Why Don't We Learn From History? (6 page)

It is also to the credit of the totalitarian systems that they have stimulated service to the community and the sense of comradeship—up to a point. In this respect their effect on a nation is like that of war. And, as in war, the quick-ripening good fellowship of the powerless many is apt to obscure the intrigues of the powerful few, the withering of the roots in such a soil, and the gradual decay of the tree. Bad means lead to no good end.

Their own declarations of faith are the truest test of the authoritarian regimes. In weighing the wrongs there is no need to argue over particular cases—which the victims assert and they often deny—because they proudly avow an attitude which makes such instances inherently probable.

It is man's power of thought which has generated the current of human progress through the ages. Thus the thinking man must be against authoritarianism in any form—because it shows its fear of thoughts which do not suit momentary authority.

Any sincere writer must be against it—because it believes in censorship.

Any true historian must be against it—because he can see that it leads to the repetition of old follies, as well as to the deliberate adulteration of history.

Anyone who tries to solve problems scientifically must be against it—since it refuses to recognize that criticism is the life blood of science.

In sum, any seeker of truth must be against it—because it subordinates truth to state expediency. This spells stagnation.

But “anti-Fascism” or “anti-Communism” is not enough. Nor is even the defense of freedom. What has been gained may not be maintained, against invasion without and erosion within, if we are content to stand still. The peoples who are partially free as a result of what their forebears achieved in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries must continue to spread the gospel of freedom and work for the extension of the conditions, social and economic as well as political, which are essential to make men free.

Disturbing trends

Looking at the situation today in Britain, America, and other democratic countries, compared with the past, and from a more detached point of view, it seems to me that, while there has been an improvement in some respects, handicaps have increased in other ways—and on balance these may be worse.

One factor is an excessive growth of “security-mindedness,” more bureaucratic than realistic, so that it is often carried to ludicrous extremes. It is certainly more difficult for Parliament (or Congress) to acquire the knowledge on which to base useful comment on defense matters. Another factor, related to the first, is the growth of “P.R.-mindedness”—and this particularly affects comment by serving officers.

The articles that [Major General J. F. C.] Fuller wrote about existing defects and new developments often caused trouble in the War Office and earned us disfavor—but officialdom stopped short of forbidding publication. Now the heretical ideas we expressed have become orthodox—but anyone who attempted a fresh bound in ideas and a fresh look into the future might find it more difficult to obtain permission to publish such ideas—or criticism of the existing doctrine.

The fallacy of compulsion

We learn from history that the compulsory principle always breaks down in practice. It is practicable to prevent men doing something; moreover that principle of restraint, or regulation, is essentially justifiable in so far as its application is needed to check interference with others' freedom. But it is not, in reality, possible to make men do something without risking more than is gained from the compelled effort. The method may appear practicable, because it often works when applied to those who are merely hesitant. When applied to those who are definitely unwilling it fails, however, because it generates friction and fosters subtle forms of evasion that spoil the effect which is sought. The test of whether a principle works is to be found in the product.

Efficiency springs from enthusiasm—because this alone can develop a dynamic impulse. Enthusiasm is incompatible with compulsion—because it is essentially spontaneous. Compulsion is thus bound to deaden enthusiasm—because it dries up the source. The more an individual, or a nation, has been accustomed to freedom, the more deadening will be the effect of a change to compulsion.

Many years spent in the study of war, a study which gradually went beyond its current technique to its wellsprings, changed my earlier and conventional belief in the value of conscription. It brought me to see that the compulsory principle was fundamentally inefficient and the conscriptive method out of date—a method that clung, like the ivy, to quantitative standards in an age when the trend of warfare was becoming increasingly qualitative. For it sustained the fetish of mere numbers at a time when skill and enthusiasm were becoming ever more necessary for the effective handling of the new weapons.

Conscription does not fit the conditions of modern warfare—its specialized technical equipment, mobile operations, and fluid situations. Success increasingly depends on individual initiative, which in turn springs from a sense of personal responsibility—these senses are atrophied by compulsion. Moreover, every unwilling man is a germ carrier, spreading infection to an extent altogether disproportionate to the value of the service he is forced to contribute.

Looking still further into the question, and thinking deeper, I came to see, also, that the greatest contributory factor to the great wars which had racked the world in recent generations had been the conscriptive system.

These logical deductions are confirmed by analysis of historical experience. The modern system of military conscription was born in France—it was, ironically, the misbegotten child of Revolutionary enthusiasm. Within a generation its application had become so obnoxious that its abolition was the primary demand of the French people following Napoleon's downfall. Meanwhile, however, it had been transplanted to more suitable soil—in Prussia. And just over half a century later the victories that Prussia gained led to the resurrection of conscription in France. Its reimposition was all the easier because the renewed autocracy of Napoleon III had accustomed the French people to the interference and constraints of bureaucracy. In the generation that followed, the revival of the spirit of freedom in France was accompanied by a growth of the petty bureaucracy, parasites feeding on the body politic. From this, the French could never succeed in shaking free; and in their efforts they merely developed corruption—which is the natural consequence of an ineffective effort to loosen the grip of compulsion by evasion.

It is generally recognized today that this rampant growth of bureaucratically induced corruption was the dry rot of the Third Republic. But on deeper examination the cause can be traced further back—to the misunderstanding of their own principles which led a section of the creators of the French Revolution to adopt a method fundamentally opposed to their fulfillment.

