Hitlerism and Ourselves
HERR, HITLER'S activities proceed apace. Within the last seven days he (or Captain Goering, acting an his devolved authority) has proscribed a meeting that was to have . been addressed by Herr Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader ; effected the absorption of the Nationalist Party ; 'declared the extermination of the Socialist Party ; declared the. virtual extermination of the People's Party in Bavaria—one more new blow at the Catholics ; and completely- subordinated the Pro- testant Churches to the State machine._ What per- manent effect these new strokes . of policy will have cannot yet be discerned. The Socialists are no longer capable of resistance. • The Catholics of Bavaria' may display some active opposition, but are not likely to display much. Some _of the Lutherans and Evangelicals may, with their historic traditions unforgotten, prove harder to deal with. As the Archbishop of Canterbury said on Tuesday, "A Church in political chains can give no inspiration or power to any national move- ment," and there may be Getman Protestants who hold that doctrine with sufficient conviction to insist on the distinction between the things of Caesar and the things ,of God with the same independence of spirit as the great German from whom the Lutherans take their name. But there are no signs at all of resistance capable at present of providing any effective obstacle to the onward march of Hitlerism. It may be true that the last General Erection was held under conditions of force majeure, with all the resources of publicity exploited' by the Government and nearly all of them denied to opposition parties. But the fact remains that there is always a certain éclat in a victory so achieved, that the momentum generated last March has been steadily increased by sustained appeals to a sensitive -mass psychology, and that the propaganda which Dr. GoebbelS' was appointed to organize is undoubtedly having sonic effect. There are, moreover, no independent newspapers in Germany today. So far as the average German ventures to frame political opinions at all, those opinions must necessarily be based not on facts as they are but on whatever facts the official controllers of publicity allow to conic to his knowledge. And those facts are naturally such as seem calculated to increase his con- fidence in and admiration of the existing regime.
That the Nazi victory is a fact that_ must be accepted and reckoned with as such is beyond question. Its consequences have yet to be disclosed, for Hitlerism has developed no philosophy of government. Its exponents have revealed no doctrine beyond a reversion to the resolve, characteristic of primitive societies, that all opposition to the party in power must be eliminated. The procedure is simple. A single party secures office by means constitutional 'or unconstitutional—in this case it was' 'a mixture of both—and then declares itself to represent the State, from which it follows ipso facto that all opposition to it is of the nature of high treason: The Government must be supposed to know what is better for the people than_ the people themselves, and consequently the people, including all political leaders of any other party than 0.e National Socialist, Must keep silence and accept the National Socialist decrees without comment or protest. This may or may not turn out to be a form of government congenial to the German temperament. In -certain respects it can be imagined that it is. And_ to certain good' features of the Nazi revolution no sincere critic can close his eyes. It represents a real uprising of national feeling, due in part to external repressions bah--unwise. ,and unjust. It is inspired • by genuine lenthusiasms' - that unfortunately have got out ot hand and turned., to tile basest uses, such as the onslaughts on Jews. It finds ex:- pression in one or two interesting _social experiments, notably the compulsory labour service scheme, whose execution and development deserve to be closely studied here in connexion with the unemployment problem.
, That , may and should be recognized=but as a palliation, not a justification, of Hitlerism. Hitlerism must be watched, and where there. is .soin' ething to be learned from it—as from Fascism or even Bolshevism or any other. political System .differing from our own— no prejudices should bias us, against the ,product on account of its origin.' But that is a thousand, miles from justifying the tendency strangely visible here and there in this country, to glorify Hitlerism as a system in many .respects superior to our own, and in the light of which we might with advantage remodel the British constitution. The truth is that never has the democratic and Parliamentary system in this country been more completely vindicated than by the Methods Herr Hitler is pursuing in Germany. It has its defects in abundance. What rsystem of government has not ? Some Of them could and should have been remedied before now. But imagine what Hitlerism would nieMi in Great Britain! Conceive of this country with all political Parties' except one (and that one not necessarily the Conservative; the Socialism in the National Socialist programme is coming increasingly to the fore) suppressed ; the trade union movement suppressed ; the employers' organiza- tions controlled by the Government ; the churches of every denomination subjected to Government cominis- sioners ; the whole of the opposition Press silenced and every paper made a mouthpiece of Government policy ; the B.B.C. become a nightly organ of Government propaganda ; the public expression of political opinions contrary to the Government's made a treasonable act ; and all this to the accompaniment of physical brutality and mental terrorism. It argues a strange blindness to the value of our Parliamentary tradition, setting a pattern for the world six centuries ago, adapting itself peacefully generation by generation to the changing needs of the time, shaping itself in accordance with the play of free opinion and resting always on consent, not on force, to feel tempted for ten seconds to exchange that for the methods in operation in Germany today.
All is by no means well with Parliament. Some improvement in the methods of election is needed, to make its membership correspond more closely with the divisions of opinion in the country. The House of Lords must be mended unless it is to be ended—and to mend it is better. Administrative experiments like the B.B.C. and the new London Transport Board and other public utility corporations must be carried further. Only so, by perfecting our own institutions, framed by the British genius of the past and proved by centuries of successful working, cart the challenge of Hitlerism in Germany, and closer home the challenge of Sir Stafford Cripps and his friends who denounce the Parliamentary system as outworn and declare for sharp and summary methods, -be effectively met. This country has done immeasurable service to the world by its demonstration of the efficiency of .democratic institutions. It can do . it equal service still by refusing to surrender to. the glamour of some new experiment -beside whose staring injustices -the admitted. deficiencies of our own system are as nothing—necessary though it-is to set ourselves resolutely to correct them. •
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