Glimpses of World History

by Jawaharlal Nehru

  Morocco had been more or less divided up into two spheres of influence by France and Spain. In 1921 an able leader, Abdel Krim, rose among the Riffs of Morocco against Spanish rule. He showed great ability and gallantry and defeated Spanish troops repeatedly. This led to an internal crisis in Spain. Both the King and the army leaders wanted to put an end to the constitution and the Parliament and have a dictatorship. They agreed about this, but they disagreed as to who was to be the dictator, the King wanting to be a dictator or absolute monarch himself, and the army leaders wanting a military dictatorship. In September 1923 there was a military revolt, and this decided the issue in favour of the army, and General Primo de Rivera became the Dictator. He suspended the Cortes (Parliament) and ruled frankly on the basis of force—that is, the army. The Morocco campaign against the Riffs, however, did not prosper, and Abdel Krim continued to defy the Spanish aggressively. The Spanish Government even offered him favourable terms, but he refused them, holding out for complete independence. It is probable that the Spanish Government would not have been able to subdue him single-handed. In 1925 the French, who had great interests in Morocco, decided to intervene, and they brought their vast resources to bear against Abdel Krim. By the middle of 1926 he had been defeated, and his long and gallant struggle ended by his surrender to the French.

  In Spain, during all these years, Primo de Rivera’s dictatorship continued with all the usual accompaniments of military force, censorship, repression, and sometimes martial law. This dictatorship, it must be remembered, was different from that of Mussolini, as it was based solely on the army, and not, as in Italy, on some classes of population. As soon as the army got tired of Primo de Rivera he had no other support left. Early in 1930 the King dismissed Primo. The same year there was a revolution that was suppressed, but the republican and revolutionary sentiment was too widespread to be kept down. In 1931 the republicans showed their great strength in the municipal elections, and, soon after, King Alfonso, holding that discretion was the better part of valour, abdicated and fled from the country. A provisional government was established, and Spain, the old symbol of autocratic monarchy and Church rule in Europe, became the youngest of Europe’s republics, outlawing the ex-King Alfonso and fighting the influence of the Church.

  But I was telling you about dictators. Among the other countries besides Italy and Spain that gave up the democratic forms of government and established dictatorships were: Poland, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Portugal, Hungary, and Austria. In Poland, Pilsudski, the old socialist of Tsarist days, was the Dictator, owing to his control of the army, and he was in the habit of using the most amazingly offensive language to the legislators of the Polish Parliament, and sometimes indeed they were arrested and bundled away. In Yugoslavia, the King, Alexander, is himself the Dictator. It is stated that in some parts of the country conditions became worse, and there was more oppression than there ever was even when the Turks governed them.

  All the countries I have mentioned above have not been continuously under open dictatorships. Sometimes their parliaments wake up for a while and are allowed to function; sometimes, as recently happened in Bulgaria, the government in power arrests any group of deputies it does not like, such as the communists, and removes them forcibly from the Parliament, leaving the others to carry on as best they can. Always they live either under dictatorship or on the verge of it, and such governments of individuals or small groups, resting on force, must find support in continuing repression, murders and imprisonments of opponents, a strict censorship, and a widespread system of spies.

  Dictatorships sprang up outside Europe also. I have already told you of Turkey and Kemal Pasha. In South America there were many dictators, but they are an old institution there, for the South American republics have never taken kindly to the processes of democracy.

  I have not included the Soviet Union in the above list of dictatorships, because the dictatorship there, although as ruthless as any other, is of a different type. It is not the dictatorship of an individual or a small group, but of a well-organized political party basing itself especially on the workers. They call it the “dictatorship of the proletariat”. Thus we have three kinds of dictatorships—the communist type, the fascist, and the military. There is nothing peculiar about the military one; it has existed from the earliest days. The communist and fascist types are new in history, and are the special products of our own times.

  The first thing that strikes one is that all these dictatorships and their variations are the direct opposite of democracy and the parliamentary form of government. You will remember my telling you that the nineteenth century was the century of democracy, the century when the Rights of Man of the French Revolution governed advanced thought, and individual freedom was the aim. Out of this developed the parliamentary form of government, in varying degrees, in most countries of Europe. In the economic field this led to the theory of laissez-faire. The twentieth century, or rather the post-War years, put an end to this great tradition of the nineteenth century, and fewer and fewer people do reverence now to the idea of formal democracy. And with this fall of democracy the so-called liberal groups everywhere have suffered a like fate, and they have ceased to count as effective forces.

