The Evening Star (December 12, 1945)
ON THE RECORD —
The atomization of civilization
By Dorothy Thompson
The fear of the atomic bomb and its potential power to disintegrate the centers of civilization is, I think, diverting attention from a more obvious and likely danger.
If civilization is condemned to disintegrate in another war, it will be because the spiritual and intellectual bases of civilization have already disintegrated. The atomic bomb will merely give the coup de grace.
All thoughts of another war must include a few fundamental theses. These are:
-
The struggle will be for the mastery of the globe and the losers will pass out of history as powers or sovereign states – since this will be the only way of assuring the permanence of the victory.
-
The victor, who will inherit a wilderness of material and social destruction, will be unable to master the chaos or govern so many divergent cultures, traditions and tongues, and will therefore be compelled either to abandon the victory to anarchy or attempt to subdue it by ruthless terror.
-
The victory and the impossibility of consolidating it except by the most brutal methods will corrupt the victor. His armies will turn into murderers, plunderers, carpetbaggers, seceding generals setting themselves up as little Caesars, and the victor will be pulled into the general maelstrom of anarchy and collapse.
This social pattern of the results of another war is already outlined in this one. Hitler lost the war because he was unable to make peace after he had, in effect, won the war. The Allies are, so far, no more successful after total victory. The unconditional-surrender formula, as applicable not only to armies but to whole nations of men, was introduced into this war for the first time in history – if one excepts the antique wars, which never involved the masses and the great interdependence of industrialized societies. The result is that the Allies have inherited colonies they do not want (Germany and Japan), which they fear to free lest they again become a menace, which they cannot equally divide, and which they dare not allow’ to be absorbed by one or the other of the victors.
This dilemma has only one implication – continued destruction, i.e., continued war. Defeat and surrender but open the gate for the continuation of the war against the disarmed. The human casualties resulting from this second phase of the post-surrender war will probably be as great as those of the war itself, and far more disintegrating to the mind and morality of conqueror and conquered.
A bombing crew dropping destruction upon enemy industries are soldiers fighting against terrible risks of airborne and ground-operated defenders. The brutalities of war are compensated for by the sense of comradeship and brotherly love among men facing common danger. The same men, though they be in uniform “liberating” cameras, watches, and the virtue of women and blowing up industries before helpless and disarmed workers, are looters and dynamiters and are likely so to consider themselves. Conquest without risk is the parent of crime.
It is doubtful whether the sight and experience of monstrous suffering breed compassion. Familiarity with suffering easily breeds contempt, and participation in causing it breeds callousness, as the anodyne for a sense of guilt. The conscience and sensibilities then either set up a condition of split personality amounting to neurosis or become progressively drugged, to the point where brutalities come naturally.
All the publicizing of the Dachau and Belsen horrors have not made mankind more tender of humanity. The demoralization of the American Army in Germany is a fact that cannot much longer remain hidden. Before a Town Hall meeting in New York I recently predicted that millions of German children would die of starvation within a few months unless Allied policies changed. To drive the point home, I suggested that it would be more humane to reopen the gas chambers for German children. The response was scattered applause. The vicarious spectacle of the famished bodies and charred bones of Nazi victims had only turned the applauders into vicarious baby killers themselves.
Saturday’s papers announced that the enforced exodus of six and a half million German-speaking persons from the eastern lands into the truncated, roofless, foodless, heatless Reich is now to begin in earnest – just at Christmas time, perhaps in commemoration of the Babe of Bethlehem?
The result will be anarchy, pillage, famine and monstrous crime arising out of ruthless struggle for personal survival, plus moral disillusionment. There will thus be an acceleration of spiritual nihilism among conquered and conqueror, in which both will lose faith in any conceivable moral order.
The atomization and destruction of mankind, his civilizations and his societies is well advanced and requires no further aid of the physical scientists. The dynamism of the Hitlerian evil is not expended. The rotting corpse of Nazism still exudes its bacteria to infect its sworn enemies. Communism has become national Bolshevism, torn by the incompatibilities of the two concepts; democracy has signed a pact with Satanic forces; hatred breeds hatred, persecution – persecution to the point where mankind may welcome the atomic bomb to put an end to terrible guilts, fears and despairs of his own soul.