Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (61 page)

The attempt by Western intellectuals to defend Stalinism involved them in a process of self-corruption which transferred to them, and so to their countries, which their writings helped to shape, some of the moral decay inherent in totalitarianism itself, especially its denial of individual responsibility for good or ill. Lionel Trilling shrewdly observed of the Stalinists of the West that they repudiated politics, or at least the politics of ‘vigilance and effort’:

In an imposed monolithic government they saw the promise of rest from the particular acts of will which are needed to meet the many, often clashing, requirements of democratic society … they cherished the idea of revolution as the final, all-embracing act of will which would forever end the exertions of our individual wills.
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For America, the development was particularly serious because the Stalinists then formed the salient part of the new radical movement; and as Trilling also noted:

In any view of the American cultural situation, the importance of the radical movement of the Thirties cannot be overestimated. It may be said to have created the American intellectual class as we now know it in its great size and influence. It fixed the character of this class as being, through all mutations of opinion, predominantly of the Left.
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This was the class which shaped the thinking of the liberal-Democratic political establishment, which was to hold power in the most powerful nation on earth until virtually the end of the 1970s.

The ramifying influence of Thirties totalitarian terror was, therefore, immense, in space and time. But at that epoch, the ultimate consequences of Hitler and Stalin seemed unimportant. What mattered was what their regimes would do in the immediate future, not merely to their helpless subjects, but to their neighbours near and far. The advent of Stalin and Hitler to absolute power dealt a decisive blow to a world structure which was already unstable and fragile. Both had limitless territorial aims, since both subscribed to imminent eschatologies, one of class, one of race, in the course of which their rival power-systems would become globally dominant. Hence the arrival of these two men on the scene introduced what may be termed the high noon of aggression.

NINE
The High Noon of Aggression

During the 1920s, the civilized Western democracies had maintained some kind of shaky world order, through the League on the one hand, and through Anglo—American financial diplomacy on the other. At the beginning of the 1930s, the system – if it could be called a system – broke down completely, opening an era of international banditry in which the totalitarian states behaved simply in accordance with their military means. The law-abiding powers were economically ruined and unilaterally disarmed. The French economy passed its peak in 1929 and thereafter went into steady decline, not recovering its 1929 levels until the early 1950s. Its unemployment figures remained comparatively low simply because the dismissed workers went back to the peasant farms on which they had been born, and migrants were ejected. France retreated into isolation and began to build her Maginot Line, itself a symbol of defeatism. The Americans and the British were obsessed by economy. In the early 1930s, the American army, with 132,069 officers and men, was only the sixteenth largest in the world, smaller than those of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Turkey, Spain and Romania.
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The Chief of Staff, MacArthur, had the army’s only limousine. Ramsay MacDonald, Britain’s Labour Prime Minister, who had no car of his own and none provided by the state, had to trot to the end of Downing Street and hail a bus or taxi when he went about the nation’s business.
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In 1930, the Americans persuaded the semi-pacifist Labour government to sign the London Naval Treaty, which reduced the Royal Navy to a state of impotence it had not known since the seventeenth century. The Foreign Secretary Arthur Henderson, a Methodist Utopian who talked of ‘mobilizing a democracy of diplomacy’, defended the decision to cease work on the projected Singapore base, and to cut Britain’s cruisers to a mere fifty, on the grounds that Japan ‘had definitely pledged herself to settle her disputes by peaceful means’.
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Ironically it was the 1930 London Naval Treaty, which they had
reluctantly signed, that finally persuaded the Japanese to break with the West and pursue their own self-interest. The 1930 Smoot–Hawley tariff, which destroyed their American trade (15 per cent of their exports) and the other tariffs which followed in retaliation, seemed to them sufficient moral reason to return to the law of the jungle. On 10 September 1931 sailors at the British naval base at Invergordon, angered by a 10 per cent pay cut, mutinied and immobilized some of Britain’s main fleet units. Eight days later, the Japanese Army High Command engineered a crisis in Manchuria, leading to invasion, against the express commands of the civilian cabinet in Tokyo.
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The cabinet surrendered and endorsed the army
coup
, declaring a new puppet state of Manchukuo.

Britain could, and did, do nothing. Its Tokyo ambassador, Sir Francis Lindley, reported that he found himself ‘in the unpleasant position of seeking assurances from a government which had not the power to make them good’.
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Britain got a League of Nations inquiry set up, under Lord Lytton, which in due course produced a report critical of Japan. The only consequence was that Japan left the League on 27 March 1933. League enthusiasts, like Lord Robert Cecil, pressed for ‘action’ against Japan. But they were the same men who had insisted on disarmament. On 29 February 1932 Sir Frederick Field, the First Sea Lord, said Britain was ‘powerless’ in the Far East; Singapore was ‘defenceless’. The ten-year-rule was now quietly scrapped, but it was too late.
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As Stanley Baldwin put it: if you enforce an economic boycott you will have war declared by Japan and she will seize Singapore and Hong Kong and we cannot, as we are placed, stop her. You will get nothing out of Washington but words, big words, but only words.’
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In fact, even with their existing forces, Britain and America in combination could have deterred and contained Japan. Pearl Harbor could only be defended by sea-power. Reinforced with British units, the American Pacific fleet might have made the base secure. Singapore harbour could be defended by adequate air power alone. With American air reinforcements, that too might have been rendered defensible.
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A strong line with Japan would then have been feasible. But such joint planning was ruled out by America’s growing isolationism – a feature of the 1930s much more than the 1920s. America was moving towards the 1935 Neutrality Act. When Roosevelt took over from Hoover he made matters worse. Hoover had helped to plan a world economic conference, to be held in London June-July 1933. It might have persuaded the ‘have-not’ powers that there were alternatives to fighting for a living. On 3 July Roosevelt torpedoed it. Thereafter no real effort was made to create a stable financial framework within which disputes could be settled by diplomacy. In
the 1920s the world had been run by the power of money. In the 1930s it was subject to the arbitration of the sword.

