CHAPTER 9 : THE HIGH NOON OF AGGRESSION
During the 1920s, the civilized Western democracies had maintained some kind of shaky world order, through the League of Nations on the one hand, and through Anglo-American financial diplomacy on the other. At the beginning of the 1930s, the system - if it could be called that - broke down completely, opening an era of international banditry in which the totalitarian states behaved simply in accordance with their military means. The law-abiding powers were economically ruined and unilaterally disarmed. France retreated into isolation and began to build her Maginot Line, itself a symbol of defeatism. The Americans and British were obsessed by economy. In the early 1930s, the American army was only the 16th largest in world, behind Romania. The Americans persuaded the semi-pacifist Labour government to sign the London Naval Treaty, which reduced the Royal Navy to a state of impotence it had not known since the 17th century.
In the 1920s the world had been run by the power of money. In the 1930s it was subject to the arbitration of the sword. A careful study of the chronology of the period reveals the extent to which the totalitarian powers, though acting independently and sometimes in avowed hostility towards each other, took advantage of their numbers and their growing strength to challenge and outface the pitifully stretched resources of dmeocratic order. Italy, Japan, Russia and Germany played a geopolitical game together, whose whole object was to replace international law and treaties by a new Realpolitik in which, each believed, its own millennarian vision was destined to be realized.
The process by whereby one totalitarian state corrupted another internally now spread to foreign dealings, so that a Gresham's Law operated here, too, driving out diplomacy and replacing it by force.
Even with their existing forces, Britain and America could have deterred and contained Japan... a strong line with Japan would then (1932) have been feasible. But such joint planning was ruled out by America's growing isolationism - a feature of the 1930s much more than the 1920s. America was moving towards the 1935 Neutrality Act.
The 1932 murders of the Japanese prime minister, finance minister and leading industrialists marked the end of government by parliamentary means.
Here again we see the process of mutual corruption at work. Mussolini's putsch had been inspired by Lenin's. From his earliest days as a political activist, Hitler had cited Mussolini as a precedent.
The handling of the Abyssinian crisis, in which Britain was effectively in charge, is a striking example of how to get the worst of all possible worlds. Abyssinia was a primitive African monarchy which practiced slavery; not a modern state at all. It should not have been in the League. The notion that the League had to guarantee its frontiers was an excellent illustration of the absurdity of the covenant which led Senator Lodge and his friends to reject it. The League should have been scrapped after the 1931 Manchurian fiasco. However, if it was felt worth preserving, and if the integrity of Abyssinia was a make-or-break issue, then Britain and France should have been prepared to go to war; in which case Italy would have backed down. The two Western powers would have lost her friendship, aroused her enmity indeed; but the League would have shown it had teeth, and could use them; and the effects might have been felt elsewhere, in central Europe particularly. But to impose sanctions was folly. Sanctions rarely work: they damage, infuriate and embitter but they do not deter or frustrate an act of aggression. In this case they made no sense because France would not agree to oil sanctions (the only type likely to have any impact on events) and America, the world's greatest oil producer, would not impose sanctions at all. Britain would not agree to close the Suez Canal or impose a naval quarantine: the First Sea Lord, Chatfield, reported only seven capital-ships were available. While the cabinet argued about whether or not to try and impose oil! sanctions, Hitler remilitarized the Rhineland on 7 March, making nonsense of both Versailles and the Locarno pact. On this date Britain had only three battleships in home waters, scarcely sufficient to neutralize Germany's 'pocket battleships'. Mussolini took Addis Ababa on 5 May and annexed the country four days later. On 10 June the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville ChamberIain, described the sanctions policy as 'the very midsummer of madness', and a week later the cabinet scrapped them.
The only effect of the sanctions policy was to turn Mussolini into an enemy. From mid-1936 the Germans began to court him. There were visits to Rome by Frank, Goering, HimmIer and Baldar von Shirach. On 1 November Mussolini spoke of the Rome-Berlin Axis'. By 22 February 1937, a review by the British Chiefs of Staff noted, 'The days are past when we could count automatically on a friendly and submissive Italy.' That meant existing plans to reinforce the Far East fleet in the event of a crisis with Japan by sending ships through the Mediterranean and Suez were impractical. Britain now had three major potential naval enemies: in home waters, the Mediterranean, and the Pacific-Indian Ocean theatre. There was also the possibility that they might operate in concert. Three weeks after Mussolini spoke of the Axis, Japan and Germany signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, aimed at Russia but signaling the possibility of groups of totalitarian powers acting in predatory wolf-packs. On 27 September 1937, Mussolini was in Berlin. He found Hitler's admiration irresistible... and the process of corruption culminated the next month (22 May) when he signed the 'Pact of Steel' with the man he had considered a potential 'enemy of civilization' only five years before.
By this time Mussolini and Hitler had collaborated together in the first of the ideological proxy-wars. Their 'opponent' in this cynical ritual was Stalin. The theatre selected for their devastating performance was Spain, which had been virtually outside the European power-system since the early nineteenth century and which now became its agonized focus. This was itself extraordinary: Spain was aloof, self-contained, xenophobic, the European country most resistant to the holistic principle, the least vulnerable to the foreign viruses of totalitarianism, of Left or Right, social engineering, relative morality. That is what makes the Spanish Civil War so peculiarly tragic. The infection entered through the Socialist Party (PSOE) and then spread.
Franco's philosophy is worth examining briefly because it was so remote from all the prevailing currents of the age, both liberal and totalitarian. His own motivation he invariably described as 'duty, love of country'. For Franco, the army was the only truly national institution, ancient, classless, non-regional, apolitical, incorrupt, disinterested.
He was in no sense a clericalist and never took the slightest notice of ecclesiastical advice on nonspiritual matters. He hated politics in any shape. The Conservatives were reactionary and selfish landowners. The Liberals were corrupt and selfish businessmen. The Socialists were deluded, or worse. He exploited the two insurrectionary movements, the Falange and the Carlists, amalgamating them under his leadership, but their role was subservient, indeed servile. Franco was never a fascist or had the smallest belief in any kind of Utopia or system.
Franco said: 'Spaniards are tired of politics and of politicians.' Again: 'Only those who live off politics should fear our movement.' He spent his entire political career seeking to exterminate politics.
Franco determined to end the destructive process of corruption by amputating the agonized limb of Spanish collectivism. His feelings towards the Left anticipated those of the wartime Allies towards Nazism: he got unconditional surrender first, then de-Communized, but in a manner closer to the drumhead purges of liberated France than the systematic trials in Germany. It was not a Lenin-style totalitarian massacre by classes: the Law of Political Responsibilities of 9 February 1939 dealt with responsibility for crimes on an individual basis (the only exception was Freemasons of the eighteenth degree or higher).
Thus ancient and traditional Spain, led by a man who regretted every second that had passed since the old world ended in 1914, sought to immunize herself from the present. The attempt did not succeed in the long run; but it gave Spain some protection from the pandemic which now overwhelmed Europe.
