Methodists From The United States

"I only know two tunes. One is Yankee Doodle, and the other one isn't."

"I don't underrate the value of military knowledge, but if men make war in slavish obedience to rules, they will fail."

"Though I have been trained as a soldier, and participated in many battles, there never was a time when, in my opinion, some way could not be found to prevent the drawing of the sword. I look forward to an epoch when a court, recognized by all nations, will settle international differences, instead of keeping large standing armies as they do in Europe."

"My lord, I have heard that your father was a military man. Was that the case?"

"Peace is not the absence of conflict but the presence of creative alternatives for responding to conflict — alternatives to passive or aggressive responses, alternatives to violence."

"No citizen should be permitted to become a member of or contribute to any organization whose members are pledged, or have ever been pledged, to tender prior loyalty to any state other than the United States, or to defend any state other than the United States in case of war, except as in such a war the United States might formally be allied with another power."

"Merely to ban the Communist Party as such would be useless. It would revive, as it did in Canada, under another name."

"Communist parties are both legal and illegal, and the illegal structure governs the legal. But legality is an enormous aid to the illegal conspiracy. It prevents forthright action against the chief criminals; it leads to roundabout persecution; it enables the Communist to deceive simple, generous-hearted, and gullible citizens, and it leads to dubiously legal actions from the government itself. The present half-legal, half-persecuted position of the Party and its members is not justice. It operates to eliminate one evil with another, both evils containing dangers to the Constitutional order."

"A continually reaffirmed thesis of communism is that its objectives cannot be realized without ruthless violence nor within the framework of a constitutional order."

"Russians would be, or are, willing to agree to a partition of the world into 'orbits' or 'spheres of influence,' along familiar lines of power politics. Those who hold this hope have been confusing Stalin with Hitler. Hitler was for the partition of the world, and tried to sell that idea to the British. But Stalin is a Bolshevist—that is, a totalist."

"Thus, the Communists program for agriculture, universal for all countries, would expropriate entirely all farmers living above subsistence or its margin, who are eventually to be collectivized."

"The publicly propagandized aims of communism are vaguely liberal. One can read the Daily Worker every day for a year without finding any clear exegesis of Communist principle. Like Hitler, Communists, outside their own ranks, promise all things to most men, denouncing only 'monopolists' 'imperialists' (and failing to provide a glossary for their meaning of these terms), opposing race discrimination, child labor, etc."

"To say that it 'unconstitutional' to outlaw and prosecute such a movement is merely to admit that democracies can devise no legal means to protect themselves."

"[The Communist's] objective is not to secure 'agreements' or 'compromises,' but to use the tribunes of governments for disruptive agitation, and destroy the representative system from within… Any Communist, sitting in any 'bourgeoisie' government, represents only the Communist International."

"All Communists speak of the Soviet Union as their 'Fatherland.' At this seventh Congress, Marcel Cachin, one of the French delegates, said, 'Comrades, all the parties of the Communist International have never been more attached than at the present time to their Fatherland, the Soviet Union."

"The American Communist Party is not an autonomous body. Its members, who claim their rights under the American Constitution have already relinquished every personal right to an international, actually Russian, body. Their claim to participate in the political life of America is as preposterous as would be the claim of the Jugoslav Communist Party to participate, because the American, Russian, Jugoslav, Bulgarian, etc., parties are all the same organization."

"Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes — you'll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success — they would all go Nazi in a crisis. Believe me, nice people don't go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them. Those who haven't anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don't — whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi."

"There he sits: he talks awkwardly rather than glibly; he is courteous. He commands a distant and cold respect. But he is a very dangerous man. Were he primitive and brutal he would be a criminal — a murderer. But he is subtle and cruel. He would rise high in a Nazi regime. It would need men just like him — intellectual and ruthless. But Mr. C is not a born Nazi. He is the product of a democracy hypocritically preaching social equality and practicing a carelessly brutal snobbery. He is a sensitive, gifted man who has been humiliated into nihilism. He would laugh to see heads roll."

"Mr. A has a life that is established according to a certain form of personal behavior. Although he has no money, his unostentatious distinction and education have always assured him a position. He has never been engaged in sharp competition. He is a free man. I doubt whether ever in his life he has done anything he did not want to do or anything that was against his code. Nazism wouldn't fit in with his standards and he has never become accustomed to making concessions. Mr. B has risen beyond his real abilities by virtue of health, good looks, and being a good mixer. He married for money and he has done lots of other things for money. His code is not his own; it is that of his class — no worse, no better, He fits easily into whatever pattern is successful. That is his sole measure of value — success. Nazism as a minority movement would not attract him. As a movement likely to attain power, it would."

