Through War & Peace

(11 of 12)

The man had used the most novel weapons of science and persuasion to revive the oldest and darkest human passions. He was the awful, ultimate answer to i goo's smug belief that change always moved in an upward direction. He was the proof that progress is poison as well as food, that evil is ineradicable and that safety is the most foolish of all foolish human hopes.

After he died, it became the fashion to think of Hitler and the Nazis as some inexplicable variation from normal mankind. The fact was that Germany stood near the peak of Western civilization, and Hitler, every inch a German, carried the bulk of his people with him into crime. The depths to which Germans had descended would not be impossible for Russians, Britons or Americans — if they managed to achieve sufficiently bad political leadership and a sufficiently reckless disregard of moral law. Hitler systematically, scientifically slaughtered 6,000,000 Jews, a fact which the world learned after the war. But before the war, he had clearly shown that he would do this if he got a chance — and most of the world, German and non-German, had received these tidings with no great indignation. War guilt was not confined to the aggressors, and not all of the guilty were tried at Niirnberg.

With Victory, the Veto.

As Hitler's defeat became certain, the victors gathered at San Francisco to build a new and better league of nations — "peace-loving nations," the phrase went. A charter, sharply restricted by the Big Power veto, emerged from San Francisco. The veto, it was agreed, would be used sparingly, a word that turned out to have different meanings in English and Russian; up to the end of 1949, the Russians have used the veto 43 times in the United Nations Security Council.

The intense nationalism that led to the veto was even proof against atomic bombs. The U.S.S.R. steadily refused to enter international atomic control agreements containing provision for genuine inspection and enforcement. By 1949 the Russians became able to make atomic bombs, and the hope of atomic agreement faded further.

In July 1945, Britain held its first general election in ten years. Churchill has described the surprising result: "I acquired [in 1940] the chief power in the State, which ... I wielded in ever-growing measure for five years and three months of world war, at the end of which time, all our enemies having surrendered unconditionally, or being about to do so, I was immediately dismissed by the British electorate from all further conduct of their affairs." Britain at that point preferred Clement Attlee (Churchill called him: "That sheep in sheep's clothing") and his Socialists, who continued the grim, grey wartime regime of "fair shares for all" — and not much for anybody.

Attlee presided resolutely over the partial dissolution of the Empire on which Churchill cast a Cassandra eye: "It is with deep grief that I watch the clattering down of the British Empire, with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind." It was too late for such regrets. Asians were determined to break the imperialist tether even at the risk of chaos and subsequent Communist control. In April 1949, Chinese Reds fired on British naval vessels in the Yangtze River; anti-Communists in Korea, Hong Kong and Shanghai hung pictures of the wounded