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    Publishing Information

    Issues and Men

    By Oswald Garrison Villard

    The Nation
    January 30, 1937
    Vol. 144, No. 5, P. 127

    Germany and Ethics

  1. Whatever else may be said about the European dictatorships, they are compelling us to test anew our standard of values in ethics as well as our political beliefs. They are, for example, presenting us at every turn with the age-old question as to whether the end can ever justify the means. Hardly a day goes by that I do not meet somebody just returned from either Germany or Italy who tells me how marvelously happy and prosperous the people are. "You may say what you please about Hitler," is what they say, "but Germany never looked so well. The people are polite. They go out of their way to be nice to foreigners. There seems to be no discontent whatever. Of course the dictator does many things of which I disapprove, but you must be fair and give him credit for the good things he has accomplished. It's not all bad."

  2. I find it hard to reply politely. I am tempted to imitate Dorothy Thompson, who usually says: "I will not debate with anybody the exact merits of a bloody-handed murderer." I, too, am not interested in an effort to evaluate the exact ethical worth of a man who had no less than 1,254 men and women and youths killed in one night and then stood up in the Reichstag, swore that there were only seventy-seven murdered, and assumed in emphatic language the complete responsibility for their deaths. "I assumed the supreme power." I cannot be enthusiastic over the good manners of the Germans toward foreign visitors, for I think of the 25,000 men and women still confined in concentration camps and often horribly tortured and maltreated. I deny emphatically that the man responsible for these and many other crimes against humanity can in the slightest degree atone for those crimes by building a magnificent stadium and superb roads, or by freeing his people from the yoke of the unjust Treaty of Versailles.

  3. Any dictator can build good roads. Any dictator can send 3,000,000 Christmas baskets of food to the destitute and needy with his picture and the words: "Your Leader is thinking of you." Any dictator can enforce outward order and militarize his people. I do not have to go to Germany to know that superficially things look well; that the streets are clean and free of beggars; that there is universal politeness; and that by means of the huge army, the compulsory work camps, the great rearmament orders to heavy industry, and the concentration camps, the number of unemployed has been reduced by the dictator from 6,000,000 to 1,000,000. Nor do I have to go to Germany to know that side by side with this progress" and the great change in the psychology of the youth of Germany, the whole intellectual life of Germany has been destroyed; that three years have been cut out of the primary educational system and one year out of the university course; that academic freedom is no more; that the press is denatured and dead; that there has been created an atmosphere of fear and domination and of disregard of the most precious human rights in which no creative spirit or instinct can survive.

  4. These things alone seem to me so infinitely worth while and necessary to the spiritual development of a people that I cannot feel that the material achievements of Hitler and Mussolini weigh many grains beside them. Their material advances are in the first place not the sole prerogatives of dictatorships. In the second place, the achievements of both the Italian and German dictatorships have been purchased by a distinct lowering of standards of living; and, finally, we do not vet know whether they will not crash financially. Certainly the regimentation of the whole people in order that what there is in the way of butter and other fats may be evenly distributed does not warrant the belief as yet that even on the material side the dictatorship is a howling success. "Guns instead of butter," is General Göring's slogan. Well, I believe, like Anthony Eden, that for the health, safety, and sanity of peoples the world over and for their future happiness and security butter is preferable to guns.

  5. No outward order or material accomplishment can offset the ethical and spiritual degradation of a people. No roads or other public works and no beautifully drilled armies and navies can possibly counterbalance the misleading of a great people by the doctrine of force, by the teaching that war is the supreme good, by the dissemination of utterly false and unscientific racial theories, and by the assumption that there is wisdom enough in any dictator to guide the intellectual development of many millions of people. Of course the economic welfare of the people must be a government's primary concern; without that there can be no other advance. But the question is simply whether material prosperity is to be vouchsafed to a lot of disciplined slaves or to free men living in that atmosphere of individual liberty and experimentation and self-expression which history has invariably proved to be the sole condition under which humanity progresses.

  6. How any loyal American—loyal not to the flag, the mere symbol of our nation, but to its fundamental principles—can indorse the regimes of the dictators is beyond me. Yet I meet these disloyalists at every turn, with their panegyrics on the great progress of Italy and Germany. Again I deny that the outward material progress achieved by Hitler in any way offsets or compensates for the misery, the injustice, the blood upon which it is built.