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A

Divided

World?




The Demilitarized Zone. It is an ugly
phrase for the even uglier thing that runs
through what once was the most beautiful
city in the world. Like a great, twisted scar
of rust and gray, it pollutes both banks of the
Seine and divides what the Second War left
of Paris, lancing north along that river all the
way to Le Havre. Its wall of wire and rock
runs southeast to Auxerre, then south to the
sea in a cruel mockery of the Treaty of
Verdun, 843 A.D. Paris defaced; France
maimed. It is almost too much for my Gallic
soul to bear.

Just the problem, my associates inform me.
A more dispassionate look at past things
would help my present disposition. How did
we arrive at such a state? Not just France but
the world itself sundered in two, each part
locked in a competition not quite war but
assuredly with deaths edge around it, a
guerre froide, if you will.

One of the great imponderables is what
Adolf Hitler, the man who almost single-
handedly began the Second War, would
have done had he lived beyond his sixtieth
birthday. Hitler was hard at work on his
memoirs, perhaps knowing that his end was
arriving. Certainly, fear of it had driven him
to the sword ten years before. But those
memoirs were never finished. Did he accept
armistice and partition in 1947 believing
both to be temporary, to be renewed once
consolidation and, as he put it,
Aryanization of all eastern Europe had
been completed? Did he retain hopes of
wooing the British, and those Americans of
correct racial stock, to join his New Order
without the need for further bloodshed, at
least in the West?

Which, for its part, accepted armistice and
partition for perhaps the same reasons that
both were imposed upon France: divisions,
most of them domestic, all of them
debilitating. Frances ensured paralysis over
Spain in 1936. The various factions
thoughtcorrectlythat any intervention
would worsen their differences and, perhaps,
lead to disorder or worse. But the only thing
in the end that would have saved France
from conquest was a successful military
defense of the metropole, and this was
rendered nearly impossible by inaction in
Spain, a real dilemma.

The other democracies faced dilemmas of
their own, although they were not so
speedily apparent. Britain had not been
divided, but its constitutional procedures
prevented swift action against the Germans
and Italians and, for reasons never made
clear, its leaders declined to use the
mechanisms of the League of Nations to
force matters. The delay proved fatalfor
the Soviet Union, which was overwhelmed
by the combined forces of the European
fascists plus Japan after a prolonged, gallant
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but ultimately hopeless struggle that saw
huge floods of refugees fleeing the German-
occupied zones as the full weight of the Nazi
Final Solution became apparent. The sad
and sorry tale of their reception by the
Italians, who at first attempted to meet bare
necessities until overcome by the sheer
numbers involved, and the Japanese, who
were not inclined to encourage more mouths
to feed from the beginning, does not bear
repeating here, though excellent studies are
now becoming available if one knows where
to look for them.

With the Soviets reduced to a shadow
stateone rather cruelly kept alive by its
former opponents as a dumping ground for
the refugees and other undesirables that did
not have to be exterminated immediately
British and French resistance forces faced an
uphill struggle after initial landings in
Brittany. While these went well, a series of
mobile actions around Paris, some
approaching the scale of the titanic clashes
along the earlier Soviet front, produced
casualty lists that drew instant comparisons
to the Somme of the First War. Comparisons
in the press. Comparisons in Parliament.
Was the struggle to free France worth
another lost generation of Englishmen?

Clement Attlee thought so. The Labour
Party leader had steadily amassed electoral
strength, awaiting the right moment for
Labours return to 10 Downing Street even
as he quietly seethed at the rising tide of
fascism on the European continent. Perhaps
the Nazis had no Final Solution for workers
unions. Perhaps Italy had no Final Solution
for even the Jews. But both, and Francos
regime in Spain, thoroughly liquidated
workers right to strike, right to safe
conditions, right to a decent amount of
leisure, right to a decent life. The fascists
even had the effrontery to trumpet their
charity programs for workers so that the
poor sods could afford decent Christmas
dinners. Attlee looked into a fascist future
and saw nothing but nightmares for most of
humanity.

But in the end even Attlee had to agree to
armistice and partition. He faced an
impossible dilemma otherwise. To continue
the war demanded untrammeled access to
Britains colonial resources, industry, and
manpower. In other words, it demanded the
continued and indefinite existence of the
British Empire. It was an empire that Attlee
could not in good conscience abide. How
could Britain fight for rights for Frenchmen
as it denied independence to Indians? And
so British politics in the late 1940s revolved
around a nest of contradictions, Halifaxes
who desired to retain the empire but not
squander blood and treasure on a war they
thought could not be won and Attlees who
desperately wanted to win that war but
thought the empire had to go.

If Asian independence, Asian nationalism,
had in this way a powerful effect on the face
of Europe, its impact was even more
profound over Asia. The Indian subcontinent
endured its own partition and armistice after
receiving independence at last in 1950.
Hindu and Moslem hunted each others
enclaves, driving whichever was in minority
out, often with bloodlettings that were
disorganized, sometimes even spontaneous,
but every inch as brutal as the Nazis
Krystallnacht of over a decade earlier.
Indian forces efforts to overrun the heavily
Moslem areas of Bengal, around Calcutta,
led to an international outcry so great over
the slaughter of the innocents that, for a
time, there was even talk of reintroducing
British control of that area.As it was, the
successful imposition of Indian sovereignty
proved a curse, as the Bengal area swiftly
became a breeding ground for fierce
resistance against that rule led by Moslem
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nationalists or, as New Delhi swiftly
labelled them, Moslem terrorists.

