DICTATORSHIP EVILS

Evening Post, Volume CXVII, Issue 74, 28 March 1934, Page 7

DICTATORSHIP EVILS

THE SAVAGE IMPULSE

OUTSP/DKEN WARNING

Why, asked Sir Norman Angell, in an address, on tho morrow of a war fought, we were told, to make the' world safe for democracy, should an epidemic of dictatorship have spread over the world, so that in Britain itself "popular" newspapers were beginning to advocate the overthrow of Parliamentary institutions and the substitution therefor of dictatorships of the German and Italian type? It was often argued that society, had become too complicated for popular management. Sir Norman agreed that modern problems were much more difficult than those which had confronted previous generations; that political incompetence, public stupidity—and xjarticularly electoral stupidity—surpassed belief, but he argued that dictatorship in. no way solved the problems of public folly, but tended rather to increase its extent and its danger. Dictators were, in the long run, as much dependent upon public opinion as were Parliaments and Parliamentary demagogues; they exploited and debased the public mind even more shamelessly. He gave instances of the.way in which dictatorship of the modern type gained its power by pandering to the most irrational, most anti-social, most dangerous impulses anid emotions of the mob mind, and in.which it exploited the desire of. everyone tp blame his troubles not upon his own. intellectual or moral shortcomings, but upon some scapegoat, upon other people, who had the insufferable impudence to. disagree with him or to differ from liam, in culture or in race. The dictator, gained support bypandering ,to i the; j savage impulse to coerce such people.. ■;. Modern dictatorships were founded upon the psychology: of the lynching party, said Sir Norman. Angell. They were democratic in the sense that ;'a lynching party was democratic, but not in the sense that jury, trial or a Court of law was democratic.1 Lynching could sometimes dispose of e^il men. ti certainly got that "actidir" which newspaper lords demanded, ibut' its spirit of violent-mindedness,,tfi* clamour for rapid judgments giyen^ in hot blood, tho refusal, to .hear evidence, the';teniper of vengeance—-all tlmI,.was:" :;fatal to any free and': orderly,'"society; ; arid in the long run did not>eyen J succeed in the suppression of the .crimes or the evils which"'-were ■•.its excuste./';. "Public judgment," continued Sir Norman, "what the common man-; thinks important and what uliiihportant, will determine the fate of! bur ciyilisation,and no dictatorship'can, ayert:'catastrophe if that judgment is vitiated at the source. A German Nazi said, the other day that rather than, see one. German under non-German "'rule he would see the. whole world perish in agony from bacteria which German science had adjpinistered. "We know that nationalism, of order; so common, in •Europe,7 Svhich has already almost, destroyed, civilisation, and- must, unless checked,' do>-so is the result of a sort of religious niankV; but it is the sort of religious mania, \ completely sincere: andy completely blind, which again and again in one foria or another .has'-captured the minds of untold millions over great surf aces of the earth for thousands of years. It gave us the holy wars of Mohammedanism, the inquisitions and • tho St. Bartholomew massacres'of Christianity. . . ':.. The danger of JFaseism does not reside in the political machinery or the economic policies which it proposes any more than the danger of Communism resides in Communism. The danger of both lies in the assumption which they make about the nature of the human mind and the place of public judgment in government." It was not.by a dictatorship which repressed all freedom of political discussion and opinion that we would solve the problem of government in our complex society, but by so reshaping popular education as to direct it more consciously than it was directed at present towards .equipping ithe millions to, understand the nature of that society of which they must be a part.