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]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] A 50-YEAR-OLD LESSON [[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[[
(12/8/1989)
This editorial appeared in The Wall Street Journal
(Europe) 1 Sept 1989.
[Kindly uploaded by Freeman 20217GIAN]
Fifty years ago today, the lights in Europe started to go
out for the second time in the 20th Century. Before they came on
again, the most terrible conflict in human history had engulfed
five continents and consumed 50 million lives.
World War II destroyed the fascist regimes of Germany, Italy
and Japan, but of course it did not eliminate totalitarianism.
Stalin, emerging as a victor, looked on his former allies with
contempt as he rang down the Iron Curtain and made Eastern Europe
the world's largest prison.
Such profound thinkers as George Orwell and Hannah Arendt
then feared that totalitarians might yet conquer the entire
world. Orwell in his book "1984" described the merciless
efficiency of a modern police state, and his warning was taken
seriously in the West. Rightly so, because Stalin and his
disciples, under guise of communist egalitarianism, were busily
creating such states.
Now we know that the Stalinist scourge, as with the
Hitlerian one, could be effectively resisted, given sufficient
courage and will power. The human spirit is resilient enough and
the love of freedom deep enough to survive the jackboot.
Even in the aftermath of World War II, there were positive
political changes in world politics, some of them little
perceived in the U.S. even today. The 1940s war furthered the
breakup, begun in World War I, of ancient class systems in Europe
and in Asia that had restrained the creative energies of people
for centuries. Broader-based democracy submerged nationalistic
impulses, moving Western Europe towards a true sense of
community. Some Asian nations, having discovered the liberating
influences of market economics, have been moving away from
authoritarianism and towards Western concepts of law and
individual rights.
Indeed, non-communist nations as a whole have become more of a
community, with the U.S. democracy and its $5 trillion economy at
the center. Japan and Germany have become serious economic rivals
to the U.S. but friendly competition in the production and sale
of goods and services is to be welcomed, not feared by peoples
seeking higher living standards. There now is a remarkable degree
of economic policy coordination among non-communist industrial
nations.
War must never be taken lightly, but World War II
dramatically illustrated the consequences of fearing it too
much. The lesson can't be repeated too often. In a new book
entitled "How War Came," British historian Donald Cameron Watt
reviews yet again the tragic sequence of events between
September, 1938, when Czechoslovakia was dismembered at Munich,
and September, 1939, when Hitler and Stalin carved up Poland.
Britain's Neville Chamberlain acted out of a sincere, but
misguided, "incredulity that anyone of an age to have lived
through the events of 1914-18, let alone to have fought in them,
could,wittingly, wish to go to war again." He did not see that
Hitler, motivated by a deep hatred for a society that rejected
him, was a natural destroyer. His hunger for conquest was
whetted,not diminished, when he learned how easy it was to dupe
and bully the aristocrats of Europe.
We now believe that had the ancien regimes of Europe
resisted Hitler early on, World War II would not have happened.
They were too weak, morally, spiritually and, of course,
militarily. The war began a restorative process, and particularly
so when the U.S. took a hand. That restoration proved strong
enough to resist the postwar totalitarians in Moscow. Today, with
communism in decline and Moscow itself looking for new answers to
its deep-seated social, political and economic problems, we can
believe more strongly than ever before that Western democracies
will not only survive, but prevail.
Future generations may look back on the mid 20th Century and
conclude it was then than imperialism, mercantilism, and statism
reached their zenith and were finally discredited. More and more
regimes have concluded that power cannot be enhanced by
territorial conquest and oppressive control of the populace.
Economic and political power is flowing to nations that are
freeing up their systems and joining the global economy.
But as bright as this future might be, it is still perilous.
The Soviet Union may yet conclude it is too far behind to ever
catch up with the West's vibrant economies and attempt to seize
power through conquest or intimidation. That is why the Free
World will be risking so much if it falls once more into self-
delusion and moral decay. The enduring lesson of World War II is
that the costs of appeasement and unreadiness are far more
terrible that the price of military preparedness and vigilance.
* * *
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