“Irrational” Governments Doomed to Failure

 [In this excerpt, a continuation of the long journal entry he made on July 22, 1945, my father makes the case that tyrannical, nihilistic and “irrational”  governments — including Nazi Germany — must inevitably fail, though they may take decades to do so. His exposition is interesting both for its historical perspective as World War II neared its conclusion, and for its current relevance to the popular uprisings against tyrannical regimes now occurring throughout the Middle East. When he writes of the American government that “Irrational elements weaken it, and a preponderance of irrationality, long prolonged, will destroy it,” it seems a caution tailor made for our current political landscape, where right-wing rhetoric and policy — on topics ranging from climate change to the “threat” posed by public employees’ unions — long ago dispensed with hard facts and rational discourse.]

 July 22, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.), con’t.

… Thus total military victory in this war will not be a total vindication of American government. On the contrary, it will be a dearly-bought opportunity to reorganize our government in such a way that America’s undoubted power may be used to improve living conditions generally for all the inhabitants of the world. This isn’t dreamy-minded altruism, but an historical imperative of any government any time in history. A government of any description is a social organization entrusted with the maintenance of law and order which are at the foundation of any civilized society. This is a responsibility which is automatically commensurate with the government’s power. When a government shirks, or neglects, or makes a mockery of this responsibility, it that far limits its power. And despite age-old traditions, and constitutions, and armed forces, it will eventually be discarded if it continues to fail of fulfilling its primary responsibility of maintaining law and order.

I don’t speak of “law and order” in a narrow legalistic sense; the Nazi government had its law and order, but in such a form that violence was done to ineradicable aspirations of millions of human beings for economic and intellectual freedom. Tyranny and persecution are not legitimate functions of any government from the point of view of the people being governed, and the deadly opposition of tyrannized and persecuted peoples is as sure the recurrence of the seasons. Total annihilation of these slave peoples would be the only method of stilling their rebellion, and total annihilation of a continental population is not yet a perfected human technique, though the Germans did make a promising advance in that direction. My guess, however, is that the regenerative powers of the human race will continue to outrun its destructive techniques for some time to come, at least as long as will concern anyone now alive. Persons who hold a contrary point of view, of course, and hope to see the entire human game played out to a finish in the twentieth century will continue to devise political and mechanical means of implementing their nihilistic theories, whether or not they have the inspirational guidance of such a leader as Hitler. And they won’t all be Germans or Japs.

Persons, on the other hand, who believe that this nihilism is leading the world down a blind alley, and this presumably includes the great majority of the men governing our country, should be interested in means of combating this abortive trend, and of getting the world pointed towards the goals named or suggested in the United States Constitution, and other documents which are professed still to be the foundation of American government.

This is a peculiar world we have today, in the sense that the words and phrases we have used to describe the relationships of its various peoples are now often quite inadequate for that purpose. Vocabulary, of course, like all things human, shows evolutionary changes, but it is, nevertheless, just about the most conservative of our departments. Words and phrases are naturally intended to supply our minds with ideas, which are necessary as a starting point for our rational actions. (And human civilization, of course, differs from animal societies only in its rational, and irrational, elements. Beavers, for instance, have never shown a development among themselves of the principle of the division of labor, which we may call an example of human rationality, nor have they seized on certain victims among themselves, to be slowly dissected to death, which is solely a triumph of human irrationality. Beavers, like all created beings with the exception of man, are strictly non-rational; and so spend no time worrying about how to improve or degrade themselves.)

Irrationality, therefore, doesn’t indicate the absence of mind, but simply, according to civilized standards, the misuse of the mind. Naturally no civilization can tolerate an irrational government such as the Nazis attempted. Insofar as such a government succeeds in perpetuating and extending its power, chaos and bestiality are the inevitable results. The fact that civilization has historically always asserted itself over chaos, has always, in the long run, dissolved predominantly irrational governments is sufficient proof for most of us that things were meant to be that way, so we may as well cooperate to the best of our ability.

Our philosophers concluded fairly early that, according to the conclusion of social experience to date, the Nazi government was highly irrational, and consequently not long for this world. And the American people, a bit slower than their philosophers, nevertheless soon gained an understanding that Nazi aggression on human rights challenged their way of living, which respected those rights, and they inevitably joined the opposition to the Nazis. And the defeat of the Nazis was inevitable, though it might well have taken sixty years rather than six.

If we want to save ourselves a repetition of this world misery in the not so distant future, now is the time for us to remember that our government operates under the same historical laws which applied to the Nazi government. Irrational elements weaken it, and a preponderance of irrationality, long prolonged, will destroy it. We’ll not be wise to forget that we must carry a large share of the blame for the original Axis aggression because of our irrational behavior, as a nation, in the past….

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The Holocaust and Circumstances of Birth

[My father had no illusions about his own fallibility, and he was too intelligent to think he was innately superior to America’s war-time enemies. As he notes here, only the circumstance of his birth in the United States may have separated him from the Germans engaged in the terrible malevolence of the Holocaust. Knowing this, my father also understood the burden of responsibility he carried to promote the compassionate and inclusive philosophy into which he had been born and raised.]