  Both communism and fascism have opposed and criticized democracy, though each has done so on entirely different grounds. Even in countries which are neither communist nor fascist, democracy is far less in favour than it used to be. Parliament has ceased to be what it was, and commands no great respect. Great powers are given to executive heads to do what they consider necessary without further reference to Parliament. Partly this is due to the critical times we live in, when swift action is necessary and representative assemblies cannot always act swiftly. Germany has recently thrown her Parliament overboard completely and is now exhibiting the worst type of fascist rule. The United States of America have always given a great deal of power to their President, and this has recently been increased. England and France are about the only two countries at present where Parliament still functions outwardly as in the old days; their fascist activities take place in their dependencies and colonies—in India we have British fascism at work, in Indo-China there is French fascism “pacifying” the country. But even in London and Paris, parliaments are becoming hollow shells. Only last month a leading English liberal said: “Our representative Parliament is rapidly becoming merely the machinery of registration for the dictates of a governing caucus elected by an imperfect and badly working electoral machine.”

  Nineteenth-century democracy and parliaments are thus losing ground everywhere. In some countries they have been openly and rudely discarded, in others they have lost real significance and tend to become a bit of “solemn and empty pageantry”. A historian has compared this degeneration of parliament to the degeneration of kingship in the nineteenth century. Just as the king in England and elsewhere lost real power and became a constitutional monarch, more or less for show purposes, so also, according to this historian, parliaments are likely to become, and are becoming, powerless and dignified symbols, looking big and important but meaning little.

  Why has this happened? Why has democracy, which was for a century or more the ideal and inspiration of countless people, and which can count its martyrs by the thousand, why has it fallen into disfavour now! Such changes do not happen without sufficient reason; they are not just due to the whims and fancies of a fickle public. There must be something in modern conditions of life which does not fit in with the formal democracy of the nineteenth century. The subject is interesting and intricate. I cannot go into it here, but I shall put one or two considerations before you.

  I have referred to democracy as “formal” in the preceding paragraph. The communists say that it was not real democracy; it was only a democratic shell to hide the fact that one class ruled over the others. According to them, democracy covered the dictatorship of the capitalist class. It was plutocracy, government by the wealthy. The much-paraded vote given to the masses gave th
em only the choice of saying once, in four or five years, whether a certain person, X, might rule over them and exploit them or another person, Y, should do so. In either event the masses were to be exploited by the ruling class. Real democracy can only come when this class rule and exploitation end and only one class exists. To bring about this socialist State, however, a period of the dictatorship of the proletariat is necessary so as to keep down all capitalist and bourgeois elements in the population and prevent them from intriguing against the workers’ State. In Russia this dictatorship is exercised by the Soviets in which all the workers and peasants and other “active” elements are represented. Thus it becomes a dictatorship of the 90 per cent, or even 95 per cent, over the remaining 10 or 5 per cent. That is the theory. In practice the Communist Party controls the Soviets and the ruling clique of communists control the Party. And the dictatorship is as strict, so far as censorship and freedom of thought or action are concerned, as any other. But as it is based on the goodwill of the workers it must carry the workers with it. And, finally, there is no exploitation of the workers or any other class for the benefit of another. There is no exploiting class left. If there is any exploitation, it is done by the State for the benefit of all. Russia, it is worth remembering, never had the democratic form of government. It jumped in 1917 from autocracy to communism.

  The fascist attitude is entirely different. As I have told you in my last letter, it is not easy to find out what fascist principles are, as they do not seem to possess any fixed principles. But that they are opposed to democracy there is no doubt, and their opposition is not on the communist ground that democracy is not the real article but a sham. Fascists object to the whole principle underlying the democratic idea, and they curse democracy with all the vigour at their command. Mussolini has called it a “putrefying corpse”! The idea of individual liberty is equally disliked by the fascists, the State is everything, the individual does not count. (Communists also do not attach much value to individual liberties.) What would poor Mazzini, the prophet of nineteenth century-democratic liberalism, have said to his fellow-countryman Mussolini!

  Not only communists and fascists, but many others, who have thought over the troubles of the present age, have become dissatisfied with the old idea of giving a vote and calling it a democracy. Democracy means equality, and democracy can only flourish in an equal society. It is obvious enough that the giving of votes to everybody does not result in producing an equal society. In spite of adult suffrage and the like, there is today tremendous inequality. Therefore, in order to give democracy a chance, an equal society must be created, and this reasoning leads them to various other ideals and methods. But all these people agree that present day parliaments are highly unsatisfactory.

  Let us look a little more deeply into fascism and try to find out what it is. It glories in violence and hates pacifism. Mussolini, writing in the Enciclopedia Italiana, says:

  Fascism does not believe in the necessity or utility of perpetual peace. Therefore it repudiates pacifism, which conceals a refusal to struggle and an essential cowardice—in face of sacrifice. War, and war only, raises human energies to the maximum of tension and seals with its nobility the peoples who have the courage to accept it. All other trials are substitutes; they do not place the individual before the choice of life and death.

  Fascism is intensely nationalistic, while communism is international. Fascism actually opposes internationalism. It makes of the State a god on whose altar individual freedom and rights must be sacrificed; all other countries are alien and almost like enemies. Jews, being considered as foreign elements, are ill-treated. In spite of certain anti-capitalist slogans and a revolutionary technique, fascism is allied with property-owning and reactionary elements.