"Germans may be more susceptible to Nazism than most people, but I doubt it. Jews are barred out, but it is an arbitrary ruling. I know lots of Jews who are born Nazis and many others who would heil Hitler tomorrow morning if given a chance. There are Jews who have repudiated their own ancestors in order to become "Honorary Aryans and Nazis"; there are full-blooded Jews who have enthusiastically entered Hitler's secret service. Nazism has nothing to do with race and nationality. It appeals to a certain type of mind. It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation — the generation which was either young or unborn at the end of the last war. This is as true of Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Americans as of Germans. It is the disease of the so-called "lost generation." Sometimes I think there are direct biological factors at work — a type of education, feeding, and physical training which has produced a new kind of human being with an imbalance in his nature. He has been fed vitamins and filled with energies that are beyond the capacity of his intellect to discipline. He has been treated to forms of education which have released him from inhibitions. His body is vigorous. His mind is childish. His soul has been almost completely neglected."

"It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one's acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times — in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis."

"The education of the Nazi elite, it turns out, is the education of super-racketeers and gangsters from among the biologically superior. The concept of 'noblesse oblige' is transformed into its polar opposite: into the concept that out of the biologically potentially noble will come a leadership of super-bandits, who will plunder the world; to whom organized murder, terror, espionage, robbery, treachery, the use of the lie, rape — which is flourishing in present-day Germany — will seem the natural, even the organic way of life. And indeed it is, if the inhibitions imposed upon men by centuries of tradition are once completely released."

"For already the myth is being carefully built up. Hitler is to be the Messiah of organic evolution—the anti-Christ of the will to power, which is not a will to national power but a will to power per se, the liberation of the lustfully destructive from any inhibitions whatsoever."

"This kind of thinking is taking a long view, in which one must also count the imponderables, such as the effort of prolonged depression upon restless social forces; the inevitable necessity for National Socialism to move very far to the Left, the possible revolt of the people everywhere against dawdling tactics of their leaders."

"The contribution of Communism to the nihilism of democratic despair has been to shear humanism off democracy, to reduce the concept of democracy to crass materialism, to interpret life in terms of bread alone. The Nazis, as anti-humanistic as the Communists, have elevated the Communist Have-Not doctrine into a war cry for the Have-Not states."

"And now the beginning of the expropriation of church lands in Austria, have all revealed the true face of National Socialism, which more and more among pious Germans is called, under their breaths, 'the brown Bolshevism.'"

"The Vatican newspaper in Rome, Osservatore Romano, said of National Socialism, 'It is the most inhumane of all heresies. Hitler is true to his role of anti-Christ.'"

"For it is no longer possible to regard Fascism as the friend of Christianity. And in making a cultural treaty with Hitler, Franco has laid Spain wide open to the penetration of Nazi ideology, which has been repeatedly denounced by the Pope himself as anti-Christian."

"For Adolf Hitler's first hatred was not Communism, but Austria-Hungary. Read 'Mein Kampf.' And he loathed it for what? For its tolerance! He wanted eighty million Germans to rule with an iron hand an empire of eighty million 'inferiors' — Czechs, Slovaks, Magyars, Jews, Serbs, Poles and Croats."

"A Frenchman who is in close touch with the situation at home told me this week, 'We would have Fascism in France already if Germany and Italy had not done it first.'"

"Can one preach at home inequality of races and nations and advocate abroad good-will towards all men?"

"Unity, in Fascist terms, means uniformity; freedom of conscience means insubordination; co-ordination means coercion."

"The idea of the State being a sort of apotheosis of the People, their ultimate expression and good, was invented for the modern age by the German philosopher, Hegel, and both Karl Marx, the father of Communism, and Mussolini, the inventor of Fascism, got their fundamental philosophy of politics from Hegel."

"The fathers of American Democracy had no exaggerated respect for the State, because they were pre-eminently men of reason and common sense. They never, for instance, identified the State with the People. They knew that the State is, by very definition, an instrument of oppression and coercion, and their idea was to make it strong enough to keep order and ward off enemies, and limit it otherwise very strictly."

