THE BLOND BEAST

Throughout the last week there has been circulated a persistent and well organized propaganda against Adolph Hitler and his treatment of Jews in Germany. The dictator is alleged to have been the moving spirit behind a persecution incredible in its extent and bitterness, and those who have been most active in dispensing figures and anecdotes have also neglected no opportunity to point the moral of a well adorned tale. Those apocryphal Germans who hacked the hands from helpless little Belgians have been resurrected, and in their new incarnation seem for more terrifying because they are far more plausible. It is easier to believe that Hitler summarily dispossessed Lion Feuchtwanger than it was to picture the Kaiser as a rather debased Antichrist.

Of course the anti-Semitism of the Nasis is a real factor, and an unfortunate one, in the present German situation. The Fascism of Hitler is based largely on the consciousness of race, as the Fascism of Massolini is based largely on the consciousness of the abstract state. Under such conditions any important racial group in the German community will inevitably be resented and discriminated against. But Bishop Manning, Rabbi Wise, and the Nation might reach a saner perspective if they reviewed some of the more obvious features of the Treaty of Versailles. That Germany's government now rests upon the Function of the governed is in great measure the result of our own insistence. That such a government reacts to the sharp disadvantage of unorganized minorities, or is, in other words; the domination of the majority in their own interest, Aristotle himself was not slow to realize. Unfortunately, the majority of Germans support a regime which dislikes the Jewish race and its power in Germany. The majority of Americans once supported a regime which believed that the negro race was divinely predestined to slavery.

Intelligent and tolerant minorities, however, existed in the United States in the early days of the nineteenth century, and they exist in Germany now. It is idle to rail against the German people, in Bishop Manning's fashion, and wonder how Goethe or Schiller could be reconciled to the illiberalism of the Nazi party. Criticism on such grounds becomes merely sanctimonious, for the evil is not in the whims of any represented majority, but in the fact that modern democracies have insufficiently represented minorities. Were the less numerous and more enlightened factions to have true proportional representation in the United States, in Germany, and in England, political and social injustice to negroes, Jews, and Irish might be sanely ameliorated. Even if one excludes the Jewish control of the American press from the question, and accepts uncritically the prevailing reports of the Nazi atrocities, the present state of world political evolution makes any attack on Germany alone the most offensive vauntings of hubris.