CHE SARA SARA

It is just as well that Austria become part of Germany. The policies of Hitler, the militarism of Starhemberg may have their ethical faults, but they represent the tendencies of the age. It is only a pity that there are so many pied de terres pocking the map of Europe such as Belgium, Poland, and the Balkans, flints to the steel that sparks international discord into war. Liberty, equality, fraternity, are as crisp and dead as the documents which attest to their existence. Democracy was only a step on the road to efficient dictatorship, as the Swastika aptly shows. Scientific organization cannot admit of rugged individualism.

Look at some of the developments of recent dictatorships. In the first place, propaganda, throughout the world, is rapidly being conscripted to the services of the governments in power. Control of the press and the radio, from which are derived control of men and industry, has become a far more facile instrument of power than divine right. Russia is perfecting her technique for mass anesthetisation; Hitler is applying the social chloroform of organized propaganda at this very moment. Every means of intellectual expression at once falls to the purpose of perpetuating the intelligent regime. That in itself should give unlimited life to any dictatorship strong enough to weather its own adolescence, since an opposition without a voice is as inaudible as the underworld and can be treated as such under those circumstances.

In the second place, depression, caused by super-industrial development and proving the fallacy of competition has begun to necessitate national industrial dictatorships such as our NRA. Such a group of highly organized, socialized industrial dictatorships as the world will shortly become makes war or combination inevitable. Whatever the means, the result will be the same. The world is already tending towards a single unitary organization, although the present demarcations of nationalism, far more fragile than they seem, obscure its destiny. But just as individual competition has been recognized as unsocial and unprofitable, so international competition will force itself into merger or flames.

The next war will not be waged or won; it will pass like a black cloud in the night, and both combatants will have ceased to exist. The powers of propaganda, organized industry, and science refine the fire of such combat to an intensity calculated to reduce the whole to a whiff of smoke and ashes. The largest nation left extant would be able to organize the world under one control, if it has been able to remain neutral. That this did not occur in the last "war" is due only to the fact that its battles, its slaughter, its campaigns were but puling chitchat in the cradle of a new era.