Eurasian boundaries, of momentary Appeasement and Infiltration (England,
the United States).
I do not think it is fanciful to suggest that the unnecessary capital
letters with which this passage is loaded are intended to have a hypnotic
effect on the reader. Burnham is trying to build up a picture of
terrifying, irresistible power, and to turn a normal political manoeuvre
like infiltration into Infiltration adds to the general portentousness.
The essay should be read in full. Although it is not the kind of tribute
that the average russophile would consider acceptable, and although
Burnham himself would probably claim that he is being strictly objective,
he is in effect performing an act of homage, and even of self-abasement.
Meanwhile, this essay gives us another prophecy to add to the list: i.e.
that the USSR will conquer the whole of Eurasia, and probably a great
deal more. And one must remember that Burnham's basic theory contains, in
itself, a prediction which still has to be tested--that is, that whatever
else happens, the "managerial" form of society is bound to prevail.
Burnham's earlier prophecy, of a Germany victory in the war and the
integration of Europe round the German nucleus, was falsified, not only
in its main outlines, but in some important details. Burnham insists all
the way through that "managerialism" is not only more efficient than
capitalist democracy or Marxian Socialism, but also more acceptable to
the masses. The slogans of democracy and national self-determination, he
says, no longer have any mass appeal: "managerialism", on the other hand,
can rouse enthusiasm, produce intelligible war aims, establish fifth
columns everywhere, and inspire its soldiers with a fanatical morale. The
"fanaticism" of the Germans, as against the "apathy" or "indifference" of
the British, French, etc, is much emphasised, and Nazism is represented
as a revolutionary force sweeping across Europe and spreading its
philosophy "by contagion". The Nazi fifth columns "cannot be wiped out",
and the democratic nations are quite incapable of projecting any
settlement which the German or other European masses would prefer to the
New Order. In any case, the democracies can only defeat Germany if they
go "still further along the managerial road than Germany has yet gone".
The germ of truth in all this is that the smaller European states,
demoralised by the chaos and stagnation of the pre-war years, collapsed
rather more quickly than they need have done, and might conceivably have
accepted the New Order if the Germans had kept some of their promises.
But the actual experience of German rule aroused almost at once such a
fury of hatred and vindictiveness as the world has seldom seen. After
about the beginning of 1941 there was hardly any need of a positive war
aim, since getting rid of the Germans was a sufficient objective. The
question of morale, and its relation to national solidarity, is a
nebulous one, and the evidence can be so manipulated as to prove almost
anything. But if one goes by the proportion of prisoners to other
casualties, and the amount of quislingism, the totalitarian states come
out of the comparison worse than the democracies. Hundreds of thousands
of Russians appear to have gone over to the Germans during the course of
the war, while comparable numbers of Germans and Italians had gone over
to the Allies before the war started: the corresponding number of
American or British renegades would have amounted to a few scores. As an
example of the inability of "capitalist ideologies" to enlist support,
Burnham cites "the complete failure of voluntary military recruiting in
England (as well as the entire British Empire) and in the United States".
One would gather from this that the armies of the totalitarian states
were manned by volunteers. Actually, no totalitarian state has ever so
much as considered voluntary recruitment for any purpose, nor, throughout
history, has a large army ever been raised by voluntary means. [Note at
end of paragraph] It is not worth listing the many similar arguments that
Burnham puts forward. The point is that he assumes that the Germans must
win the propaganda war as well as the military one, and that, at any rate
in Europe, this estimate was not borne out by events.
[Note: Great Britain raised a million volunteers in the earlier part of
the 1914-18 war. This must be a world's record, but the pressures applied
were such that it is doubtful whether the recruitment ought to be
described as voluntary. Even the most "ideological" wars have been fought
largely by pressed men. In the English civil war, the Napoleonic wars,
the American civil war, the Spanish civil war, etc, both sides resorted
to conscription or the press gang. (Author's footnote.)]
It will be seen that Burnham's predictions have not merely, when they
were verifiable, turned out to be wrong, but that they have sometimes
contradicted one another in a sensational way. It is this last fact that
is significant. Political predictions are usually wrong, because they are
usually based on wish-thinking, but they can have symptomatic value,
especially when they change abruptly. Often the revealing factor is the
date at which they are made. Dating Burnham's various writings as
accurately as can be done from internal evidence, and then noting what
events they coincided with, we find the following relationships:
In THE MANAGERIAL REVOLUTION Burnham prophesies a German victory,
postponement of the Russo-German war until after Britain is defeated,
and, subsequently, the defeat of Russia. The book, or much of it, was
written in the second half of 1940--i.e. at a time when the Germans had
overrun western Europe and were bombing Britain, and the Russians were
collaborating with them fairly closely, and in what appeared, at any
rate, to be a spirit of appeasement.