In these terrorists, senior leaders of the
Japanese military saw reflections of the
Chinese communists they had helped
suppress for years. Hopes that Mao
Zedongs movement would fade after the
collapse of the Soviet Union themselves
collapsed as Guomindong authorities proved
unable to completely extinguish it. Mao
proved adept in harnessing nationalist
sentiment in Indochina, where forces calling
themselves the Viet Minh successfully
prevented the reimposition of control by
either French government and showed no
reluctance to engage Guomindong or even
Japanese forces sent against them. The
Bengali nationalists too studied Maos
methods, proving that the Japanese were not
seeing phantoms. But so long as the British
and West French governments refrain from
providing substantial aid to these groups, it
is difficult to see them becoming a danger to
fascist rule whether of the German, Italian,
Japanese, or Chinese variety, in which all
have rather cleverly finessed the question of
who rules by adopting and then adapting a
form of corporatist governing model that,
appropriately enough, puts large, self-
sustaining corporations in control of most
aspects of life.

The Americans had tried, with varying
degrees of success, to insulate themselves
from these chaotic events, but they were
hardly oblivious to them. Their professional
diplomatic corps, paid to think about the
world beyond, had grown increasingly
concerned about the future of American
ideals and even American democracy as
they watched fascisms successes grow. Few
had ever believed in an effort to make the
world democratic. President Wilson, in fact,
had never believed in that himself,
promising only that American involvement
in what turned out to be the First War would
simply make the world safe for
democracy, a rather more modest objective.
But by the time of the 1948 presidential
campaign it was by no means certain, at
least to those diplomats accustomed to
thinking long-range, that such a world was
any longer possible. As they warned (and as
Thomas Jefferson had warned, in a world
long distant but perhaps not as different as
might first appear), true freedom stemmed
not simply from obeying forms of
government that guaranteed the right to vote
and, for that matter, to run for office. No one
was truly free unless they enjoyed a measure
of control over their own livelihoods, for
was not the true definition of a slave
someone who did not? In a world dominated
by fascist powers and colossal corporations
with intimate ties to fascist states, how could
American companies hope to survive? In a
world of fascist corporatism, with workers
compelled to toil for pennies a day, how
could American workers earn dollars an
hour and hope to be competitive?

Yet what alternatives existed? Few
Americans envied Britain. Divested on
empire, the British had tried preferential
trade with their former possessions only to
see that trade poached by the corporatists as
British workers found wages falling,
unemployment rising, and the unimaginable
yet all-too-real prospect of food rationing for
years on end. West France was hardly better
off, a stark fact that prevented many workers
from the East from becoming cavaliers de
mur as the French so quaintly put it, or the
more prosaic but perhaps accurate English
phrase, wall jumpers.

This conundrum became an issue in the
1948 contest, to the amazement of political
analysts who thought the American public
incapable of looking six days into the future,
let alone six years. Franklin Roosevelt
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insisted on running for the fifth time despite
his being only four years under the Biblical
threescore and ten. Who in the Democratic
Party could deny him? Roosevelt assured
America that a free trade league of the
Americas would be sufficient to see
prosperity for all, despite worrying signs
that nations such as Argentina preferred
commerce with Europe. Roosevelts rival,
Wendell Willkie, held the Republicans to a
wide view, insisting that American private
enterprise, if properly organized (and subject
to less rigid antitrust laws), could compete
with anything in fascist Europe or Asia.

We will never know which view, or which
candidate, would have prevailed, as
Americans were stunned when both died
during the campaign, Roosevelt from a
severe stroke, Willkie a heart attack. No one
knew much about vice presidential
candidate James Byrnes, whom the
Democrats swiftly promoted to standard
bearer, save that he was from the South and
had two further curses: a divorced Catholic.
Byrnes won the South, but not much else as
Republican John Bricker won handily.
Bricker was an amiable man with a warm
smile but a cold heart. Dismantling the New
Deal as rapidly as he could, Bricker oversaw
the expiration of Roosevelts social security
program and the rollback of workers rights
under the Taft-Bricker anti-union laws.
Union busting, especially the hounding and
prosecution of labor organizers, also fit well
with the rising tide of anti-Semitism in
America. In foreign policy, Bricker
combined Roosevelts hemisphere-only
protectionism with Willkies pro-monopoly
inclinations. He did so with avid support
from exactly those states who had voted for
Byrnes, but there was scant mystery
involved.

The American South, or at least its whites,
had never been far removed from sympathy
for certain fascist ideals, not least that of a
hierarchy of races. Its leaders had been
thoroughly alarmed by Attlees grant of
independence to the darkies, as they rather
crudely but perhaps correctly put it. What
were the implications of India for Alabama
or Mississippi? It was a question many
American Negroes were asking themselves.
To even consider a global outlook, much
less any challenge to fascist domination of
most of the planet, risked disorder at home.
But the destruction of unions and
dismantling of social safety nets would
ensure that challenges to the political order
would remain sporadic and ineffective.

And so America too adjusted to the new
global realities. Any one, on any continent,
who challenged these risked being labelled a
communistthat is to say, a failure. Work
hard and live. Attend national party rallies
and, if you were lucky, see a child or two
join the Nazis or Fascisti or Imperial Rule
Assistance Association and look forward to
a comfortable life among the corporatists.
Life could be worse and, in time, perhaps
even that ugly wall will come down, as
people on both sides will see life is no
better, and no worse, on the other side of it.

We are very glad, economics minister
Herman Gring had said in 1950, that
Made in Germany has become the standard
by which all fine manufactures are judged.
Designed by the best engineers in the world,
produced at the finest large facilities, and by
workers who take pride in the excellence of
their work, not the size of their paychecks,
these goods are worthy of being called the
best of the best. And practical, too. Even the
most modest of workers can afford the base
model of the Volkswagen, The Peoples
Car, in a fitting tribute to the genius behind
the Nazi vision for the world. Heil Hitler!


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