was to lubricate the tale of the German “ corpse factories” , in which the bodies of dead soldiers were alleged to have been boiled down for their fat and chemicals. Not only was this untrue, but it would never have occurred to any one in 19W even to invent a story about abattoirs in which human beings took the place of * This essay appears here as published in “ Politics” for March, 1945. The f ollowing footnote was added in 1953: Later estimates put it at six million. By nn ironical twist of history, the victims have now become oppressors in their nun. Since 1948, some 800,000 Arab refugees, who fled from Palestine liming the fighting, have been living wretchedly in camps around the iinintry’s borders maintained by U.N. charity. The Israeli government opposed by no important Jewish group that I know of— refuses to let them buck and has given their homes, farms, and villages to new Jewish settlers. This is rationalized by the usual “ collective responsibility” nonsense. This expropriation cannot, of course, be put on the same plane as the infinitely gi cHlcr crime of the Nazis. But neither should it be passed over in silence. 12 THE RESPONSIBILITY OF PEOPLES cattle. And yet we know, from irrefutable evidence, that these things have been done. They are part of our world and we must try to come to some kind of terms with them. Detailed reports about the “death camps” have only come out within the past year. The chief ones I have seen are the descriptions of the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau in Upper Silesia which appeared in the N.