In the supplementary note added to the English edition of the book,
Burnham appears to assume that the USSR is already beaten and the
splitting-up process is about to begin. This was published in the spring
of 1942 and presumably written at the end of 1941; i.e. when the Germans
were in the suburbs of Moscow.
The prediction that Russia would gang up with Japan against the USA was
written early in 1944, soon after the conclusion of a new Russo-Japanese
treaty.
The prophecy of Russian world conquest was written in the winter of 1944,
when the Russians were advancing rapidly in eastern Europe while the
Western Allies were still held up in Italy and northern France.
It will be seen that at each point Burnham is predicting A CONTINUATION
OF THE THING THAT IS HAPPENING. Now the tendency to do this is not simply
a bad habit, like inaccuracy or exaggeration, which one can correct by
taking thought. It is a major mental disease, and its roots lie partly in
cowardice and partly in the worship of power, which is not fully
separable from cowardice.
Suppose in 1940 you had taken a Gallup poll, in England, on the question
"Will Germany win the war?" You would have found, curiously enough, that
the group answering "Yes" contained a far higher percentage of
intelligent people--people with IQ of over 120, shall we say--than the
group answering "No". The same would have held good in the middle of
1942. In this case the figures would not have been so striking, but if
you had made the question "Will the Germans capture Alexandria?" or "Will
the Japanese be able to hold on to the territories they have captured ?",
then once again there would have been a very marked tendency for
intelligence to concentrate in the "Yes" group. In every case the
less-gifted person would have been likelier to give a right answer.
If one went simply by these instances, one might assume that high
intelligence and bad military judgement always go together. However, it
is not so simple as that. The English intelligentsia, on the whole, were
more defeatist than the mass of the people--and some of them went on being
defeatist at a time when the war was quite plainly won--partly because
they were better able to visualise the dreary years of warfare that lay
ahead. Their morale was worse because their imaginations were stronger.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it, and if one finds the
prospect of a long war intolerable, it is natural to disbelieve in the
possibility of victory. But there was more to it than that. There was
also the disaffection of large numbers of intellectuals, which made it
difficult for them not to side with any country hostile to Britain. And
deepest of all, there was admiration--though only in a very few cases
conscious admiration--for the power, energy, and cruelty of the Nazi
r�gime. It would be a useful though tedious labour to go through the
left-wing press and enumerate all the hostile references to Nazism during
the years 1935-45. One would find, I have little doubt, that they reached
their high-water mark in 1937-8 and 1944-5, and dropped off noticeably in
the years 1939-42--that is, during the period when Germany seemed to be
winning. One would find, also, the same people advocating a compromise
peace in 1940 and approving the dismemberment of Germany in 1945. And if
one studied the reactions of the English intelligentsia towards the USSR,
there, too, one would find genuinely progressive impulses mixed up with
admiration for power and cruelty. It would be grossly unfair to suggest
that power worship is the only motive for russophile feeling, but it is
one motive, and among intellectuals it is probably the strongest one.
Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost
unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is
winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese
have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if
the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if
the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in
London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that
things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than
they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance
of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake
suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as
though they were already at an end. Burnham's writings are full of
apocalyptic visions. Nations, governments, classes and social systems are
constantly described as expanding, contracting, decaying, dissolving,
toppling, crashing, crumbling, crystallising, and, in general, behaving
in an unstable and melodramatic way. The slowness of historical change,
the fact that any epoch always contains a great deal of the last epoch,
is never sufficiently allowed for. Such a manner of thinking is bound to
lead to mistaken prophecies, because, even when it gauges the direction
of events rightly, it will miscalculate their tempo. Within the space of
five years Burnham foretold the domination of Russia by Germany and of
Germany by Russia. In each case he was obeying the same instinct: the
instinct to bow down before the conqueror of the moment, to accept the
existing trend as irreversible. With this in mind one can criticise his
theory in a broader way.