May 6, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

Last week TIME printed pictures and reports from several of the German concentration camps captured by the Americans. This week there was additional evidence, about Dachau; LIFE printed pages of the horror, – human bodies, broken, burned, beaten, starved, – piles of bodies so vast and horrible that the sense of individual tragedy is blurred, and the mind fails to comprehend the meaning, if there is any meaning, to such utter bestiality. Then this afternoon it came over me, while I saw these scenes repeated on the theatre screen, how slender a thread of chance had prevented me from being one of those beasts, or one of those victims. We are all men, and partake of the same nature, and ultimately know the same capabilities, even of degradation. Had I been born in Germany, and been educated a German, and caught up in the Nazi madness at the age of eleven or twelve, I could have been one of those German boys who burned the despised swine in the warehouse, and machine-gunned those few who broke loose and fled. I know there is cruelty in me, and more than once I have exulted in it. But what is important is that I’ve had the chance to learn a way of life which can keep in check the brute in me, if never wholly eradicate it. Very well I know that it isn’t the only way of life, or a perfect way of life. But by its principles men are, at least, strongly influenced to live peaceably together, to respect the rights which all men share alike in a common humanity. This morning I finished the philosopher Spinoza’s pure exposition of those principles, and knew that they were in harmony with the ideas of man and society which I have learned to love. If I falter now in my fight to keep those ideas living among men, after I’ve seen so clearly what men can become when these ideas die in them, or are never born, the fault will lie with no one but me.

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War’s Brutality, and Americans’ Smug Self Image

 [Often in his journal entries about World War II, my father exhibited an empathy for our German and Japanese enemies — especially the civilians in each country who he understood weren’t all that different from America’s citizens. His ability to see the world clearly, and to avoid being swept up in the sloganeering and mob-think of the moment, was a trait he exhibited throughout his life. Thus his later dismay at the Bush Administration’s fear mongering and demonizing, which it used in its successful post-9/11 efforts to push our country into the unnecessary and misguided Iraq war.]

April 23, 1945 (Ft. Jackson, S.C.)

The war with Japan has been waged with relentless ferocity from the very beginning. Every battle has been one of annihilation; the fact that the battlefields have been isolated islands may explain this. Whichever side happens to be losing has no hope of escape and has been convinced that death is a better choice than capture by the enemy. We have now broken deep within Japan’s defenses, and are plastering the home islands daily with our big bombers. Thus it happens that the Japs are catching the hell they hoped to pour on us. Fair enough, we say. They asked for it, and now we’re giving it to them. But sometimes I wonder at the feelings this brutal conflict stirs in us. We read of the flattening of whole square miles of Japanese cities with considerable satisfaction, – Serves them right! the dirty bastards! Yet in those ruins there must be the mangled bodies of thousands of ordinary Japanese people, inoffensive, hard-working people, proud of their country, no doubt, as we are proud of our country. This is obviously the same ruthlessness bombing of civilian populations which we damned when the Germans did it all over Europe, and the Japs in China. War, after all, moves ahead by destruction, and the more destruction the better. But in smugly believing that the Jap people somehow morally deserve their agony, which was an inhuman crime when the British and the Chinese were suffering it, simply highlights the easy habits of self-deception by which nations can allow themselves to condone war in the first place. War is convenient in that it allows us to direct all our fury against an enemy for faults which in peacetime we sometimes have the candor to see exist in ourselves. Now that we’re coming head on against the problems of peace, which demand the constructive qualities we’ve assumed we possess in unusual degree, as opposed to our enemies, we’ll find just how far our assurance was justified.

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Nazi Philosophy of Destruction versus Christian Morality

[The Nazi strategy of destroying towns and villages while retreating has my father contemplating the importance of Christian morality — and its emphasis on creativity — as a countervailing force. Although my father didn’t adhere to some of Christianity’s core faith beliefs and symbols, he recognized the importance to the war effort of the moral system that these beliefs promoted.]

October 8, 1943 (Camp Fannin, Tex.)

The shape of the Nazi scheme for the great withdrawal to the Fatherland begins to appear in the utter destruction they are leaving behind them in Russia and Italy. They will not return to the places they’re leaving now, and they know it. So they will attempt to stamp death indelibly upon all the places they have occupied, – to drag all of Europe down into hell, as Hitler has already threatened. We have heard for months of the rape of Russia, of the systematic destruction of all that represents civilization. There are no military objectives for the Germans. Just this morning we read that in Naples hundreds of tons of high explosive, planted in the basement of the post office, exploded yesterday, killing hundreds of people.

This is the way it will be all across Europe as the Nazis retreat. Towns will be completely blotted out, and great cities reduced to rubbish. The terror in Europe will grow more intense, as the advances of the Allied armies will come to mean not liberation, but torture and death. People will not dare to stay in their own homes, for fear that they will blow up. Water supplies will be polluted; there will be no food.

From our point of view this is senseless, and utterly criminal, but to the Nazi mind it probably appears as the supreme logic of their philosophy. For it would seem that that inner drive, which in most civilized human beings has been turned to creative ends, has been perverted in the Nazi mentality to a terrible force of destruction. It is possible that a Nazi commander surveys the ruins of a pillaged city with the same triumphant elation that Michelangelo feels as he stands before his completed David.

“Build thee more stately mansions,” someone says in the Bible. And so far as I can remember, the Bible is often stressing creation, even though metaphorically, as of the soul. Creation, and respect for those who create, for God, the supreme creator, are among the teachings of Christianity, and are in the foundation of the general morals of Christianity. If the Nazi terror is indeed the result of the deliberate destruction of Christian morals, that is reason enough for the preservation of these morals.

I have spent much time arguing with myself and with others over the technicalities of the Christian religion, – God, miracles, the true nature of Jesus. To me, these are matters of unimportance, because I believe that the moral system they are employed to inculcate is of major importance. But I guess I was wrong to argue, if for most people the moral system has meaning only through these symbols. And it is also true that a faith in the strength of these symbols is translated into a corresponding moral strength in the believers which otherwise might not be there.

So why continue arguing over nonessentials? The essentials themselves are being brutally challenged today, and my whole fight should be directed against the challengers. That bomb in Naples was not planted to kill men and women, but to kill beliefs and faith and morals and whatever else has been instrumental in the building of Western civilization. 

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