  These are some odd aspects of fascism. The philosophy underlying it, if it has any, is difficult to grasp. It began, as we have seen, with the simple desire for power. When success came, an attempt was made to build up a philosophy round it. Just to give you an idea of how very involved this is and to puzzle you, I shall give you an extract from the writings of an eminent fascist philosopher. His name is Giovanni Gentile, and he is considered the official philosopher of fascism; he has also been a fascist minister in the government. Gentile says that people should not seek self-realization through their personality or individual selves, as in democracy, but, according to fascism, through the acts of the transcendental ego as the world’s self-consciousness (whatever this may mean—it is wholly beyond me). Thus in this view there is no room for individual liberty and personality, for the true reality and freedom of the individual is that which he gains by losing himself in something else— the State. “My personality is not suppressed, but uplifted, strengthened, enlarged by being merged and restored in that of the family, the state, the spirit.” Again Gentile says: “Every force is moral force insofar as capable of influencing the will, whatever be the argument applied, the sermon or the cudgel.” So now we know what a lot of moral force the British Government in India uses up whenever it indulges in a lathi charge!

  All these are subsequent attempts to justify or explain a thing that has happened. It is also said that fascism aims at a “Corporative State”, in which I suppose everybody pulls together for the common good. But no such State has so far appeared in Italy or elsewhere. Capitalism functions in Italy more or less in the same way as in other capitalist countries, though some restrictions have been introduced.

  As fascism has spread in other countries, it has become clear that it is not a peculiar Italian phenomenon, but that it is something which appears when certain social and economic conditions prevail in a country. Whenever the workers become powerful and actually threaten the capitalistic State, the capitalist class naturally tries to save itself. Usually such a threat from the workers comes in times of violent economic crisis. If the owning and ruling class cannot put down the workers in the ordinary democratic way by using the police and army, then it adopts the fascist method. This consists in creating a popular mass movement, with some slogans which appeal to the crowd, meant for the protection of the owning capitalist class. The backbone for this movement comes from the lower-middle class, most of them suffering from unemployment, and many of the politically backward and unorganized workers and peasants are also attracted to it by the slogans and hopes of bettering their position. Such a movement is financially helped by the big bourgeoisie who hope to profit by it, and although it makes violence a creed and a daily practice, the capitalist government of the country tolerates it to a large extent because it fights the common enemy—socialist labour. As a party, and much more so if it becomes the government in a country, it destroys the workers’ organizations and terrorizes all opponents.

  Fascism thus appears when the class conflicts between an advancing socialism and an entrenched capitalism become bitter and critical. This social war is due not to misunderstanding, but to a better appreciation of the inherent conflicts and diversities of interests in our present-day society. These conflicts cannot be resolved by ignoring them. And the more people who suffer by the present system understand this diversity of interests, the more do they resent being deprived of what they consider their share. The owning class has no intention of giving up what it has got, and so the conflict becomes intense. So long as capitalism can use the machinery of democratic institutions to hold power and keep down labour, democracy is allowed to flourish. When this is not possible, then capitalism discards democracy and adopts the open fascist method of violence and terror.

  Fascism exists in varying degrees in all countries of Europe except, I suppose, Russia. Its latest triumph has been won in Germany. Even in England fascist ideas are spreading among the ruling classes, and we see their application often enough in India. On the world-stage today fascism, the last resort of capitalism, faces communism.

  But fascism, apart from its other aspects, does not even offer to solve the economic troubles that afflict the world. By its intense and aggressive nationalism it goes against th
e world tendency towards inter-dependence, aggravates the problems that the decline of capitalism has created, and adds to national friction which often leads to war.

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  Revolution and Counter-revolution in China

  June 26, 1933

  Let us now take leave of Europe with its discontents and visit another area of even greater trouble—the Far East, China and Japan. In my last letter on China I told you of the many difficulties of the young republic which had been grafted on to one of the world’s most ancient and vital cultures. The country seemed to be splitting up, and unscrupulous war-lords, tuchuns and super-tuchuns, were coming into prominence, often encouraged and helped by the imperialist Powers, who were interested in keeping China weak and disunited. These tuchuns had no principles; each one of them stood for his own personal aggrandizement, and they were frequently changing sides in the petty civil wars that were continually going on. Meanwhile they lived with their armies on the unhappy peasantry. I have also told you of the nationalist government organized in the south at Canton by Dr Sun Yat-Sen the great leader who had worked for China’s freedom all his life.

  The whole country was dominated by the economic interests of the foreign imperialist Powers, who sat at the great port towns, like Shanghai and Hongkong, and controlled all the foreign trade of China. Dr Sun had said quite truly that China was economically the colony of these Powers. It was bad enough to have one master, to have many masters was sometimes even worse. Dr Sun tried to get foreign help to develop the country industrially and to put his house in order. In particular he looked to America and Britain, but neither of them, nor any other imperialist Power, came to his help. They were all interested in the exploitation of China, and not in her well-being or strengthening. Dr Sun then turned to Soviet Russia in 1924.