The mistakes I have pointed out do not disprove Burnham's theory, but
they do cast light on his probable reasons for holding it. In this
connection one cannot leave out of account the fact that Burnham is an
American. Every political theory has a certain regional tinge about it,
and every nation, every culture, has its own characteristic prejudices
and patches of ignorance. There are certain problems that must almost
inevitably be seen in a different perspective according to the
geographical situation from which one is looking at them. Now, the
attitude that Burnham adopts, of classifying Communism and Fascism as
much the same thing, and at the same time accepting both of them--or, at
any rate, not assuming that either must be violently struggled against--is
essentially an American attitude, and would be almost impossible for an
Englishman or any other western European. English writers who consider
Communism and Fascism to be THE SAME THING invariably hold that both are
monstrous evils which must be fought to the death: on the other hand, any
Englishman who believes Communism and Fascism to be opposites will feel
that he ought to side with one or the other. [Note 1 at end of paragraph]
The reason for this difference of outlook is simple enough and, as usual,
is bound up with wish-thinking. If totalitarianism triumphs and the dreams
of the geopoliticians come true, Britain will disappear as a world power
and the whole of western Europe will be swallowed by some single great
state. This is not a prospect that it is easy for an Englishman to
contemplate with detachment. Either he does not want Britain to
disappear--in which case he will tend to construct theories proving the
thing that he wants-or, like a minority of intellectuals, he will decide
that his country is finished and transfer his allegiance to some foreign
power. An American does not have to make the same choice. Whatever
happens, the United States will survive as a great power, and from the
American point of view it does not make much difference whether Europe is
dominated by Russia or by Germany. Most Americans who think of the matter
at all would prefer to see the world divided between two or three monster
states which had reached their natural boundaries and could bargain with
one another on economic issues without being troubled by ideological
differences. Such a world-picture fits in with the American tendency to
admire size for its own sake and to feel that success constitutes
justification, and it fits in with the all-prevailing anti-British
sentiment. In practice, Britain and the United States have twice been
forced into alliance against Germany, and will probably, before long, be
forced into alliance against Russia: but, subjectively, a majority of
Americans would prefer either Russia or Germany to Britain, and, as
between Russia and Germany, would prefer whicheve
r seemed stronger at the
moment. [Note 2 at end of paragraph] It is, therefore, not surprising that
Burnham's world-view should often be noticeably close to that of the
American imperialists on the one side, or to that of the isolationists on
the other. It is a "tough" or "realistic" world view which fits in with the
American form of wish-thinking. The almost open admiration for Nazi
methods which Burnham shows in the earlier of his two books, and which
would seem shocking to almost any English reader, depends ultimately on
the fact that the Atlantic is wider than the Channel.
[Note 1: The only exception I am able to think of is Bernard Shaw, who,
for some years at any rate, declared Communism and Fascism to be much the
same thing, and was in favour of both of them. But Shaw, after all, is not
an Englishman, and probably does not feel his fate to be bound up with
that of Britain. (Author's footnote.)]
[Note 2 As late as the autumn of 1945, a Gallup poll taken among the
American troops in Germany showed that 51 percent "thought Hitler did much
good before 1939". This was after five years of anti-Hitler propaganda.
The verdict, as quoted, is not very strongly favourable to Germany, but
it is hard to believe that a verdict equally favourable to Britain would
be given by anywhere near 51 per cent of the American army. (Author's
footnote.)]
As I have said earlier, Burnham has probably been more right than wrong
about the present and the immediate past. For quite fifty years past the
general drift has almost certainly been towards oligarchy. The
ever-increasing concentration of industrial and financial power; the
diminishing importance of the individual capitalist or shareholder, and
the growth of the new "managerial" class of scientists, technicians, and
bureaucrats; the weakness of the proletariat against the centralised
state; the increasing helplessness of small countries against big ones;
the decay of representative institutions and the appearance of one-party
r�gimes based on police terrorism, faked plebiscites, etc: all these
things seem to point in the same direction. Burnham sees the trend and
assumes that it is irresistible, rather as a rabbit fascinated by a boa
constrictor might assume that a boa constrictor is the strongest thing in
the world. When one looks a little deeper, one sees that all his ideas
rest upon two axioms which are taken for granted in the earlier book and
made partly explicit in the second one. They are:
1. Politics is essentially the same in all ages.
2. Political behaviour is different from other kinds of behaviour.
To take the second point first. In THE MACHIAVELLIANS, Burnham insists
that politics is simply the struggle for power. Every great social
movement, every war, every revolution, every political programme, however
edifying and Utopian, really has behind it the ambitions of some
sectional group which is out to grab power for itself. Power can never be
restrained by any ethical or religious code, but only by other power. The
nearest possible approach to altruistic behaviour is the perception by a
ruling group that it will probably stay in power longer if it behaves
decently. But curiously enough, these generalisations only apply to
political behaviour, not to any other kind of behaviour. In everyday life,
as Burnham sees and admits, one cannot explain every human action by
applying the principle of CUI BONO? Obviously, human beings have impulses
which are not selfish. Man, therefore, is an animal that can act morally
when he acts as an individual, but becomes immoral when he acts
collectively. But even this generalisation only holds good for the higher
groups. The masses, it seems, have vague aspirations towards liberty and
human brotherhood, which are easily played upon by power-hungry
individuals or minorities. So that history consists of a series of
swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise
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