I know something about that war, and I never want to see that history repeated. But, my fellow Americans, it certainly can be repeated if the peace-loving democratic nations again fearfully practice a policy of standing idly by while big aggressors use armed force to conquer the small and weak.
Let us admit that most of us writers feel an essential aversion to politics. By taking such a position, however, we accept the perverted principle of specialization, according to which some are paid to write about the horrors of the world and human responsibility and others to deal with those horrors and bear the human responsibility for them.
Honesty is the best policy, when there is money in it.
It is a political axiom that power follows property.
At one end of the spectrum are the terrorist gangs within our borders, and the terrorist states which finance and arm them. At the other are the hard left operating inside our system, conspiring to use union power and the apparatus of local government to break, defy and subvert the law.
It also happens, rather often, that politicians do not actually talk to each other but only to one another's shadows as they appear in the media.
Politics cannot be a science, because in politics theory and practice cannot be separated, and the sciences depend upon their separation.
Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of government. The collapse of 1929 showed up the despotism for what it was. The election of 1932 was the people's mandate to end it. Under that mandate it is being ended.
The previous regime, armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology, reduced man to a force of production, and nature to a tool of production. In this it attacked both their very substance and their mutual relationship. It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to the nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy and stinking machine, whose real meaning was not clear to anyone.
Complete equality of rights for all nations; the right of nations to self-determination; the unity of the workers of all nations, such is the national programme that Marxism, the experience of the whole world, and the experience of Russia, teach the workers.