"Someday, when women realize that the object of their emancipation is not to make them more like men, but more powerfully womanly, and therefore of greater use to men and themselves and society."

"It is intolerable that a whole race should be indicted and banned—each individual, good, bad and indifferent, lumped into one category—as the Jews are in Germany. It is intolerable that we should accept the principle that there is a permanent, irreconcilable and even necessary hostility between workers and the men who employ them—as is positively implied in this country, in the National Labor Relations Act."

"The object of mankind is not to live in a perfectly functioning universe, but to live in a tolerable universe, which means one suited to the nature and aspirations of human beings."

"The Liberal is distinguished from the Conservative and the Radical, not only by his basic philosophy but by his methods. Never does he believe that a good end justifies and evil means. He seeks to find everything that binds men together, rather than what divides them, for he loves persuasion and detests coercion."

"Radicals and Conservatives are not at all unlike, temperamentally. They want order, organization, efficiency, perfection. The Conservative or Reactionary thinks these can be best obtained by putting and keeping the power in the hands of a small class. He is afraid that an extension of democracy will destroy form and tradition, which he believes are essential to holding any society together. The Radical is so obsessed by the obvious faults of society that he wants to pull everything up by the roots and start all over again, and build a perfect society according to a blueprint. It is interesting that when the extreme Radicals triumph—in a revolution, for instance, as in Russia—they immediately become rigidly conservative, and punish all deviation rigorously. The worst fundamentalists in the world today are the Russian communists."

"William Penn summed up the ideal of human liberty in the remark: 'Men must either be governed by God or they must be ruled by tyrants.'"

"A slave has no morality, because he cannot choose between good and evil. He has only a derivative morality—that of his masters."

"The object of liberty is to give men and women a chance to be their best selves. That is its first and last purpose."

"Liberalism is not being killed by dictators. Liberalism is committing suicide—out of despair and a bad conscience. What liberalism needs is a revival, in the evangelical sense of the word. It needs to admit its sins, as the basis of renewing its life."

"The easiest way to simplify society is to reduce it to a military organization. That is the most primitive form of social organization. And that is precisely what is being done. The unit of communal life shrinks. Wealth, prosperity, inventiveness, choice, demand are subordinated to simplified nationalistic aims. The very mind which created the liberal universe becomes atrophied through disuse."

"Pre-eighteenth century economics were governed, not by consumers, who determined what should be produced by what they were willing to buy in a competitive market, but by producers who enjoyed special privileges in return for the most stringent kind of state regulations. Mr. Walter Lippmann, in his book, The Good Society, points out that in the days of Louis XIV the manufacturers of France were told exactly what to produce and exactly how to produce it. Industry and agriculture were governed by codes more complicated than anything ever invented by the NRA or Mr. Wallace."

"The rise of liberalism was accompanied by immense technological progress; by the industrial revolution; by the division of labor which ensued, and which suddenly, and prodigiously, accelerated the efficiency of production; and by the conception of economic life governed by the market. In other words, of economic life governed by the buyer, not the seller. This was a brand-new and wholly revolutionary idea."

"The American Revolution of 1776 was a great liberal revolution. The Declaration of Independence and the American Constitution, more than any documents on earth, embody the fundamentals of liberalism. These documents assert the essential equality of human beings. This does not mean, and never did, that one man is as talented, or wise, or good as another, or that each person is entitled to the same rewards. It does mean that every human being has a right to his own life; that no man may be forced to labor against his will, or to assert beliefs contrary to his conscience, or be relegated to one class of society."

"To be a liberal means to believe in human freedom. It means to believe in human beings. It means to champion that form of social and political order which releases the greatest amount of human energy; permits greatest liberty for individuals and groups, in planning and living their lives; cherishes freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and freedom of action, limited by only one thing: the protection of the freedom of others."

"What confuses the mind of the average American is that the American collectivist calls himself a Liberal, and has pre-empted a word which has a totally different philosophy behind it. The Fascists and Communists know that Liberalism is the enemy. But the American collectivist, who calls himself a Liberal, believes that he can have the better of two worlds."

"The Communists and Fascists are engaged in a sham struggle of ideas. The actual forms of government under which Fascists and Communists live are almost identical. One claims to abolish private property and attacks the other as its defender. But the property of Russia is not controlled by the people, but by the bureaucracy, operating in the name of the people, just as it is in Germany, where you get your head cut off if you try to hold your property in gold or in anything except German paper."