The Strategy Of Terror - Europe's Inner Front

THE STRATEGY OF TERROR Europe s Inner Front by K D M O N 1 TAYLOR HOUGHTON MIFFTJN COMPANY - BOSTON tftoc 1940 CONTENTS I War Never Ends i II The Word Becomes War 6 III Back to Munich 26 IV The Spring of War 53 V The Fateful Month of August 68 VI Ideals as Weapons 106 VII Hamlets in Uniform 146 VIII War in Our Time 166 IX Killing with Kindness 187 X Anastasie the Fair 211 XI The War of Reason 221 By Way of Postscript 266 The Pace Quickens 269 I ndex 271 I WAR NEVER ENDS THERE is one of Europes battle fronts no war correspondent has yet adequately covered the battle-front of the mind, where ideas and ideologies, propaganda and emotions, clash in ordered ranks, disciplined like soldiers. On this front there is no truce here war never ends. It was raging before the first gun spoke it will still be raging when the diplomats of Europe gather under the chandeliers or by some lakeside to dictate or negotiate a peace. Peace offensives are just offensives on the battle-front of the mind and war scares are just war. My book is an attempt to cover this little-known battle-front. It is the kind of unpretentious, hurried history which foreign correspondents today write as they run, that is, history not only seen but felt and lived by the historian, I am keenly interested by the strategy and tactics of psychological warfare, but I am more interested by the human drama underlying it, and this dramatic element is precisely what most writers on the subject have overlooked We hear a lot about the war of propaganda, the war of nerves, STRATEGY OF TERROR and other names for the war in the mind, but we arc apt to think of these expressions as metaphorical, whereas they are literally descriptive of a form ofconflict which is becoming more and more important in modern life. In reality, the war in the mind, the war of nerves, or whatever you choose to call it, is, like any war, an organised conflict of group-wills. It 1ms its own battle fields, and these produce not only their victories and defeats, but their own thrills and their peculiar horrors. A trick of the tongue makes it hard for us to realise this. We say war of propaganda 7 and at the back of our minds there is a sort of Walt Disney image of little uniformed lies charging the enemy in syntactical phalanxes. Obviously, only a poet like Disney or a nee-Platonic mystic can see a human drama in such a conflict, because lies are not men but merely the wonts of men when a lie kills a He there is no blood I am writing this book because 1 see a different image I am not interested in the massacre of ideas as such, but in the impact on human beings of ideas used as weapons. Tactically, the drama of Europe lies in the clash of ideals and the tug of contradictory loyalties, pitted the ones against the others by conscious propa gandists to whom the mind of Europe Is only a battlefield, sentiments and ideals so many weapons to be used against the enemy. From a human point of view, the drama of Europe is the havoc wrought by this psychological war on the battlefield of the mind, and of this war I am well fitted to bear wi trims in more than ten years of living in Europe I have not only covered it but lived with it and collected scars from it, When I hear expressions like war of nerves war of propa ganda 1 think of my scars and of the scars which my friends carry. I remember those inhuman diplomatic crises, more un WAR NEVER ENDS nerving than war, that we lived through, particularly the one before Munich. I remember all those stupid, bitter political quarrels, felt like a personal grievance, between friends and within families quarrels about Spain, quarrels about Munich. I remember all the false hopes, all the bitter disillusionments...