A careful study of the chronology of the period reveals the extent to which the totalitarian powers, though acting independently and sometimes in avowed hostility towards each other, took advantage of their numbers and their growing strength to challenge and outface the pitifully stretched resources of democratic order. Italy, Japan, Russia and Germany played a geopolitical game together, whose whole object was to replace international law and treaties by a new Realpolitik in which, each believed, its own millennarian vision was destined to be realized. None of these wolf-like states trusted the others; each deceived when it could; but each took advantage of the depredations of the rest to enlarge its booty and strengthen its position. There was therefore a conspiracy in crime, unstable and shifting, sometimes open, more often covert. Competition in crime, too: the process whereby one totalitarian state corrupted another internally now spread to foreign dealings, so that a Gresham’s Law operated here, too, driving out diplomacy and replacing it by force.

These predator-states practised Realpolitik in different ways and at different speeds. Stalin’s Russia was the most Bismarckian, content to seize opportunity merely when it offered and patient enough to move according to geological time-scales, convinced all would be hers in the end. Germany was the most dynamic, with an imminent eschatology which Hitler felt must be realized in his lifetime. Mussolini’s Italy was the jackal, following in the wake of the larger beasts and snatching any morsel left unguarded. Japan was the most unstable, haunted by the vision of actual mass-starvation. The world recession had cut the prices of her principal export, raw silk, by 50 per cent and she was now short of currency to buy rice. Yet by 1934 she was spending 937 million yen out of a total budget of 2,112 million, nearly half, on her army and navy.
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All these totalitarian regimes suffered from internal predation too, the Hobbesian ‘war of every man against every man’. But at least Germany, Russia and Italy had gangster dictatorships. In Japan, nobody was in charge.

The 1931 Manchurian conspiracy showed that the military could usurp decision-making and remain unpunished. The 1932 murders of the prime minister, finance minister and leading industrialists marked the effective end of government by parliamentary means. In December 1933 the Tenno himself was nearly murdered, and thereafter he went in terror. The most influential single figure in Japan in the period 1931–4 was the War Minister, General Sadao Araki, a ferocious bushido ideologue, who ran a Hitler-style youth movement and was one of the leading exponents of the new
totalitarian Shinto. In a European country he would almost certainly have become a dictator, and thus created a centralized focus of decision-making and responsibility. But in a country which, in theory, was ruled by a living god-man, individual leadership was reprobated and punished by assassination. Even the most authoritarian of the Japanese, indeed especially the most authoritarian, subscribed to clan or group rule, small oligarchies meeting and arguing in secret and taking collective decisions which shrouded individual responsibility.
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It was a system which encouraged at one and the same time both physical recklessness and moral cowardice, and which stifled the personal conscience. It made the Japanese ruling élite
s
peculiarly susceptible to the collectivism preached, albeit in different accents, by Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler and especially to the central proposition, about which all three were unanimous, that the rights of the individual were subsumed in the rights of the state, which were total and unqualified. Since the 1860s, the British and Americans had tried hard to inculcate a different tradition; and with some success. It was upheld by and personified in Professor Tatsukichi Minobe, an authority on constitutional law at the Imperial University since 1902, and a peer of Japan by imperial nomination. His three major works on the Japanese constitution made him the mentor of Japanese parliamentary liberalism, and were objects of peculiar hatred to the
dévots
of totalitarian Shinto. Attacks on the old professor, who argued that the law existed to protect the individual in society, and that it was greater than the state, mounted steadily as Japan’s own lawlessness went unpunished and, still more, when Hitler triumphantly emerged in Germany to rule without constitutional law and to defy international agreements. On 19 December 1934 Japan denounced the London Naval Treaty and followed Hitler in unrestricted rearmament. On 16 March 1935 Hitler repudiated the Versailles Treaty. On 25 April leading members of the Japanese armed services carried Tatsukichi’s books to the roof of the Tokyo Military Club and burned them publicly.

This symbolic repudiation of the rule of law was rapidly followed by the adoption of what might be termed a crude Japanese form of Hegelianism, which became government doctrine and was taught in the services and the schools. It was summarized officially by the Ministry of Justice:

To the Japanese mind there has been no conception of the individual as opposed to the state …. Underlying western types of ideas exists an individualistic view of life which regards individuals as absolute, independent entities … the standard of all values and themselves the highest of all values. [But] human beings, while having their independent existence and life, depend in a deeper sense on the whole and live in co-ordinated relationship with each other. They are born from the state, sustained by the state and brought up in the history and traditions of the state. Individuals can only exist as links in an infinite and vast chain of life called the state; they are links through whom the inheritance of ancestors is handed down to posterity …. Individuals participate in the highest and greatest value when they serve the state as part of it.
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