ARMS FOR DEMOCRACY

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 73, 15 November 1940, Page 4

ARMS FOR DEMOCRACY

Sir,-In your issue of October 4 you reprinted part of a statement to the "New Republic" in which Archibald MacLeish, Librarian for the U.S. Congress, said that several post war-writers had disarmed democracy. I wondered, if these men had disarmed democracy, who had armed it again, and

with what weapons. One answer to these questionings appeared on your Leader Page in your issue of November 1. You said: The time might come when we could fight two wars at once-Hitler’s own and our most advanced thinkers’-but it had not come yet. We are rearmed, then, I take it, with fear for our hides, There are many answers to MacLeish, and there are the same answers to your leader. However, since Mr. MacLeish started the argument let us consider an answer to him which appeared in a later issue of the "New Republic." If the questioning voice of the "average man" in New Zealand can be ignored, as you ignore it, it is possible that some one may heed Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science in the University of London since 1926. Both he and MacLeish, it must be remembered, confined their direct arguments to the American scene. I hope your readers realise how strongly they apply elsewhere. Laski talks of "the general malaise of our time, the index to the collapse of a historic civilisation in which America shares." He goes on: "The war is an expression of that malaise and that collapse and the new generation, not unnaturally, has the sense that it is being asked to be its victims without any certainty that the sacrifice will bear fruit. I think it knows, just as much as Mr. MacLeish, that Hitlerism is ugly and evil. What it asks to be assured of .. . is that a victory over Hitlerism will be a victory for the things it cherishes . . . It suspects those, who, while they excoriate Hitler and all his works, are not disturbed by share-croppers and the infantile death-rate in San Antonio." He talks of the control of big business over American colleges, and the frustrated feeling it gives undergraduates to be forced to believe that they will leave college with no philosophy at all, or as worshippers "at the shrine of what William James called ‘the Bitch Goddess Success’." He adds: " The students are not led astray by Hemingway, Remarque, and Walter Millis. Mr. MacLeish knows how much of what they had to report was true. I add that, if he does not, I should like him to see the men from Dunkirk I have seen, and I think they will be able to convince him that these writers had grounds for the analysis they made . . . Heaven knows that in this beleagured fortress of ours the defeat of Nazism is the price of a tolerable civilisation. But I also know that this defeat depends upon our power in Britain to evoke the dynamics of Democracy . . . The readers of this literature about which Mr. MacLeish is so fearful are not... opposed to the real interests of democracy . . . It is by meeting their discontents with understanding and magnanimity that we shall give the younger generation the sense of a victory for freedom." It may, as you suggest, be the worst sort of subversion to say that we do not know what we are fighting for. In actual fact we do know that we are fighting for the lives we are living now. But the more important fact remains that my generation has been disillusioned so much by its experience of the results of one war, that it goes into another without crusading enthusiasm. If you refuse to supply that crusading spirit then you are as much to blame as Hemingway or MacLeish, or Versailles, or the Saar, or Homo Sapiens in his entirety, if Democracy is still spiritually disarmed.

WAR BABY

(Wellington).

(We do not ignore the voice of the average man. We give it. The average man knows why we are fighting, and knows that those who pretend not to know are either not average or not sincere.-Ed.)