FOREWORD

THE highway of history forked after the World War, as it has forked after other such major catastrophes. One part of the civilized world turned off up to the left toward Communism. Other parts--Italy, Germany, Austria, Spain--have gone on to the right down the old way toward Fascism or Naziism. That was the choice. That is the choice. Other nations coming up to the turn are looking around now anxiously, desperately for another, a third, a middle way, but history, both ancient and modern, and the working womb of creative economics show no other way. Either left or right they--we-- must go.

And to the backward, balking nations that are coming to the fork and have not yet chosen--England, the United States, Japan--that narrow choice is fair and clear enough. They--we--can look ahead at the peoples who have gone on before us and see how they have fared. We can see thus into our future. Whether we can deliberately choose even when we see a preference, was once thought to be impossible. But now we know that it can be done. It has been done.

Russia, which has been longest on the way and went left and likes it, that young pioneer of planned civilization and revolution, has shown experimentally that the human race has arrived at the stage where they can comprehend and use history to shape its end. In one short sharp struggle, the Russian people used their head and picked their own way, knowingly. Next came Italy, and consciously rejected the Communist road and chose the Fascist. I know that the choice was conscious because I was in Italy at the time and, soon after the march on Rome, I had a talk with Benito Mussolini showing that he understood, historically, what he had been doing. Now come Germany and Austria, whose Fascist-Nazis are not so aware, not so realistic, historical and original as Italy's Duce but who do know enough about what they are up to to show that the course they were following was politically understood by them. The German people did not know where they were going; they were misled into thinking that they were going back to a middle-class system, but their Fuhrer knew that he had sold them out and was going to deliver them to big business. They were backing away from Communism and trying hard to maintain the capitalist system j as they are still doing-by force and violence.

When the Russians made their planned revolution, the rest of the world, though it was just emerging from a devastating war, was shocked at the force and violence in Russia and declared itself with many voices against a revolution. It preferred what was called "evolution" as more gradual and less costly. Now we can see, if we will, by looking comparatively at Russia and at Germany, Austria, Italy and Spain that some struggle is inevitable, and that "evolution" is more violent. It is more terrible; and it probably means two civil wars instead of one.

But the test of these two ways, Communism and violent conservatism, is not, I submit, the use of force, which will come anyhow. The real test is whether they have solved the problem which blew them up in the first place and now is terrifying us. And the point for us to notice is that Fascism has not solved our problem in western Europe. On the contrary, the economic problem of which the symptoms are war, imperialism and graft, poverty, riches and crime has grown upon them as it is growing with us. In other words, the experiment with Fascism has failed. In Russia, however, Communism has from the start, and is continuing to make progress to ward a solution.

The Russians have not gone far on their new road, but you can see that they have changed the road-bed and the direction. They have cleared it of all the economic privileges that have blocked our reforms and they have found that that clearance disposes of the big obstacles to progress; they do not have to kill pigs and plough the cotton under when they are hungry and need clothing; they can use a surplus whether of goods or workers; they are rid of individual poverty and individual riches; they can avoid war and have peace; they can abolish graft and crime; they can let science and invention ride. They have found that they can have civilization. And the Fascists can't. The Fascists have not yet had to destroy crops, but they have had to-and I say had to-kill races or suppress them and organized labor; they have had to abolish free press, and justice, and proceed to the making of an army and war.

Like Capitalism itself, of which it is only a form, Fascism, to survive, needs a war, as do England, the United States, France and Japan.

It is a hard choice that faces the unrevolutionary world, but peoples who have not made that choice yet are deterred most by fear of the process of transition from the present into the future. Well, we know pretty well the economic changes that are ahead of us, but we still cannot make a picture of the actual road into Fascism. We cannot see what will happen to us personally. Now comes this book that tells us just what happened to individuals during the forced, "evolutionary" change to Fascism. As I see it, it is a chapter of our still avoidable future; we don't have to continue on the way we are headed now. A very simple narrative, this vivid book tells with tight-lipped, unexpressed emotion just what happened in Germany to one man who suffered as much as any other German probably. He was not a middle-class Jew, he was a Communist worker and the Communists are the worst hated of all men by the Nazis. You can see here the reason for this. Communism is the opposite to the Fascists' way; the Communists are the most dangerous of all people to the Fascists; and the Communists are the hardest to conquer. This man, for example, was sent to one of the Fascist prisons in Berlin and he was tortured there, en masse; then to a concentration camp and tortured there, en masse. Indeed this is his whole story told in moving detail, except that he did not yield or peach, but held silently, grimly, to the line of his conviction. And when he was released he went back to work, with his party, for Communism.

LINCOLN STEFFENS.

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