U. S. or Them?

Among U. S. editors and statesmen the prestige of Foreign Affairs, sobersided, grey-backed quarterly, is high. Its circulation is modest (9.500). When Foreign Affairs' thick-thatched, sobersided editor, Hamilton Fish Armstrong, addresses his audience, he does not hope to be heard by the U. S. at large. But sometimes Editor Armstrong has more to say than he can pack into the pages of his quarterly and wants to say it to more than his usual readers. On such occasions his thoughts overflow into a book, the fruit of studious reading, conservatively liberal thinking, alert observations gleaned on his annual trips to Europe. Though respectfully reviewed, his books have never been bestsellers, but last winter an extra-editorial utterance of Editor Armstrong's caught the public ear. So timely, so comprehensive, so stimulating did U. S. readers find the 106 pages of We or They/- that it began to sell like a racy novel, by last week had passed its 40th thousand.

The title and its challenge Author Armstrong accepts from a speech of Mussolini's (1930): "The struggle between two worlds [democracy and fascism] can permit no compromise. . . . Either we or they!" To this ugly Duce-ism. Editor Armstrong soberly agrees, resoundingly replies with a statement of the American position which no American has yet so well expressed.

Americans long ago made their choice between Dictatorship and Democracy: "In the U. S. the choice is made--made by reason and instinct. . . . But there is another question. Can tolerably satisfactory relations ever in fact be established between peoples free and peoples in chains? Is not the gulf too wide? . . . Intercommunication across the abyss has become almost impossible." Dictatorship and democracy literally do not speak the same language: "How, specifically, are we to discuss art with people who say 'art' and mean 'propaganda,' to whom music by Mendelssohn is not music, and poetry by Heine is not poetry, and a novel by Thomas Mann is unworthy, not because of extraneous fact wholly disassociated from all possible measures of beauty and satis faction?"

Dictatorships are dress parades for war, must attack their neighbors when the dictator's domestic show begins to pall on the audience. At all costs he must keep the populace interested, not let their minds wander from their glorious destiny, himself. "He has inspirations, walks in his sleep, shoots his friends in their beds, makes his enemies viceroys or air marshals or special ambassadors, reiterates his devotion to peace, launches warships, has birthdays, plows fields to prove that he knows the dignity of labor, shatters microphones, lowers the age for little boys to start rifle practice and for little girls to drill with gas masks." If he announces himself "satisfied." like Mussolini after swallowing Ethiopia, "so is a boa constrictor when it has just swallowed a calf. The intermission is only digestive."

Early in his essay, Editor Armstrong makes it clear that his warning is against all autarchs. Red Stalin as well as Brown Hitler or Black Mussolini. And his rallying cry is to all democracies, to consolidate their national thinking and their honor against the spread of autarchy. He does not call for war: "The liberal states could fight, might win. But could their liberalism survive the wartime curbs that would be prerequisite to victory and the new waves of economic deterioration and social disorder that afterwards would overtake the victor along with the vanquished? Hardly. . . . The call is not for an attack on the dictators but for a general mobilization against all their conceptions and practices. . . ."

Until war becomes inescapable, or the Dictators turn and rend each other, let democrats of good will learn "how not to behave in a crisis of representative government . . . remembering how much it is in the interest of every democracy that every other democracy be strong and prosperous enough to maintain its existing form of government. . . . Even sentimental manifestations of solidarity count."

As practical defensive steps for democracies Mr. Armstrong suggests: 1) naval and military agreements; 2) tariff and commodity agreements; 3) money stabilization at home and abroad; 4) above all, determination not to finance the Dictators again.

Why should the U. S. try to rally other democracies? Why not let Europe severely alone? It cannot be done, says Editor Armstrong. U. S. sentiment is still strong for isolation, but it will have to learn better. "In a surge of reaction against all that they had been through in 1917-1918 the American people decided to learn nothing from that experience. . . . We are not yet in sight of the time when the great American public will see that there is one way, and one only, for them to make certain of not being involved in future world wars: that there be none."

The U. S. must be concerned with liberty abroad, but liberty begins at home. "We must hold tight to legal prescriptions and procedures, trust only to leaders committed by instinct and belief to the defense of civil liberties, and deal summarily with those who band together to destroy them. We must guard zealously the rights of our scholars and teachers to carry forward the stream of civilized thought . . . and protect the rights of assembly and speech and the freedom of the press. . . .

"The democratic principle is that the majority has the right to govern and that the minority has the right to criticize and oppose the majority. . . . The majority of today shall not put chains on itself and on all future majorities any more than it shall make people of a particular color slaves. It shall not accept a dictator."*

*Early this week, in a startling letter to Ohio's Robert Johns Bulkley--with copies to other Senators%#151U. S. Ambassador to Germany Wil- liam Edward Dodd wrote: ''There are individuals of great wealth [in the U. S.] who wish a dictatorship and are ready to help a Huey Long. There are politicians, some in the Senate, I have heard, who think that they may come into power like that of the European dictators. . . . One man, I have been told by personal friends, who owns nearly a billion dollars, is ready to support such a program and, of course, control it."

/-Macmillan ($1.50).

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