It might be thought that conscription should be less detrimental to the Germans, since they are more responsive to regulation and have no deeply rooted tradition of freedom. Nevertheless, it is of significance that the Nazi movement was essentially a voluntary movement—exclusive rather than comprehensive—and that the most important sections of the German forces—the air force and the task force—were recruited on a semi-voluntary basis. There is little evidence to suggest that the ordinary “mass” of the German Army had anything like the same enthusiasm, and considerable evidence to suggest that this conscripted mass constituted a basic weakness in Germany's apparent strength.

The system, as I have said, sprang out of the muddled thought of the French Revolution, was then exploited by Napoleon in his selfish ambition, and subsequently turned to serve the interests of Prussian militarism. After undermining the eighteenth-century “age of reason,” it had paved the way for the reign of unreason in the modern age.

Conscription serves to precipitate war, but not to accelerate it—except in the negative sense of accelerating the growth of war-weariness and other underlying causes of defeat. Conscription precipitated war in 1914, owing to the way that the mobilization of conscript armies disrupted national life and produced an atmosphere in which negotiation became impossible—confirming the warning “mobilization means war.” During that war its effect can be traced in the symptoms which preceded the collapse of the Russian, Austrian, and German armies, as well as the decline of the French and Italian armies. It was the least free states which collapsed under the strain of war—and they collapsed in the order of their degree of unfreedom. By contrast, the best fighting force in the fourth year of war was, by general recognition, the Australian Corps—the force which had rejected conscription and in which there was the least insistence on unthinking obedience.

Significantly, the advocacy of conscription in Britain can be traced back to the years immediately before the war and even prior to the adoption of military conscription—to a time when an influential section of people were more impressed by the social developments of the Nazi system than alarmed by its dangers. A campaign for “universal national service” was launched in the winter before Munich. As defined by Lord Lothian, in a letter to The Times in March 1938, it embodied the “allocation of every individual” to a particular form of service “whether in peace or in emergency.” It is being freshly urged now as an “educational” measure.

Such a system entails the suppression of individual judgment. It violates the cardinal principle of a free community: that there should be no restriction of individual freedom save where this is used for active interference with others' freedom. Our tradition of individual freedom is the slow-ripening fruit of centuries of effort. To surrender it within after fighting to defend it against dangers without would be a supremely ironical turn of our history. In respect of personal service, freedom means the right to be true to your convictions, to choose your course, and decide whether the cause is worth service and sacrifice. That is the difference between the free man and the state slave.

Unless the great majority of a people are willing to give their services there is something radically at fault in the state itself. In that case the state is not likely or worthy to survive under test—and compulsion will make no serious difference. We may be far from having attained an adequate state of freedom as yet, of economic freedom in particular, but the best assurance of our future lies in advancing conditions in which freedom can live and grow, not in abandoning such essentials of freedom as we have already attained.

In upholding the idea of compulsory service, its advocates have often emphasized that the principle was adopted in our statute law in certain times of alarm and applied in a haphazard way to the poorer classes of the community during the eighteenth and the early nineteenth century. Here they fail to take due account of the progressive development in our national principles and of the way our concept of freedom has been enlarged during the last century.

It was an advance in British civilization which brought us first to question and then to discard the press gang as well as the slave trade. The logical connection between the two institutions, as violations of our principles, was obvious. Is the tide of our civilization now on the ebb?

Another false argument is that since conscription has long been the rule in the Continental countries, including those which remain democracies, we need not fear the effect of adopting it. But the deeper I have gone into the study of war and the history of the past century the further I have come toward the conclusion that the development of conscription has damaged the growth of the idea of freedom in the Continental countries and thereby damaged their efficiency also—by undermining the sense of personal responsibility. There is only too much evidence that the temporary adoption of conscription by England had a permanent effect harmful to the development of freedom and democracy. For my own part, I have come to my present conviction of the supreme importance of freedom through the pursuit of efficiency. I believe that freedom is the foundation of efficiency, both national and military. Thus it is a practical folly as well as a spiritual surrender to “go totalitarian” as a result of fighting for existence against the totalitarian states. Cut off the incentive to freely given service and you dry up the life source of a free community.

We ought to realize that it is easier to adopt the compulsory principle of national life than to shake it off. Once compulsion for personal service is adopted in peacetime it will be hard to resist the extension of the principle to all other aspects of the nation's life, including freedom of thought, speech, and writing. We ought to think carefully, and to think ahead, before taking a decisive step toward totalitarianism. Or are we so accustomed to our chains that we are no longer conscious of them?

Progress by compulsion

It is only just to recognize that many of those who advocate such compulsory service are inspired by the desire that it should, and belief that it will, be a means to a good end. This view is one aspect of the larger idea that it is possible to make men good; that they must not only be shown the way to become better but compelled to follow it. That idea has been held by many reformers, most revolutionaries, and all busy-bodies. It has persisted in generation after generation, although as repeatedly contradicted by the experience of history. It is closely related—cousin at least—to the dominant concept of the Communist and Fascist movements.

While pointing out the analogy, and the fallacy, we should draw a distinction, however, between the positive and negative sides of the principle. The negative side comprises all laws which are framed to remove hindrances to progress and prevent interference by a selfish or naturally obstructive section of the community. It may be defined as a process of regulation, as contrasted with actual compulsion—which is, strictly, the positive process of forcing people to do some action against their will. Regulation, in the negative or protective sense of this definition, may be both necessary and helpful in promoting true progress. It does not infringe the principle of freedom, provided that it is wisely applied, for it is embraced in the corollary that freedom does not give license for interference with others' freedom. Moreover, it accords with the philosophical law of progress that the negative paves the way for the positive; that the best chance of ensuring a real step forward lies in taking care to avoid the mistakes that, in experience, have wrecked or distorted past attempts at progress.